Photo by Cees de Jonge at the library of Textielmuseum Tilburg
Last year the Textielmuseum (textile museum) in Tilburg, the Netherlands, started to disclose one of their oldest museum collections, the Driessen collection. This was bought in the 1950’s and consists of textiles, literature on textile, sample- and dye recipe-books, correspondence and more archive material from and collected by the last director of De Leidse Katoenmaatschappij (Cotton printing company Leiden, LKM), Louis Driessen.
Louis André Driessen (1890-1954) run the based in the city center of Leiden cotton printing company until it was declared bankrupt in 1936. Driessen also working as a colorist (specialist in dyeing of fabrics), hold the collection together.
The Driessen collection is in the past months researched and processed, to make it accessible. Thanks to an open call a lot of this work is done by a group of volunteers. Boxes filled with archival materials have been sorted and described. Also the already digitised sample- and dye recipe books by the Regionaal Archief Tilburg were with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) program Transkribus put to text, that was checked by volunteers. Next to the checking, important textile terms were tagged and put into a list by me. Different textile terms, locations, dye ingredients, names of persons and businesses are gathered in a list. In this list are the current correct spelling next to the variants we came across in the texts. This list of 500+ words will help in making the collection more easily accessible. Researchers interested in the collection can search the terms and see if certain information on a type of textile, business, dyestuff or date is available.
Screenshot of transcribing in Transkribus of the Driessen collection
Wrote a blog for Modemuze (in Dutch) on this project and research possibilities this collection hold. Read the post ‘De Leidse Katoenmaatschappij (LKM) en de Driessen collectie‘ here.
It was great being part of this project to disclose this collection. Before we started with the volunteers, I made a list of textile terms we would likely come across with a little explanation on each term. The list soon started the grow when the volunteers started checking in Transkribus. Spend many hours figuring out textile term which were often for that time new chemical products, highly toxic, that the cotton printing industry happily experimented with. I also gave several talks on the products that we might find and what we did find. I would like to thank the volunteers who really did and are doing a great job in opening up this important part of (colonial) textile history!
I hope the Driessen collection can be fruitful for many researchers in the near future. If you want to get access to the collection already, or if you would like to volunteer for the transcribing of the books, reach out to Jantiene van Elk via bibliotheek@textielmuseum.nl.