Unlocking the Fagel Collection

The Fagel Collection is one of the most important and largest still extant Dutch private libraries from the eighteenth century.

The Library of Trinity College Dublin began 'unlocking' this collection in 2020, launching a programme of cataloguing, conservation, and digitisation of its unique holdings. The Fagel Collection was assembled as a working library by several generations of the Fagel family, of whom successive members held high office in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collection of approximately 30,000 books, pamphlets and maps was purchased as a whole for Trinity College Dublin in 1802.

The first phase of the project (2020-2023) was a collaboration between the Library of Trinity College Dublin and the KB National Library of the Netherlands and focussed on recording the Dutch imprints in the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands. This was made possible by the support of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and culminated in an international research symposium in June 2023.

A second phase of work is ongoing and concentrates on the approximately 15,000 European imprints contained in the Fagel Collection.