Spent a fascinating afternoon in the Dutch Royal Library in the Hague. Like the British Library they keep one copy of most books, although in this case the book has to be in Dutch or about the Netherlands. It seems such a shame that this collection isn't connected to the vast audio and video archives in Hilversum, also financed by public money. This is crying out for a cross-media approach. They also seem to spend an enormous amount of money paying publishers for the rights to loan out a book. Never understood this myself. Isn't the library offering publishers a free archiving service? Do authors benefit somewhere?...so many questions.
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