Newspaper Collection

This is the Newspaper collection of The National Library of The Netherlands (KB). "The KB promotes the visibility, usability and longevity of the Dutch Library Collection, defined as the collective holdings of all publicly funded libraries in the Netherlands" (KB mission statement).

The following figures give answers to common questions about the composition of this collection:

What part of the collection is included in the Media Suite?

The Media Suite gives access to the KB's newspaper "basic collection". "The basic collection contains approximately 11 million newspaper pages from the Netherlands, the Dutch East Indies, the Antilles, America and Surinam from 1618 to 1995. This is about 15% of all newspapers that have ever been published in the Netherlands" (KB "wat zit er in Delpher?").

What years does the archive cover?

The KB newspaper basic collection includes newspapers from 1618 to 1995. The Media Suite harvested all the items available and integrated them into the Media Suite in May 2018.

Figure 1: Number of newspaper articles in the collection over time

How and how often is the data updated in the Media Suite?

The collection's metadata and their OCR enrichments are made available to the CLARIAH Media Suite by the KB via their harvesting end-point (OAI-PMH).

The latest update to the Media Suite's data from EYE Jean Desmet film collection has been done in May, 2018.

What kind of media is included?

The collection includes newspaper content of different types: articles, advertisements, illustrations with captions, and obituaries).

Figure 2: Types of content in the KB newspaper basic collection

What portion of the collection is digital?

A big part of the KB newspaper basic collection is digital. The KB is progressively digitizing more newspapers (KB "wat zit er in Delpher?"). Via the Media Suite, users can access the digitized newspapers in the KB Delpher search engine.

Does the collection include enrichments?

This collection has undergone object character recognition (OCR) processes. The OCR output is available via the Media Suite for searching purposes only. To read the OCR, users are redirected to the KB Delpher search engine.

Figure 3: Proportion of OCR-ed content in the KB newspaper basic collection

Where to find more information?

• KB newspaper collection site (in English) (in Dutch)
• KB Delpher (newspapers) search engine
• KB information about "what is available via Delpher?"

How to search in this collection?

To search the content of this collection, use the Media Suite’s Search tools.