Digitisation of library collections in the Netherlands

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning,

First of all I would like to thank the BnF for inviting me at this roundtable ‘National Libraries and Digital Cooperation’ here in Lille. I’d like to say a few words about this city, though I am sure that for most of you it’s well known. Lille is a resilient city. In the distant past it started of as a small medieval merchant town that was situated on a major route between the great Flemish towns and the Champagne fairs. Centuries later Lille became a great industrial power and thrived in the metalwork, chemistry and textiles industries. In the eighties of the last century however, Lille was hit by the industrial crisis. The city entered a heavy period of restructuring based on the development of a service sector. The city of factories and workshops was replaced by one of offices and services. And today Lille is France’s fourth largest metropolitan area, with the Eurostar and the new Euralille district. Euralille has been one of France’s largest urban planning projects. And here my Dutch heart starts to beat a little faster, because Euralille was designed by the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. The resilience Lille has shown through the centuries serves as an example to us all. Adaptability to new developments and circumstances and a readiness to change are key elements in the survival of our libraries in the digital age. From within our buildings the world may still seem rather sturdy and physical, but in fact we are all sitting on the edge of the ‘digital cliff’. We all agree that the future of our libraries is digital. This implies that we have to rethink and reinvent our role as we trade places with the comfortable analogue world. What is the future of the library in the digital age? Some people believe that the stereotypical library is dying and that paper will soon be the information medium of the past. Others are less drastic and believe that libraries will continue to function as hybrid organisations, offering access to both print and digital resources. Whatever the outcome of this debate, to me and my organisation it is clear that we should adapt to the changing expectations and wishes of the users of information. And this means that we need to offer our customers digital access to all digital and paper publications published in the Netherlands. Large-scale digitisation of the Dutch paper collections is an important element in this policy. ---------------------------------------------------Now that we are arriving at the actual topic of today – the digitisation of library collections – I must start with a confession. In the Netherlands a national digitisation policy does not exist But fortunately, this does not mean that nothing has happened. I do have a story to tell. In recent years there have been several attempts to develop a national digitisation policy. But these were usually bottom up initiatives, coming from organisations within the sector itself.

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Although these attempts did not lead to an overall policy, they did generate funding for digitisation projects. Funding came from different corners within the ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and from different funding schemes, both in the science and the cultural heritage domain. So, the absence of a national policy has not been a major impediment to digitisation in my country. You might even say that this lack of central direction is typically Dutch and we do not seem to need it. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands, has always been and still is a very active player in this field. Many of the digitisation initiatives of recent years have been born within the KB. Today the KB is working with other leading parties to foster the establishment of a joint, national information infrastructure that will offer integrated access to cultural and scientific collections. This infrastructure would for example allow everyone to search in the entire digital and paper holdings of the Dutch scientific and public libraries. Our ministry accepted this concept with open arms and even drew up an investment scheme. But these are uncertain times in the Netherlands, both economically and politically, so the outcome of this process is still highly uncertain. ----------------------------------------------------In the meantime, we have not been sitting still at the KB. Last year we published a Strategic Plan for the period 2010-2013. Boldly and ambitiously, this plan says that the KB ‘will digitise all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470 on.’ • • •

Why did we set this goal? What are we talking about in numbers? How are we going to achieve this ambitious goal?

Why? The ambition to digitise all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals is linked to the responsibility of the KB as a national library to acquire, preserve and give access to everything published in (and about) the Netherlands. The ambition is also rooted in a firm believe that information that is not available digitally will in the future no longer be found. And thus will be lost for future generations. The issue of national language weight on the Web does not play a role in these considerations. I guess this is typically Dutch as well. What? Talking about numbers one has to realise that we are a small country, but with a lot of keen publishers. The digitisation of all publications that have appeared in the Netherlands is a huge and labour-intensive challenge for the KB, though nothing compared to French dimensions of course To give you an idea: we are talking about some 2 to 2.5 million books. About 200,000 before 1800, 500,000 titles published between 1800 and 1950, and the vast majority of course after 1950.

