History and Contents of the Dutch Theatre Production Database

Contained in this repository are files pertaining to the article to be published in the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Abstract: The Production Database is a historical database with data on theatre and dance productions in the Netherlands by professional Dutch and foreign producers and companies. The database contains data on practically all productions from 1940 up to now and over one hundred thousand productions that can be freely searched. Since 2013 the database is managed by the University of Amsterdam, by the department of Special Collections of the University Library, and the only source that offers an overview of the complete theatre programme in the Netherlands. The origins of its development lie in the card-index boxes of the library of the Toneelmuseum of the sixties. The database itself is now nearly three decades old and has grown much larger than the first compilers could ever have imagined. The input has moved with the history of the theatre field, that of the sector institution TIN and with the technical possibilities. Until now a history of its development was missing. This concise paper offers a reconstruction of the history of the creation and development of the data, a concise description of the protocols and input system. This paper clarifies which sources have fed the database and which systems and productions have been fed by the database. With this paper the verifiability and representativeness of the data can be assessed more effectively.