The studiezaal is the reading room. Most archives in the Netherlands have a reading room. Opening hours may vary, some smaller reading rooms are open by appointment only. Thanks to large digitization projects and scanning on demand services, visiting reading rooms in person is often not necessary anymore since most of the research can be done online. Typical reasons for me to visit the reading room are: To access records at a small archive, that doesn't have a lot of information … [Read more...]

A kaartenbak is a card catalog. Creating card catalogs was the popular way to index genealogical records before the computer age. Not all kaartenbakken have been made available online, so a quick survey of the available catalogs in a reading room is a good first step in a research plan. Archives often use one of three strategies to make this information available online: Using the card catalog for database entry. This creates a digital version of the catalog that is fully searchable. … [Read more...]