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Together with the periodicals and newspapers this adds up to more than 700 millions of pages that are waiting to be digitised. We calculated the production costs of this effort at some 300 million euros. The additional and structural maintenance and exploitation costs of this digital output should not be underestimated. Once it’s digital we’d like to keep it accessible, don’t we? In its Strategic Plan the KB announced its ambition that in four years from now ten percent of all Dutch publications will have been digitised. Sixty million pages will be digitised by the KB itself and 13 million pages by third parties. The ultimate goal – all publications digitised – is of course a long term goal. We want to finish the job by 2030. By that time I hope to sit in my rocking chair and read an article on my tablet about the successful completion of this mega-project. How? How is the KB going to achieve these ambitious goals? In fact, work on this colossal project is already on the way. I always like to represent this digitisation effort as a large matrix, with on one axis ‘time’ (publication years) and on the other the type of material (books, newspapers, periodicals). The cells that appear in this matrix have to be filled one after the other or even in parallel. And this process takes time, because funding today is hard find and the work is very labourintensive. But we’d like to end up like this of course: Fortunately the first cells of our matrix are being filled as we speak. It is obvious that we started with those materials that show the highest figures when it comes to actual use. A good example of these are the newspapers. The KB received a 13 million euro grant from the ministry of Education, Culture and Science to digitise 8 million historical pages from Dutch newspapers between 1618 and 1995. The first millions of pages are already available on the Web. Next to that, we received 10.5 million euro to digitise the Dutch parliamentary papers from the period 1814-1995, about 2.3 million pages. It’s already online as well, we’re currently loading the earliest decades for this. This year 6,000 books, about 1.3 million pages, from the period 1780-1800 will become available online. This is the result of a 3 million euro collaboration project of the KB and the university libraries of Amsterdam and Leiden. In this pilot project we built up a lot of experience with scanning rare and valuable publications. Finally, we run the national programme Metamorfoze, aimed at the preservation of paper heritage, mainly from the period 1840-1950. It started in 1997 with transferring the content of threatened material to microfilms. From 2008 on preservation imaging – digitisation - has become the only method of conversion. These four digitisation projects are already filling up the first cells of our matrix.

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Cooperation and coordination are an important key to the success of our ambitions: • In our projects we also digitise material from other institutions. • We will be setting up a digitisation register that prevents possible overlap of digitisation activities by other institutions. And what are our plans for the coming years? In order to reach our short term goal of 2013, we need to cooperate with external parties. First of all with other public organisations. An example of this is the so-called Libratory proposal. This proposal builds on the 18th century digitisation project I just mentioned and is a collaboration of the KB and four Dutch university libraries. It aims at digitising almost 44 million pages published before 1840 and building a research environment around it. Estimated costs: 75 million euro Estimated running time: 15 years This concerns a major operation. Mind you, government funding has not yet been found ! And to be honest, looking at the economic circumstances, I am too optimistic about the outcome. Since there will be scarce funding available within the public domain, we are also looking for opportunities in the private sector. Three months ago we signed an important agreement with Google. Under this agreement Google will digitise some 160.000 public domain books from the 18th and 19th centuries that we have in our collection. The books will be fully searchable and accessible for free via Google Books, but also via the various KB websites and –I’d like to stress that- via the Europeana portal as well. We are very pleased with this partnership because it gives us the opportunity to accelerate the digitisation process. Another private sector partner we are talking with is ProQuest. We are considering joining their Early European Books Online programme. This would make it possible to digitise some 25,000 books that were published before 1700. With all these initiatives we will be able to fill most of the cells in our matrix up to the twentieth century. And reach our goals for the year 2013. The last century confronts us with an extra challenge: the copyright issue. In the Netherlands, as in most of the other EU-countries, publications become out-ofcopyright only seventy years after the death of the author. This poses a major problem when it comes to digitising more recent books, newspapers and periodicals. In the framework of our newspaper digitisation project, we are already talking about these issues with publishers and rightsholders organisations for freelancers – like journalists, photographers, illustrators. These discussions usually take a long time, but mostly ended in signing agreements. So that gives us hope for the future. A major challenge in this respect are the so-called orphan works. Orphan works are copyrighted works whose owner cannot be located.

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No less than seventy percent of all works may be orphaned. Although we are allowed to digitise this material for preservation purposes, we cannot provide access to it as long as we have not been able to trace the owner. Or at least can prove that we did our best to do so. The European Commission seems to be supportive to consider legislation that would better enable libraries and other memory institutions to digitise materials more easily. That sounds pretty optimistic. I will end my presentation with an interesting experience I had some years ago. And if I am not mistaken a similar case occurred here in France. Unwittingly, I caused quite a stir when in an interview I mentioned the fact that one of the techniques the KB might be using to digitise, is to cut up books in order to be able to scan them more efficiently, so cheaper. The reputable Dutch newspaper NRC ran the news on its front page: ‘The KB wants to cut up old books in order that they may be read’. There were few but rather fierce protests from readers. Some wanted me to be fired. How could a national heritage institution such as the KB even contemplate cutting up old books to digitise them? The KB was quick to defray the fears of the nation. Of course the KB will never cut up anything that is precious or valuable. Of course the KB will honour its commitment to publishers that one copy of each publication that is deposited will be preserved indefinitely. And of course cutting & scanning will only be applied to publications of which multiple printed copies are still available. In fact, a test run of cut & scan digitisation was done with second-hand books especially bought for the purpose of cutting them up. Mind you, for me it’s just one of the options to digitise ! Personally this example showed me once more that also emotions play an important role in the shift from paper to digital information. The sheer scale of digitisation, the funding, the copyright, the public private partnerships, and the long term access are all interesting challenges we have to tackle in the coming years. Still, if we continue our efforts, I am convinced that in the end we will realise of our ultimate goal. The digitisation of 730 million pages and – with that - the availability of all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals - for everyone, whenever and wherever.

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