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In less than 20 years’ time, the collections of digitized materials from the KB, the national library of the Netherlands, have grown into fully-fledged large-scale national collections, actively maintained and well established. Access to the collections is facilitated with an online graphical search interface (Delpher) and with a suite of services, in line with the ‘Collections as Data imperative’ first elaborated by Thomas Padilla and colleagues (2019). Based on ten years of experience the KB is now in the process of rethinking and redesigning these Data Services. In this paper we offer a concise analysis of our experiences so far and discuss the plans we have to get Data Services ready for another ten years. It includes the introduction of a data registry to make data more easily findable for both humans and machines, and a series of data sheets and/or data cards as standardized documentation. We also aim to build a corpus selection tool, offering advanced functionalities of data discovery and selection to support the creation of research corpora, as such functioning as a more intuitive user interface to the existing API’s. Finally we will address the need for giving access to in-copyright materials by creating an onsite mining facility and an online tools-to-data solution, providing ways to mine our collections without violating the rights of copyright owners.

This poster introduces two projects exploring the concept of a secure virtual research environment allowing researchers to analyse data that are sensitive, private or protected under copyright law. The data always remain safe and, depending on the specific legal restrictions, cannot be copied or even viewed. This type of research infrastructure can help substantially improve the results of humanities and social sciences research by making far more data available for analysis. Researchers who want to analyse datasets by applying computational analysis tools usually obtain a copy of the data from a data provider. This has some disadvantages. Firstly, copying, storing, and managing the data on their computers is cumbersome and error prone. Secondly, and more importantly, data providers cannot hand over specific, sensitive datasets. Government, commercial parties, and heritage institutions have an increasing number of interesting but sensitive datasets available, e.g. housing market information from real estate platforms, business data from the chamber of commerce or e-books which are still in commerce. Unfortunately, there is no generic infrastructure available allowing researchers to analyse these sensitive data in a way that data providers are assured personal data or copyright protected data remain safe. As a result, potential data providers are still hesitant to share their data. The projects Tools-to-Data & SANE are developing a solution. Both projects turn things around by bringing the tool to the data. The data remains in a virtual, fully shielded environment. The researcher provides a tool, algorithm or container that will run in the same environment. The researcher cannot copy the data and only receives the results. In 2022 a proof-of-concept was built and evaluated in order to demonstrate the viability of the tools-to-data-environment. This was the Tools-to-data project. In the SANE project (Secure ANalysis Environment) the aim is to develop the proof-of-concept into a working service. It allows researchers to mine sensitive data, while leaving the data providers in complete control from beginning to end. They control the access, can screen the software, and can decide whether the data should remain hidden or not. The data itself never leaves the virtual environment. Derived data can be released, again after screening. SANE comes in two variants: In SANE Blind, the researcher submits a tool or script without being able to see the data and the data provider approves the tool and the output. SANE Tinker allows the researcher to see and manipulate the data. Tools-to-data has been developed by SURF, the collaborative organisation for IT in Dutch education and research, and KB, National Library of the Netherlands. SANE is being developed by the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations), Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, CLARIAH (Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), SURF and KB, National Library of the Netherlands. SANE is funded by PDI-SSH (Platform Digital Infrastructure Social Sciences & Humanities). Marian Hellema, ‘Tools-to-Data: Report of a Proof-of-Concept’. KB, national library of the Netherlands 2022. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7254517

Deliverable 13.2 for the WorldFAIR Project’s Cultural Heritage Work Package (WP13). Although the cultural heritage sector has only recently begun to think of traditional gallery, library, archival and museum (‘GLAM’) collections as data, long established practices guiding the management and sharing of information resources has aligned the domain well with the FAIR principles for research data, evidenced in complementary workflows and standards that support discovery, access, reuse, and persistence. As explored in the previous report by Work Package 13 for the WorldFAIR Project, D13.1 Practices and policies supporting cultural heritage image sharing platforms, memory institutions are in an important position to influence cross-domain data sharing practices and raise critical questions about why and how those practices are implemented. Deliverable 13.2 aims to build on our understanding of what it means to support FAIR in the sharing of image data derived from GLAM collections. This report looks at previous efforts by the sector towards FAIR alignment and presents 5 recommendations designed to be implemented and tested at the DRI that are also broadly applicable to the work of the GLAMs. The recommendations are ultimately a roadmap for the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to follow in improving repository services, as well as a call for continued dialogue around ‘what is FAIR?’ within the cultural heritage research data landscape. Visit WorldFAIR online at http://worldfair-project.eu. WorldFAIR is funded by the EC HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-41 Coordination and Support Action under Grant Agreement No. 101058393. &nbsp

Digital research environments are confronted with a gap between simple search interfaces and advanced functionalities for (text) analysis. Researchers can usually choose between either a user-friendly search interface to read individual sources with few or no options for analysis, or API-access or data export which necessitates coding skills for advanced analyses of (big) datasets. In the present study we explored whether the KB, the national library of the Netherlands, could develop a digital research environment for historical text collections that bridges this gap and offers advanced analysis tools that are sufficiently usable for scholars (and other users) without programming skills, a so-called ‘text suite’.

