Digitizing and Unlocking Mass Media Heritage Collections in and beyond the Royal Library of Belgium

Following increasing academic and public interest, the digitisation department of KBR
provides digitised resources with full-text access via two main online archival platforms:
BelgicaPress, dedicated to Belgian newspapers, and BelgicaPeriodicals for all other forms of periodicals. Besides specific demands (treated by a Digit-on-Demand service), large scale digitisation of periodical collections is mainly performed by action-research projects with the aim to valorise fragile and understudied heritage materials with social relevance, such as ARTPRESSE (*). From this perspective we want to present the digitisation of printed magazines, which are simultaneously visual and textual documents, and address some key issues regarding online publication and accessibility in the light of past, current and planned developments and projects within and outside KBR. The digitisation of magazine collections concerns a complex process involving transversal collaboration and requiring an approach suitable to the temporal and spatial specificities of ‘magazines’. One of many being the importance of the cover as its ‘face’ and the troublesome recognition of text and images within it as in other magazine components, another being that collection items are often severely damaged (fubar occasionally) or lacking covers, or other ‘limbs’, all of which heavily encourages the current efforts within KBR to start implementing IIIF. In anticipation, kindred collections in Belgian and foreign heritage libraries are being identified. On another plan, past and ongoing projects to make digitised newspaper collections available as data pave the way for bringing soon the large corpus of illustrated magazines in equal reach of the digital humanities. Lastly, since online access to digitised press materials from the past century is notoriously burdened by copyright law, we briefly want to observe KBR’s experience and role as national hub for registering orphan and out-of-commerce works in EUIPO databases and the possibilities this offers to improve public access and use of these digital collections.
(*) ARTPRESSE is an interdisciplinary research project funded by the BRAIN-be framework
program of BELSPO, coordinated by KBR in collaboration with KU Leuven and ULiège,
focusing on KBR collections of Belgian illustrated magazines from the interwar period
(1918-1940).