Books and periodicals

The extensive library and periodicals collection provides a comprehensive picture of women and their position in society both today and in past centuries.

Books

The library collection consists of more than 92,000 books, brochures and reports. In the library, you will find biographies and autobiographies, results of academic studies, pamphlets, reference works, CDs, and gray literature such as theses, annual reports, and women’s calendars. Most publications are in Dutch or English. In more recent years, increasing numbers of publications are being acquired digitally and these can be accessed directly online.

Periodicals

For 4,500 current and historical periodical titles, we have at least a year of the title, if not more, in our collection. We also have current subscriptions to 585 periodicals, of which 261 are digital. You can consult these digital periodicals – also known as e-zines – directly online. All other periodicals can be found in the library.

Finding books and periodicals

If you perform a search using the integrated search engine on this website, you will be searching all of Aletta’s collections, not just the books and periodicals. If you would like to restrict your search to books and periodicals, you can use the search option below. When searching Aletta’s collections, terms found in the women’s thesaurus are a good place to start.

Gerritsen collection

The Gerritsen collection comes from the library of Aletta Jacobs’ husband, Carel Victor Gerritsen, and contains books, pamphlets and periodicals about women and the women’s rights movement from the 16th century to 1945. The collection has evolved to become a digital collection with full text searching capabilities and is accessible online via Aletta’s website.
For more information

Clipping collection

For some time now, the employees of Aletta have maintained collections of periodical clippings of articles about the lives of important or well-known women and about women writers and their work. This collection now contains nearly 7,500 articles. If you search for information on a specific person using the integrated search engine on this website, you may find references to the biographical clippings collection. These clippings are available in the library at Aletta.
Visit Aletta

Women’s Resources International

Are you looking for even more recent literature? Then you can also search the Women’s Resources International CD. It contains more than 400,000 titles of books and articles from international women’s studies periodicals, biographies and databases. The CD contains titles from dating back to 1972 and is updated every six months. The CD can be found in the reading room at Aletta.