Koninklijke Bibliotheek
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek is the national library of the Netherlands. The name translates to Royal Library, but its official name in English is 'National library of the Netherlands'.
From their mission statement:
- We offer everyone everywhere access to everything published in and about the Netherlands.
- We play a central role in the (scientific) information infrastructure of the Netherlands.
- We promote permanent access to digital information nationally and internationally.
One of the ways they offer access to everything published in the Netherlands is that they place a copy of every book and magazine published in the country in their collection. They manage the Picarta database which is a database of all the books and magazines that are in Dutch libraries.
Their website offers access to the part of the Picarta database that describes their own collection.
They maintain numerous scanning projects, the fruits of which do not always end up on the web, and where these fruits do end up on the web the scans aren't always stored in accessible or usable formats, or are of more esoteric works. This is no BNF or Canadian Libraries.
Searching the catalogue
Collaboration between PG / DP
There have been several talks between our volunteers and KB employees. Unfortunately the turnover of both categories of personnel has been rather large, which makes it difficult to either agree to or implement collaborations.
2011 - follow-up project of Early Dutch Books Online
KB started a follow-up project of Early Dutch Books Online in which they tried to produce richer, OCR-ed versions of the books they had scanned for the earlier projects.
They were interested in learning from our experience, and we learned a couple of things about how to work with Early Dutch Books online from them.
A report by branko can be found in forumpost:805747.
