A collaboration to
make the history of the East Cantons more accessible

Thanks to the collaboration with the Zentrum für Ostbelgische Geschichte (ZOG), BelgicaPress now offers a home page in German and more than 171,000 pages from 14 newspapers from the East Cantons, both in German and French. And that is just the start. This partnership will soon lead to even more external content on the KBR platform.

For the first time, users can use BelgicaPress in German. At the same time, the new website of ZOG will now be available in French, Dutch and English. Revamped last year, this website offers an extensive collection of online resources, introductory texts, in-depth case studies, a history lab and a blog on the history of the East Cantons. As such, the history of the East Cantons is now accessible to all Belgians in their native language.

The English version means that the site is now accessible beyond national borders. For example, BelgicaPress now features 100 volumes of Die Fliegende Taube (1851-1951), the oldest German-language newspaper in our region. You can also consult the oldest volumes of Grenz-Echo, the only German-language newspaper still published in Belgium.

BelgicaPress, the most consulted online interface of KBR

The BelgicaPress portal was launched in 2016 and currently provides access to 138 digitised Belgian newspapers (1814-1987). These newspapers have highly diverse geographical and ideological backgrounds. Most of them were published daily. Thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, it is possible to search full-text in more than 4 million pages.

BelgicaPress was the most consulted online platform of KBR in 2023, with 129,000 visits. The portal is mainly used for scientific and journalistic research, as a teaching resource, but also sometimes in a legal context and for court cases.

In April 2024, the KBR announced a large-scale digitisation project that will double BelgicaPress’s current offering. Financed with its own funds, this project will allow the public to also access Belgian newspapers from the second half of the 20th century, online.

Access to BelgicaPress content

All documents published up until 1918 are freely accessible, as are the titles for which the KBR has express permission from the rights holders. Unlimited remote access – with a KBR account – to the entire digitised corpus is only possible for scientific research or for teaching resources.