Digital Scholarship at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek

The National Library of the Netherlands (KB) is an active partner in national and international cooperative efforts to develop new knowledge and technology. With this poster, we wish to showcase what the KB can offer researchers in the field of Digital Humanities. We will present our digitised data sets, current research projects and the services of the KB Research Lab that was launched at DHBenelux 2014.

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 2013, 10% of this enormous task was completed, resulting in 73 million digitised pages, either from the KB itself or via public-private partnerships as Google Books and ProQuest. Over 1 million books, newspapers and magazines are currently available via the search portal www.delpher.nl.

Next to this, most of these data sets are freely available for research purposes and we welcome and encourage experiments and new applications. The virtual KB Research Lab shows some of such applications and invites researchers to experiment with our data, new technologies and innovative prototypes. The KB also collaborates with researchers in research projects or (junior) fellowships to learn from their research in order to improve the services we provide for Digital Humanists.

This poster will present the various data sets that the KB has available for research, the activities we undertake to work together with scholars in research projects and the services that we offer those who wish to work with our material.