KB posts one of eight million newspaper pages

AMSTERDAM – The Royal Library of the Netherlands (KB) has launched a website on which it plans to post eight million newspaper pages, covering the period of 1618-1995. The project includes about ten percent of the pages ever published and represents an investment of 12 million euros. KB sees it as its mandate to open up its collection of newspapers for research to the general public. The decision is a major benefit to KB preservation efforts since, after scanning the pages, they will be less handled while achieving instant accessibility for anyone anywhere with a computer. The project also is a major boon to linguists wanting to study the development of the Dutch language and to genealogists (for instance, for family announcements), sociologists (to study phraseology in obituaries) and historians. When the project is completed, the KB website will overtake the Library of Congress site as the largest of its kind in the world.