Collections as Data at the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands: Redesigning Data Services for the Future

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.