Some times finding the right sources on Catholic heritage can be challenging. On this page, you can discover tips to find your way in the archives and references to collections that are not always visible, but can be relevant to your research.
Research aid
Getting started
The best place to start exploring the collections is the online catalogue. Read this page to find out how to use it.
Not all collections are as easy to find, so we have provided some tips below to help you with your search. Still having trouble? Feel free to contact us.
Searching the collections
The KDC collection can be divided into various thematic areas, all of which fall within the broader Catholic heritage. The classification is only intended as a general categorisation of the archives and serves as an aid for initial orientation for research. The thematic areas are:
- Culture, leisure and recreation
- Democracy and politics
- International diversity
- Youth and young people
- Church and faith
- Charity and social work
- Mission and colonial heritage
- Education and science
- Socio-economic partners
- Healthcare sector
Go to the thematic overview to search.
Note: This section of the website is still under construction.
Most of the KDC archives are open to the public and can be viewed by any researcher. In some cases, access to a collection is restricted (in whole or in part), usually to protect the privacy of living persons.
If you request an archive document that is not open to the public, you will see in the online catalogue that prior permission must be requested. You can read how to do this on this page.
There are a number of archive collections that are only digitally available. These are mostly collections from the Shared Heritage Sharing project, concerning archives in Indonesia that have been digitised with the help of the KDC and the Dutch National Archives and made available online. The KDC does not have any physical copies of these.
How to consult a digitised archive
- Go to the online catalogue (via the button above).
- Type your search term in the search bar (e.g. “scans orphanage Semarang”).
- Click on “show” in the search results.
- Click on the first hit.
- Expand the overview using the plus sign (+) – sometimes several times.
- You can view the scans of archive documents via the links in the overview.
Newspapers, magazines, journals and other periodicals published for and by Dutch Catholics are a very valuable source for researchers. Precisely because of their periodical nature, they offer an excellent source of sequential information on various topics and the associated socio-cultural networks.
Many periodicals from the KDC library have been digitised and can be found via the Delpher platform, a collaboration with the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague.
Bibliography of Catholic Dutch Periodicals
From the multitude of Catholic periodicals, a number of expert historians have selected more than 3,600 national and regional titles that are eligible for a detailed description based on autopsy. In recent years, these descriptions have been published in instalments by the KDC in the Bibliografie van Katholieke Nederlandse Periodieken (BKNP). You can find previous editions here.
Note: These PDF's are only available in Dutch at this moment.
| volume | description |
|---|---|
1. Daily and weekly newspapers | The first part of the BKNP contains 314 descriptions of daily and weekly newspapers that were published until 1980. For regional and local newspapers, the criterion is that only those newspapers that appeared at least twice a week during their existence are included. For weekly newspapers, the criterion is that they must be of a general, opinion-based nature or have been distributed as a supplement to a daily or news newspaper. This section also includes trade journals for newspaper publishers and journalists and the publications of the Catholic Dutch Press Agency (Katholiek Nederlands Persbureau). |
2. Culture and recreation | The second part of the BKNP focuses on Dutch Catholic culture and leisure in the 19th and 20th centuries in all its forms, with 368 bibliographic portraits. It includes leading cultural, literary and scientific journals such as De Beiaard, De Gemeenschap, Roeping and Tijdschrift voor theologie, as well as a large number of forgotten journals and almanacs. In addition, the colourful variety of magazines that collectively took care of leisure activities within the Catholic community is discussed: from chess to football, from dancing to singing, from travelling to theatre, from Esperantists to bird lovers. |
3. Religious and ecclesiastical life | Religious and ecclesiastical life in Catholic Netherlands in the 19th and 20th centuries is covered in all its facets in the third part of the BKNP, with bibliographic descriptions of almost 1,200 periodicals. The main themes are Ecclesiastical Information, Orders and Congregations, Religious Lay Movements, Theology (including liturgy, ecumenism, apologetics and preservation of faith), Apostolate, Devotion and Mission. The collection provides insight into how the distinctiveness of Dutch Catholics developed within the broad spectrum from “more Roman Catholic than the Pope” to provocative individualism. It includes well-known periodicals such as het Katholiek Archief, de Pius-almanak, het Schild, Kerk en ontmoeting, Rome and Plein. But it also includes a striking number of magazines from orders and congregations, mission magazines and magazines that became important mouthpieces for the Dutch Catholic Church, such as de Volksmissionaris, de Bazuin and de Kloosterling. |
4. Parenting and education | The fourth section comprises 898 titles, all of which relate to education and upbringing: some intended for children and young people, others devoted to them. The large number of periodicals in this category is related to the way in which young people in Catholic Netherlands were organised: both by class and by gender, and within those categories often by age group. These periodicals originated from the numerous primary and secondary schools, higher education institutions, student associations, priest training colleges, boarding schools, workers' youth organisations and various trade union organisations, each of which published its own magazine. Of course, this section of the BKNP also includes popular magazines such as Engelbewaarder, Taptoe and Okki (short for Onze Kleine Katholieke Illustratie) for young people, trade journals such as Katholieke Schoolblad and School en Godsdienst, and the magazine Dux, which had an enormous influence on Catholic thinking about mental health in the 1950s and 1960s. |
| 5. Politics and social actions | The fifth and final part is currently in the final stages and is expected shortly. |
- Sometimes an archive that has been donated to the KDC is still being processed. In that case, no online inventory is available for consultation at this time.
