Reuse of Digital Heritage in the Library, Today and Tomorrow. The Case of the National Library of Netherlands

Reuse of digital heritage in the library, today and tomorrow; The case of the National Library of the Netherlands

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands  is a research library with a broad collection in the fields of Dutch history, culture and society, and as a national library collects and stores all (digital) publications that appear in the Netherlands, as well as a part of the international publications about the Netherlands. The KB has planned to have digitised and OCRed its entire collection of books, periodicals and newspapers from 1470 onward by the year 2030. Already in 2016, about 15% of this enormous task was completed, either by the KB itself or via public-private partnerships as Google Books and ProQuest. Over 20 million book-, newspaper- and magazine papers are currently available via the search portal www.delpher.nl. The KB is one of the major hubs of the Digital Heritage Network that have recently published the National Digital Heritage Strategy.

The library also hosts a Digital Humanities team, aimed to support research of the digitised collection in bulk. In the two years that this team operates in the international Digital Humanities field, a great deal of experience has been gathered in making the digital collection available for (research) communities. This presentation will present the activities that the Koninklijke Bibliotheek undertakes with regards to reuse, how they fit in the framework of the National Digital Heritage Strategy and what we aim to achieve with this network.