Four centuries of newspaper searchable via Royal Library portal

Earlier on this blog we reported the Dutch Royal Library’s (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) plans to digitize a great deal of its newspaper archives and make them available via an online portal.

Now it's there. The Royal Library has made available online 1 million old newspaper pages from 70 different newspapers dating back as far as 1618. The collection will later on be further extended to include 7 million pages. The scanned newspapers are searchable by word.

"The web service is the largest, freely accessible online newspaper database in the world", claims the Royal Library to Webwereld. The Royal Library has made agreements with rightowners on the accessibility of newspaper publications which are still copyright protected.

The methods of the Royal Library are in contrast with the plans of the British Library to offer the same online newspaper service, but instead of a free service, users wille have to pay for access. Also, the British Library is reportedly planning to put all their newspapers online without any consultations with copyright holders or a system of for compensation.

29-05-2010