Digitised newspapers and newspapers on microfilm

How to consult newspapers on microfilm

You can consult almost 600 Belgian newspaper titles on microfilm (approx. 12,000 rolls). These rolls constitute the “Mic Perm” collection, which was created as a consequence of a conservation policy that began in the seventies and has been pursued more intensively in the past two decades. Most of these microfilms were produced by our Photography Service, while others have ended up in the collections as a result of partnerships with various institutes.

Some newspapers are only available on this medium and certain series are more complete on microfilm than the collection on paper.

 

Digitisation projects

In 2005, KBR launched several digitisation projects for our broadsheet (grande presse) collections. In less than a decade, more than 3,500,000 pages of newspapers were digitised and processed with the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) procedure. These were newspapers dating from 1831 to 1950, with the exception of Le Soir, which is digitised up to 1970.

Around 1.2 million pages are now available via the search tool BelgicaPress. You can freely consult the newspapers from the period 1831 to 31 December 1918.

Access to the entire digitised corpus – without any restrictions – is allowed if the documents will be used as illustration for teaching or for scientific research. Read more