The Theaterbib catalogue and mijn.opendoek are not the same website. You therefore need a separate account, username, and password to order books through our online catalogue. You can create an account by clicking ‘Register here’ on https://bib.opendoek.be.

Please note: being signed in to mijn.opendoek does not mean you are signed in to the Theaterbib catalogue and vice versa!

The standard username for the catalogue is firstname.lastname

My username, for example, is bastiaan.malcorps. You cannot sign in with your email address. As soon as there is an “@” in your username, it will not work.

Names that consist of multiple words are written together in lowercase. For example: Jean-Paul Van den Driesch would receive the following username:

jeanpaul.vandendriesch

That’s possible. Just send an email to theaterbib@opendoek.be and we will provide you with a new password as soon as possible.

When you have reserved books, they are considered ordered. They are not yet borrowed, because your loan period only starts once we send your books by post. You can always check in your own profile to see whether your order was successful. All books listed under ‘Reservations’ have been ordered and will be sent to you soon. All books listed under ‘Loans’ are already on their way to you or already in your possession.

This system does not send confirmation emails, because you can check at any time in your profile which books you have ordered. Each time you reserve a book, you are automatically taken to an overview of all your loans and reservations.

If you would still like to receive confirmation emails each time you order a book, please let us know at theaterbib@opendoek.be. The catalogue can send you emails, but only per individual book. So, if you order ten books, you will receive ten separate emails in your inbox.

That’s possible. Go to your own account and click ‘Renew’ under ‘Loans’.

In two ways.

You can simply type the genre you are looking for into the search bar at the top of any page. For example, if you type “thriller”, you will get all thrillers, but also any book where the word “thriller” appears in the title or in the short summary. If there happened to be an author named Hanz E. Thriller, all of his works would also appear in the results.

However, you can also search more precisely by clicking on “Search Elements” and selecting “Genre” under “Element Type”. Then enter the genre of your choice and click “Submit”. You will see all genres that match your search term (for example, searching for “trag” will show “tragedy” and “tragicomedy”).

Next to each genre, you will see how many texts we have in that category (e.g., “absurd” has “168 biblios”). Click on that number of “biblios” to get a full list of all texts in that genre.

This system can search very precisely, but it requires you to enter your entire search query at once. You can do this by describing your search as accurately as possible in “Advanced Search”: cast size, author, genre, full‑length or not, … By clicking “More options”, you can add as many additional search terms as you like.

If the results do not match what you expected, you can simply click “back” and adjust your search query.

Because this catalogue is based on international open‑source software, a large part of the system is indeed still in English. We are working to translate the rest of the site as quickly as possible, but you will continue to see English terms appear for a while.

Borrowing from the Netherlands is possible, but we do charge the shipping costs to the user. Please keep in mind that this can become quite expensive due to international postal rates. It may therefore be better to first check out the theatre library in The Hague. They offer a similar collection and also provide a shipping service. You can find all the information here.

When books and/or brochures are returned late, or when they are lost or damaged, a fine is applied. For each week (or part of a week) overdue, a fee of €0.75 per book is charged. For lost or damaged items, the replacement cost of the item is charged as the fine.

You can recognise the digital texts in our catalogue by the word “DIGITAL” in the title line and by the “0” in the barcode. If you want to search specifically for digital texts, you can do so via the “Advanced Search” function. There, under “Item Type”, you can select the category “Digital Reading Copy”.

If you now click “Search”, you will get a list of all digital texts. If you first enter a search query in the fields at the top, the catalogue will search within our digital collection for the author, genre, or cast size of your choice.

Our digitally accessible catalogue currently contains around 3,000 texts. That is already quite a lot, but there is still plenty of room to grow. The reason we cannot offer all our texts digitally right away has to do with copyright. We are still in active negotiations with several publishers.

Is there a text missing that you would like to read digitally? Send us an email! We will do what we can to add your preferred texts to the digital collection more quickly.

The texts you can borrow digitally from us are reading copies. This means you cannot print, download, or edit them. It is also not possible to forward these texts to other borrowers.

If you want to use a text for rehearsals, you will need to contact the author or the author’s rights holder. In our digital brochures, you will always find the rights holders of the text and their contact details.

You certainly can! Create a reading‑committee account for your group, and all digital texts borrowed with that account will be sent immediately to every member of the committee. This makes it easy to read digital texts together. How do you create such an account? Send a list with all the names of your reading committee and one email address per name to theaterbib@opendoek.be. We will take care of the rest.

Don’t hesitate to contact us at theaterbib@opendoek.be or at 03/222.40.95.

How to borrow?

Borrowing

Online Borrowing System

BORROW DIGITALLY!

Frequently Asked Questions

Any further questions or comments?

Theaterbib