Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute

Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

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2018-19

Alex Alsemgeest

Alex Alsemgeest is a book historian and researcher with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, and joins us a fellow in association with Trinity College Library. Mr Alsemgeest has more than a decade of experience in some of the leading research libraries in the Netherlands and Sweden. His professional interests include topics in the fields of book trade, natural history, the history of libraries and collections and Swedish-Dutch cultural history. As a bibliographer, Alex catalogued early modern books for the Short-Title Catalogue, Netherlands in Dutch and Swedish libraries. Previously, he worked on the Bibliotheca Carcinologica at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Hugo Grotius collection at the Peace Palace Library. He has published in both popular magazines and academic journals. His book, In krabbengang door kreeftenboeken was nominated for best book on nature in the Netherlands in 2016.

During the Fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Mr Alsemgeest will research the contents of the Fagel collection in order to find unique books, unknown to researchers. Significant parts of the Fagel collection at Trinity College Library will be catalogued for the Short-Title Catalogue, Netherlands. The Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN) is the Dutch retrospective bibliography for books printed before 1801, and the database is freely available as a scholarly bibliographic research instrument. The ultimate goal is the description of every single book that has been published before 1801 in the Netherlands and all Dutch-language books published abroad. The database contains (at the end of 2017) 210,000 titles in more than 530,000 copies. Inclusion of the Fagel collection, one of the richest eighteenth century collections of Europe, in the STCN will put the collection in an appropriate bibliographical and book historical context. It opens up the collection for research across a number of disciplines.