Limburg Letterhead Project

Company letterheads are a unique and underexplored type of cultural heritage. Apart from their visual appeal, they contain a great deal of information about the companies and institutions that produced them, as well as the socio-economic contexts in which they were created. The Limburg Letterheads Project allows exactly that, by making available a dynamic Linked Open Dataset of digitized historical letterheads kept in the archives of the Centre for the Social History of Limburg (SHCL), regional archive of Limburg (HCL) as well as those of municipal heritage associations and local archives. At the moment, the digital repository of the SHCL and HCL letterheads contains around 25.000 individual scans. These digital scans are currently being described in a database on the basis of over 40 unique variables. After establishing procedures for digitizing and describing letterheads, the project aims to systematically incorporate the letterhead collections of other archival institutions. The ultimate goal is to create a digital collection in Nodegoat of all historical Limburg letterheads that is freely accessible to everyone. It is explicitly intended to encourage historical research based on these letterheads.