All the material has been taken from collections and records put on microfiche at an earlier stage within the context of Metamorfoze, the national programme for the preservation of library material. In order to allow a larger audience to get acquainted with these collections, thirteen fragments belonging to eleven authors’ collections have been chosen for this site. Not only are they characteristic of the collections they represent, but they also give a good impression of the Museum’s total collection.

All the items (except the guest book Het Boek van de Buissche Heide) are text fragments of a volume of verse, a novel, a stage play or a single poem. Most of the time, these fragments are handwritten by the author or poet, but occasionally parts or all of the texts are typed or printed.

In order to retain the material’s authenticity as much as possible, it was decided to scan the fragments in their original state. In practice, this means that some text fragments are displayed upside down, because the author (for instance Gorter when working on his Mei) just turned his notebook over when it was full and went on writing. In other cases (Slauerhoff’s Soleares for example), it means that all the loose sheets of paper the author had written on were also digitized as being part of the notebook; when Slauerhoff inserted them, they became an integral part of the text. Sheets with the text crossed out in whole or in part were digitized as well. In general, blank sheets were not digitized except, for instance, as a means toward a better understanding of the pagination.

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