ASC Leiden Receives 3000 Books from KIT Amsterdam

Following its closure at the end of 2013, the 450,000 books that made up the library of the KIT (Royal Institute of the Tropics) in Amsterdam have been transferred to other libraries. The staff at KIT Amsterdam desperately tried to find a new home for the whole collection in the second half of 2013 and largely succeeded in doing so. The 31 staff in the KIT Library & Collection Department all lost their jobs as of 31 December.
More than 3000 books from this collection were donated to the African Studies Centre. The majority were given to Leiden University Library (1.5 km = all pre-1950 books, maps & the cultural heritage part of the collection) and to Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt (ca. 250,000 books). Other parts of the collection have been sent to 24 other libraries in the Netherlands. Click here for an (incomplete) overview  (in Dutch).

Unique copies

The 3029 books donated to the ASC Library arrived in Leiden in December. They are, of course, about Africa and are all unique copies. i.e. no other library in the Netherlands has any of them. The titles of all the 3029 books are already in the ASC’s library catalogue (the number is slowly diminishing as the books are gradually integrated in the ASC Library).
Most of the books are in English and 620 of them are UMI dissertations. All were published between 2000 and 2013. The books will be gradually incorporated into the ASC Library’s collection but can be borrowed as of today.

Journal articles & E-docs

In addition to these 3000 books, KIT Amsterdam also transferred the metadata of approx. 10,000 journal articles and 9000 electronic documents to the ASC in Leiden. The data of the journal articles will soon be integrated into the bibliographic database AfricaBib.

Jos Damen