Corporate template-set Universiteit Leiden


Mart van Duijn & Laurents Sesink 7 July 2017

A comprehensive approach 
towards the curation of born digital 

material by Leiden University Libraries 



First university in 
the Netherlands

Founded by William of Orange in 
1575 as a reward for Leiden’s resistance 
against the Spanish

Motto 
Praesidium Libertatis 
[Bastion of Freedom]



Collections
5,200,000 volumes

1,000,000 e-books

20,000 current serials 

40,000 e-journals

60,000 manuscripts 

500,000 letters

100,000 maps

100,000 prints 

12,000 drawings and 

300,000 photographs



Wicked problem
Problem difficult or impossible 

to solve because of incomplete, 

contradictory, and changing 

requirements that are often 

difficult to recognize.



Support and facilitate, in collaboration with expert centres, faculties 
and (inter)national partners, digital scholarship within the University. 

Centre for Digital Scholarship

• Open access, copyright and publication advice
• Data management
• Digital Preservation
• Data Science 

Special Collections
Curation of rare, valuable and vulnerable material.

• Material preservation
• Research support
• Outreach
• Acquisition



../../Downloads/Screen Shot 2017-06-25 at 04.01.20.png


The Challenge:
Curating Born 

Digital 
Material

Ecosystem mapping

Problem
statement

Participants
and
stakeholders

Scope
Constraints

Systems and
applications

Goal



Overview/status report/roadmap

• E-books and e-journals

• Research data

• Virtual Research Environments

• Websites

• Digital AV-material

• Web exhibitions



Overview/status report/roadmap

• E-books and e-journals

• Research data

• Virtual Research Environments

A digital heritage

• Documents

• Correspondence

• Publications

• Databases 

• Website

• Software

• Websites

• Digital AV-material

• Web exhibitions



Framework/grid
Content type

Image AV Text Online 

resource
C

o
n

te
x

t 
ty

p
e Archive/heritage Press photo's; 

conference 

photo's; maps

Recordings of an 

interview or a 

television 

performance

Correspondence; 

lecture notes; 

presentations

Website?

Research Output Poster; printed 

map

Film on DVD; film 

on CD

Publications 

(e-books and e-

journals)

Website?

Research Data Photo’s for

research

Recording for oral 

history

Research report; 

dissertation

Datasets



j.m.van.duijn@library.leidenuniv.nl
l.b.j.sesink@library.leidenuniv.nl

A comprehensive approach 
towards the curation of born digital 

material by Leiden University Libraries