From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com
Date: 99/11/10, 15:44 
Re:   Chess History on the Web (1999 no.1)
 
The next review, following the Chess History bookmarks, is for the Van der
Linde-Niemeijeriana chess & draughts collection of the Koninklijke
Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) in The Hague. The
English home page is at http://www.konbib.nl/kb/vak/schaak/intro-en.html.
The home page has ten links relevant to chess & two exclusive to draughts.
 
In my recent site review of the John G. White collection, I mentioned that
library sites were often drab. The KB site is an exception. This is not
surprising since the Dutch are often in the European forefront for
exploiting technology.
 
[Introduction and history] explains the origin of the collection. Antonius
van der Linde (1833-1897) sold his 750 chess books and manuscripts to the
KB in 1876. Meindert Niemeijer (1902-1987) donated his collection of 7.000
titles to the KB in 1948. It is the 'second largest public chess
collection in the world' with 'ca. 25.000 titles ... about 40.000
volumes'. There are a few references describing the collection. The page
contains four nice illustrations, each of which links to a larger version.
 
[Users manual] links to many of the same resources available from the home
page. The page also mentions several 'catalogues'. At first glance it is
not completely clear what resources are available, so I looked carefully
at the various links. 'How to find chess and draughts titles' & 'Finding
chess and draughts books by subject' point to four online sources of
information:-
- Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Van der Linde-Niemeijeriana, 1955 ('ca.
6.000 titles')
- Classification codes for the Chess and Draughts collection
- Published catalogues
- General Catalogue ('ca. 20.000 titles')
 
The first two sources are specific to the chess collection, are linked
from the home page, & are described below. The third source lists hardcopy
titles published by the KB. The fourth source is a search engine, 'over
one million descriptions of books, journals and other publications in the
holdings of the KB.' I did a few searches on 'All words':-
- 'chess' -> 'Set overflow'
- 'computer chess ' -> 'There are 28 hits'
- 'women chess ' -> 'There are 4 hits'
At one point I received the message 'Due to time out you are no longer
connected to the system', unusual for a Web service which is not password
protected.
 
The page mentions other services, including periodicals ('The KB
subscribes to ca. 150 chess and draughts periodicals'), copying (on
'written order'), & contact by email. There is also an 'alphabetic card
catalogue' with 'several chess titles which can neither be found in the
General Catalogue nor in the catalogue of the Bibliotheca Van der
Linde-Niemeijeriana... mostly published in the period 1955-1980'. There
are two links to:-  
- Dutchess -> '34 resources have been found for the search term(s) "chess"'
- NL-Menu -> http://www.nl-menu.nl/nlmenu/kucu/sport/sck.html
 
[Chess & draughts collection by subject] categorizes titles by general;
game phases; games, players, tournaments, matches; special playconditions;
computers; composition; unorthodox; & chess as theme. Each category has
subcategories. A message informs that 'It will be possible soon to click
on the different subjects and view the matching titles.'
 
[1955 Catalogue] is a search engine on:-
- Catalogue number
- Subject (!)
- Author
- Author + editor + person as subject (!)
- Word(s) from the title
- Word(s) from the series
- Land* (!)
- Tournament year
- Tournament place (!)
where each search criterion marked '(!)' has a selection list to limit the
possible choices. Because of the embedded selection lists, the page size
is 89K. When I find the time, I'll document some search experiments in a
reply to this post.
 
['Schaakbibliotheken' by M. Niemeijer] is in Dutch. My understanding of
Dutch isn't very good & I couldn't find a Web based Dutch to English
translation service, but the page seems to be titled 'Chess Libraries - a
book about collectors and collecting' by Dr. M. Niemeijer, & is a table of
contents. When I first looked at this page (sbib0.html), there were links
to four pages sbib1.html/-4, which seem to be paragraphs taken from the
book. These pages are no longer linked, but they are still available.
 
Finally, a few pages contain images. [Images from the collection: chess]
has 23 images; [Chessposters] has 15; & [Portraits of chess grandmasters]
has 41. [Ground-plan of the Chess & Draughts reading room] & [Pictures of
the Chess & Draughts reading room] help to orient the future visitor.
 
Bye for now,
Mark Weeks