Research Guide to Libraries and Archives in the Low Countries

The first comprehensive guide in English to libraries and archives in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg, this book gives humanities and social science researchers easy access to numerous important unexplored collections. The detailed entries fill the void between international directories (which provide minimal information) and country-specific guides in the vernacular (which are largely unknown to U.S. scholars). The thorough descriptions are based on selected on-site visits, direct correspondence with researchers, librarians, and archivists, and bibliographic research about the collections.

Part I contains a 90-page, annotated bibliography covering five categories of publications: national bibliographies, union catalogs, biographical dictionaries, directories and guides to collections, and subject guides and bibliographies. Part II provides detailed descriptions of the principal research collections in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The descriptions include basic directory information, profiles and histories, notes on special collections, and details on regulations affecting access. Institutional, subject, and author and title indexes are also provided. This book is an important research tool for national and academic libraries and archives, museums, scholars of social science, and Netherlandic studies, and European Community depository libraries.

MARTHA L. BROGAN is Social Sciences Bibliographer at Yale University. She co-edited and wrote the closing essay to The State of Western European Studies: Implications for Collection Development. She has contributed articles to College & Research Libraries and College & Research Libraries News, and a chapter to the book, The Low Countries: Multidisciplinary Studies. She has just completed a three-year term as an executive officer of the Western European Specialists Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.