The KBR is launching a new project to digitise the Belgian newspaper press that will double the number of pages currently available via its BelgicaPress interface. The project is financed with its own funds and will allow the public to access Belgian newspapers from the second half of the 20th century in digital format.
BelgicaPress
The BelgicaPress portal currently features 136 Belgian newspaper titles from 1814-1950 that are preserved at the KBR (two titles run a little longer: the newspaper Le Soir runs until 1970 and Le Drapeau rouge runs to 1982), totalling nearly 4 million pages. Thanks to several collaborations, it was possible to add titles from the end of the French period (1814-1815) and Dutch period (1815-1830).
To put an exact number on it, the portal already features 3,952,430 pages, all of which are available in ‘full text’ thanks to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. All documents published up to and including 1918 are in the public domain and therefore freely accessible. The same goes for titles still under copyright but for which the KBR has obtained an express agreement from the rights holders.
In 2023, BelgicaPress was the most consulted tool of the KBR, with 129,000 visits. The portal is mainly used in the context of scientific research or journalistic work, for teaching resources or in the context of legal cases.
I am delighted to announce the launch of such a major project. Like many of our
other projects and initiatives, the aim is to open up the information in our
collections as much as possible and make it accessible to the widest possible
audience, while facilitating research in the human sciences.” – Sara
Lammens, General Director of KBR
Doubling the offering
Thanks to the new project, newspaper titles from 1951 to 1989 will be digitised. We stop at 1989 because publishers generally started producing their moulds in digital format after 1990. Some publishers have digital archives from then on; we would therefore need to make a specific analysis for the period after 1989.
This project aims to double the current offering over the next three years and foster research with newspapers from the second half of the 20th century. There is significant demand from the public for material from this period.
KBR will work with an external service provider for this project; following a European tender, the Dutch firm GMS was selected.
The digitisation of the Belgian newspaper press by the Royal Library of Belgium opens up a wealth of historical knowledge to a wide audience. By doubling the offering, thanks to this ambitious project, we aim to make our collection much more accessible and stimulate research into this time period. – Thomas Dermine, Secretary of State for Science policy
