Lecture, Faculty Lecture

The Archive Records Act and Archive Decision regulate the storage of information in documents (digital and analogue), information systems and websites.

Conference, Workshop

Start thinking in advance about the selection for long-term preservation.

The University’s historical collection is housed in the Academic Historical Museum. The museum is situated in the Academy Building.

Slowly but surely Open Science is becoming a standard in scholarly research, making it more open, collaborative, transparent, and after all FAIR, from its planning stages to publishing and re-use of data.

An exam file contains all relevant information about an exam or assignment and must be kept according to legal guidelines. This page provides the procedures for archiving exam files and the responsibilities of the examiner.

On 24 and 25 April 2025, the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam — home to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) — hosted an interdisciplinary workshop organized by dr. Rafal Matuszewski, an ancient historian at the Institute for History in Leiden.

When are you (sexually) mature? A KNAW grant will enable associate professor Rafal Matuszewski to organise an interdisciplinary workshop on this question.

Lecture, Sign Languages & Deaf People

What to do when more than forty boxes, filled to the brink with archival materials from the study of religion ranging all the way from the 1960’s up until contemporary times, ‘surfaces’? This may not be a typical question that you ask yourself on an average weekday. However, it is a question that must…

Theft, prostitution, fortune-telling or murder. Historian Manon van der Heijden and a group of students are researching court records from The Hague from 1600 to 1800. They are tracing crimes and offenders and shedding new light on The Hague’s Gevangenpoort (or Prison Gate). Among their many discoveries…

On Thursday 23 November, Professor Betty de Hart delivered the lecture ‘Exploring the Legal Archive on Race: Methodological Challenges’ as part of the lecture series ‘Reconsidering the Socio-Legal Gaze’ organized by the Van Vollenhoven Institute. Over 40 people attended the lecture, held online due…

Recently, the oldest parts of the Leiden University Archives have been preserved and digitised thanks to a grant from Metamorfoze. This makes an important source on the history of Leiden University – and academic life in the Northern Netherlands in a broader sense – widely available.

The Leiden municipality wants to make the city centre climate-proof and combat heat stress by greening it. But they want to do this in a way that does justice to the city’s heritage. Researcher Fenna IJtsma delves into historical greenery to offer inspiration.

Exhibition

The collection guides of archives and collections of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) have been made available via the portal Collection Guides. This has greatly improved the findability, visibility and ease of use of these collection finding aids.

When you think of a library, you probably picture books – or students quietly studying. But for subject librarian Rutger de Jong, most of the work happens online. ‘We never throw anything away. Everything produced here in the name of science should remain findable.’

While investigating 16 years of images of young stars from a retired astronomical camera, Leiden master's student Sam de Regt discovered that two of those stars were still enveloped in birth clouds. Never before has anyone captured these two stars in so much detail. He publishes his data-cleaning method…

Andrew Hoffman (CADS), Mark Westmoreland (CADS) and Yasmin Ismail (CADS) have received a KIEM grant of € 10.000 for their project 'CARMA: Community Archive and Repository for Multimodal and Artistic Research'. The grant will be used to create a 'living laboratory' that helps researchers, data management…

Lecture

In a speech on Keti Koti the Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, apologised on behalf of the royal family for the Netherlands’ historical role in slavery. What is the significance of this?

Doing research in archaeology is more than just gathering data and publishing a paper. Nowadays, there is a growing trend in producing well-defined and responsible data management plans. They help to navigate the process and result in good data management practices which in return benefit the researchers…

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Faculty of Archaeology which naturally leads to questions about its past. Part of the answer might be hidden in the archival photo negatives that paint a lively portrait of archaeological research taking place more than half a century ago.

How did Scottish speakers sound hundreds of years ago? University lecturer Mo Gordon thinks the answer to that question can be found in church archives. 'It can be a boost to your identity to know the history of your language.'

Education

A collection of interviews from the oral history project "Storia de Nhas Pais" ("Story of my Parents") was handed over to the Rotterdam City Archive on 26 November 2021.

The family of the famous diplomat, sinologist and writer Robert van Gulik has donated his personal archive and part of his collection to Leiden University Libraries (UBL). The collection and archive provide insight into the life and work of Robert van Gulik, who became known to the general public for…

Leiden University contributed to colonialism and slavery through its research and teaching. And governors and residents of Leiden had an active role in colonial networks. These are the findings of two explorative studies presented on 3 April.