Ook vandaag nog bewijzen kritische stemmen van vakgenoten uit de eerste honderd jaar van de Brinkman hun nut. Ze vertellen ons hoe de nationale bibliografie gebruikt werd, welk doel hij in zijn tijd diende. Ze geven inzicht in de zin en het nut, maar ook de zwaktes van deze ‘nationale bibliografie’. Wat verwachtte men van de Brinkman en wat leren we over de opzet en de samenstelling? Vragen die belangrijk zijn voor iedereen die uitspraken doet op basis van ‘de Nederlandse nationale bibliografie’, toen en nu.

Slides of the paper presented at the DH2019 pre-conference 'Libraries as research partner in Digital Humanities', The Hague, The Netherlands, 8 July 2019. This paper presents how the National Library of the Netherlands (KB)collaborates with researchers in various forms to better serve their needs but also to improve our own services.

The rise of the digital humanities has posed research libraries to new challenges. Since researchers’ demands and requests are changing, libraries need to adopt their services while staff members need to update their knowledge of new methodologies to become the research librarian of the future (Ekstrøm et al, 2016). To learn more about the changing needs of researchers, the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) has set up the Researcher-in-Residence Program five years ago. The program allows early-career researchers to spend six months at the KB’s Research Department to work on their research question together with technical support from one of KB’s Research Software Engineers, collections expertise from a digital curator and project support from a digital scholarship advisor while using KB’s digital collections (Wilms, 2017). Since 5 years, 11 researchers participated in the program, 7 tools have been built and 5 datasets were created and published on the KB Lab at http://lab.kb.nl. In this paper we will reflect on the lessons learned and benefits of the program for the KB after five years, both on the short as well as long term. Which user needs did we identify? How could research libraries adopt to these changing needs? And what more can research libraries gain from collaborating with researchers? We will address these questions by first focusing on the short-term benefits. We will give an overview of all the projects and the evaluation of the program done in 2017 by visiting researcher Michael Gasser. Second, we will share the long-term benefits of the program for the KB by highlighting two aspects: 1) The researcher-in-residence program creates ambassadors for the library as the researchers promote their work and therefore our collection and Lab to their community. 2) By hosting researchers at the offices of the KB, we were not only able to assist and learn from them but also got to know them and their supervisors better. This allowed us to increase our academic network, set-up several follow-up research projects and currently we are exploring the implementation of one of the projects’ outcomes in one of the KB’s services. By showcasing a follow-up project, we follow the plea of Peter Leonard to ‘put TDM in the mainstream’ (2016). Similarly, Humphreys (2018) called for ‘Applied Digital Humanities’ just like Kleppe (2018) referred to ‘Libraries as incubators for DH Research Results’. It shows how research libraries can benefit in several ways of collaborating with Digital Humanities scholars: not only by assisting them but also by going beyond a service-oriented approach and acts as full research partner (Boekestein 2017; Ekstrøm et al, 2016).

Presentatie over de digital humanities werkzaamheden van de KB Nationale Bibliotheek, gegeven tijdens de eerste avond van de Digital Humanities cursus georganiseerd door het Nationaal Archief.

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 will showcase what the KB can offer researchers in the field of computational linguistics. We will present our digitised datasets, current research projects and the services of the KB Lab. 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. As a national library we collect and store 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. Over 60 million book-, newspaper- and magazine pages are currently available via the search portal www.delpher.nl. Via DNBL (www.dbnl.nl) high quality digitized works of Dutch literature, linguistics and Cultural History can be accessed. To further improve the usability of our content we aim to have all relevant names of persons, locations and organisations in our digital content reusable as linked (open) data in the near future. For this, a team of researchers at the KB Research Department is developing methods to automatically extract these types of information from the unstructured text of e.g. historical newspaper articles and use it to improve the findability and usability of our digital content. Next to this, most of our datasets (such as historical newspapers, books, periodicals and catalogues) are freely available for research purposes via our Dataservices department and we welcome and encourage experiments and new applications. The virtual KB Lab shows some of such applications and invites researchers to experiment with our data, new technologies and innovative prototypes. The KB also collaborates with academic researchers in research projects or (junior) fellowships to learn from their research in order to improve our services. Example outcomes of research projects using computational linguistic methods are the Frame Generator and Genre Classifier. This poster will present the various datasets that the KB has available for research, the activities we undertake to work together with scholars in research projects, the services that we offer those who wish to work with our material and demos of the tools available in our KB Research Lab.

Aan het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuwis de mens oorzaak en getuige van een nieuwe leesrevolutie, eenleesrevolutie waarbij teksten vaker door algoritmes dan door mensen worden gelezen. Als we aannemen dat deze tweedeleesrevolutie een gelijkaardig verloop kent als de eerste, toen intensief lezen naar dezijlijn werd geduwd door extensief lezen, dan is het aannemelijk dat de mens hetlezen meer en meer zal overlaten aan de machine.

This poster describes the KB Researcher-in-residence programme, the first three pilot placements of 2014 and our lessons learned.

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., also available here; http://dhbenelux.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/08.pdf