- In other cases, an archive is simply not donated to the KDC (yet). In that case, you can contact us here for advice on where an archive might be located instead.
- Please note: Most archives are not digitised and therefore cannot be consulted online. There is an online inventory available, and you need to visit the reading room to consult the archive documents. The KDC only scans on request. Read more about this service here.
Looking for contact details
For privacy reasons, among others, the KDC does not provide contact details of third parties. If you have any questions about an archive creator or owner (individuals or institutions), please contact the archivist.
The KDC does not hold any collections from monasteries. For questions regarding monastery archives, please contact the Dutch Monastic Life Heritage Centre (Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven) in Sint Agatha.
The Netherlands has a rich variety of Roman Catholic communities and organisations with roots abroad. These include communities that were (once) established by migrant workers, refugees, expats, foreign students and members of Eastern Catholic churches. In addition, there are organisations that support these communities, for example with activities for young people, social assistance, organising pilgrimages, fundraising, liturgical choir singing or accompanying priests.
With the International Diversity database, the KDC wants to show how diverse the Roman Catholic community in the Netherlands is. The database contains information about, among other things:
- contact details: secretariat, website, Chamber of Commerce
- the place of worship, including any monumental status of the building
- Catholic profile (Roman Catholic Church, rite)
- international profile (language, areas of origin)
Contact
For privacy reasons, the KDC only provides contact details from this database on request. Please contact us to make such a request.
More about Catholic heritage
Would you like to learn more about the history of Dutch Catholicism to better contextualise your research? Please read this brief historical overview.
The KDC collections contain many Catholic terms and concepts that may not be familiar to everyone. For this reason, the Catholic ABC has been compiled with a brief explanation of common, mostly specifically Catholic terms. Proper names, including those of saints, are not included, nor are overly technical or esoteric ecclesiastical terms, names of books of the Bible, titles of encyclicals or hymns, abbreviations, and names of institutions. For commonly used words that also have a specific Catholic meaning (e.g. “sister”), only that meaning is given.
Please note: This overview is only available in Dutch.
There are more than 650 known pilgrimage sites in the Netherlands. Since 1993, a team of researchers from the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam has been working to record these pilgrimage sites and routes in the lexicon and database Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland (Pilgrimage Sites in the Netherlands), or BiN for short).
In 2022, the BiN collection was transferred to the KDC, and since then the database has been maintained by a joint team from the KDC and the Meertens Institute.
Search in this collection?
All information about Dutch pilgrimage sites and pilgrimages can be consulted online (via the link above). The KDC collection contains the documentation and source file that formed the basis for the publication and the online database. It is a dynamic file that is regularly updated with new material. The paper file can be consulted in the heritage collections reading room.
In order to gain a better understanding of the activities of Dutch missionaries and how they themselves experienced their mission period, the KDC collaborated with the Central Mission Commission (CMC) in 1976 to set up the interview project KomMissieMemoires (KMM). The aim of the project was to systematically collect missionaries' memories and record them on audio tapes. In this way, a 'documentation of memories of Dutch missionaries' was built up.
KomMissieMemoires
Since 1978, KMM has conducted interviews with almost 900 Dutch missionaries and with people in the Netherlands who were involved in the missionary 'home front'. The KDC keeps the audio recordings of these KMM interviews and has published short summaries (abstracts) of each interview.
Permission is required to listen to the interviews. Read here how to do this.