Data services: APIs and downloads

Do you want to analyse 100 years of illustrations in digitised newspapers with machine learning software? Are you building an online application about Dutch writers in the 19th century? Or are you doing computational research on the development of the Dutch language?

The digital collections and metadata of the KB are available according to linked data principles, as bulk downloads, via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or via Wikimedia Commons. If copyright law allows it, anyone can use the data, free of charge and without conditions. If the material is copyrighted, access to the data for scientific research purposes is often possible. Read more about our data services.

KB datasets

All KB datasets

Delpher magazines

Which magazines were illustrated in the past and which were not? What did the first sports magazines write about? Which recipes have been popular in Dutch magazines throughout the years? In our dataset Delpher tijdschriften you will find more than 400.000 digitised magazines from 1800 to 2000.
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Delpher newspapers

Do you want to know from which countries news was published in the 18th century and from which countries it was not? Or do you want to find out which products were advertised in the Dutch newspapers during the Second World War? With Delpher newspapers you can research 2 million digitised newspapers from 1618 till 1995.
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Delpher ANP

With ANP Radiobulletins Digitaal you can research 48 years of Dutch radio news. The collection consists of 1,474,359 digitised typed texts, so-called typescripts.
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DBNL dataset

Which novels were popular long ago? Are female characters described differently from male characters? Can literature be measured? In the DBNL dataset you will find more than 5 million digitised pages of Dutch language and literature.
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Digital KB collections: data research and other purposes

The KB's extensive digital collections make it possible to use software to analyse large quantities of text, structured data or images from several centuries, in search of historical patterns or breaks. When did a word disappear from the Dutch language? When did the majority of illustrations in Dutch newspapers become photographs? When did people write positively or negatively about certain concepts or people?

All that data also offers unprecedented opportunities for making connections with other collections or data, or for bringing the history of the Netherlands to life through apps or online visualisations. 

Access to open and non-open data

The method of access differs per collection or file and depends, among other things, on the legal status, the technical possibilities and the type of (meta)data. New forms of access are being developed on a regular basis.

Usually open data (i.e. not protected by copyright) can be downloaded without prior registration. For non-open data please contact @email and briefly describe what data you need and why. There is often an arrangement for research purposes. However, you may first have to sign a contract or access to the data may be limited to the KB building.

New possibilities

More and more humanities or social science research with a historical component makes use of the possibilities of Text and Data Mining (TDM), machine learning or forms of artificial intelligence. The KB's digital collections often form the basis of this research.

Every year, dozens of researchers use the KB's digital collections to pose their own advanced questions and perform analyses. In this way, the KB's digital collections are more often 'read' by software than by people. Digital collections of the KB also find their way to other (sub)search environments, such as (in random order) Nederlab, Europeana, CLARIAH, Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen or Golden Agents.

Linked data

De collecties van de KB bestaan uit miljoenen publicaties zoals boeken, kranten en tijdschriften. Om deze op een goede manier toegankelijk te maken, zijn ze volgens een vast patroon beschreven. Deze beschrijvingen van publicaties noemen we 'metadata'. Om ze zo bruikbaar mogelijk te maken voor onderzoekers en diensten biedt de KB data aan als linked data. Lees meer over deze expertise van de KB.

Contact

For more information, please contact @email.