This collection consists of transcripts made of wartime radio bulletins from the Netherlands, broadcast by the BNO (Berichtendienst Nederlandsche Omroep). The BNO operated under the aegis of the occupation regime in the Netherlands during the Second World War and actively made propaganda to promote national-socialism in its news broadcasts. The collection is provided by the NIOD (the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies), collection 103, Nederlandsche Omroep.
The collection consists of images of the scanned transcripts. The transcripts have been processed by the NIOD using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to make them searchable. The quality of the OCR is variable. The transcripts are stored per page, and have only very basic metadata. Each page belongs to a folder for which a year and a range of dates is known. Page dates have been automatically extracted from the transcript, and dates have been manually added for pages in certain folders. See section below for more information about dates.
This collection was imported into the Media Suite as part of the Mediaoorlog project.
What part of the collection is included in the Media Suite?
The entire BNO collection has been imported
What years does the collection cover?
The collection covers 1940-1945
Date fields
The original metadata contains no page dates, but every page belongs to a folder, for which a year and a range of dates within that year are specified.
Individual page dates have been added both manually and automatically for subsets of the collection.
Five date fields are available:
Automatic page date
The dates in the Automatic page date (ocrDateAutomatic) field were extracted from the OCR text of the scanned page using code written by a Sound & Vision data engineer. The results of this code were compared to the manual dates for a sample of 100 pages per folder for 10 randomly chosen folders. The accuracy was between 90-100%, but dates were only reliably found for 10-50% of the pages in a folder, dependent on the quality of the OCR in the folder. Automatic dates are available for 36% of the total collection.
Curated date
The Curated date (curatedDate) field is the recommended date to use for most researchers in most tasks. It is currently the same as the Parsed folder dates field.
Folder year
This is the year of the folder to which the page belongs
Manual page date
The dates in the Manual page date (ocrDateManual) field were added in 2023 by a researcher who is an expert in wartime propaganda. The dates were determined by reading the top of the scanned page to obtain the date. Pages without dates were assumed to have the same date as the previous dated page. Obvious errors, such as a page labelled Saturday 13th February 1944 within a group of pages labelled Saturday 12th February 1944, were corrected. Where two dates were listed on a page, the top date was used. No attempt was made to verify dates by checking the page content. Manual dates are available for 6% of the total collection, focused on specific folders.
Parsed folder dates
The Parsed folder dates (folder.folderDateParsed) field contains a list of the dates specified for the folder. NOTE: this information is derived from the text in the Folder dates field.
Broadcasters
The news bulletins were initially broadcast by the Algemeen Nederlandsch Persbureau (ANP) under Nazi control. The BNO was set up on 1st April 1941, and officially the first broadcasts followed a month later. Evidence from the transcripts, such as announcements at the start of a broadcast, suggest otherwise. For all bulletins from prior to April 1941 the broadcaster field has been set to 'ANP under Nazi control' (genazificeerd Algemeen Nederlandsch Persbureau), while for all bulletins from May 1941 onwards the broadcaster field has been set to 'BNO' (Berichtendienst Nederlandsche Omroep). The bulletins during April 1941 have been manually allocated to either the ANP or the BNO by a researcher who is an expert in wartime propaganda.
