Digitisation from microfilm from Dutch newspapers 1910-1919
Introduction
A few years ago the National Library of the Netherlands initiated the project the Roaring Twenties, whose goal it was to digitise three Dutch national daily newspapers, and more important make it accessible on a website. The carefully selected newspapers are De Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, Het Centrum and Het Vaderland. The period selected was 1920-1929, the Roaring Twenties.
In recent years there has been a tendency to tremendous growth in the accessibility of digital (source) material. However, the historical newspaper, an enormous important primairy source, is somewhat lacking on the Internet. There has been some good initiatives by national libraries but due to the specific problems with historical newspapermaterial these courageous attempts often die by inches.
The National Library of the Netherlands has since 1999 given the conversion of it's marvelous collection of historic newspapers priority. The project War & Revolution is a testcase of the possibilities to digitise to a high resolution digital format and convert ( a part of) the collection to obtain full text accessibility. The project is conducted in the framework of the Dutch national programme for preservation of library material, Metamorfoze, which is an initiative of the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The selected part of the collection contains historic newspapers from the period 1910-1919, a most interesting period in the Dutch history. The newspapers selected for this period are the Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, a liberal newspaper; het Centrum, a newspaper with strong affiliations with the Catholic Church and het Volk, a leftist -newspaper. Ten volumes of the daily newspapers are microfilmed in order to digitize the collection and to post this part of the collection of the National Library on a website. This ambitious project (with a total of 275.000 newspaper pages) will be very interesting for a general public as well as for those who are professionally interested in the material such as journalists and researchers.
Website
The digital collection of the newspapers shall be available in the middle of december on the website. It contains both the material from the Roaring Twenties project as well as the material from War & Revolution. Anyone interested in the collection can get an impression on http://kranten.kb.nl/, which contains the digital collection of the Roaring Twenties project. The collection is accessible on title of the newspaper, year and issue.