KB Research – Page 6 – Research at the National Library of the Netherlands

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International collaboration in the IIPC Preservation Working Group

Web archiving is often about collecting the web. But part of the work is also related to preserving the web. One of the working groups in the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) is focused on this aspect. Recently we published an article in the D-Lib magazine, called Facing the Challenge of Web Archives Preservation Collaboratively: The Role and Work of the IIPC Preservation Working Group. The article was written by Andrea Goethals, Clément Oury, David Pearson, Tobias Steinke and me. In this article we inform you about our goals, activities and results in the Preservation Working Group. We also report the findings of a survey we did amongst the (around 50) members of the IIPC in 2013 and their approaches to preserving the web. And we want to point you to a set of databases we are maintaining, with crucial information for web archiving, like the Environments Database and the Risks Database. Happy reading!

Top 50 file formats in the KB e-Depot

April 29, 2015 / Johan van der Knijff / 2 Comments

The current version of the KB’s digital repository system (e-Depot) doesn’t include any tools for automated file format identification yet. Our previous DIAS system didn’t have identification functionality either. As a result, information on file formats in digital our collections is largely based on publisher metadata and file extensions. Neither are necessarily correct. Moreover, previous analyses revealed a number of prevalent file extensions that could not be easily linked to a specific format. One result of this situation was that we couldn’t even reliably tell to what extent patrons were able to view e-Depot content on the PCs in our reading rooms (the obviously common formats aside).

To get a better view of the formats in our collection, we did an analysis of the “top 50” most prevalent file extensions in our e-Depot: what are the corresponding formats, can these formats be automatically identified, and can we render them in our reading rooms? This blog post summarises the main findings of this work.

Supporting History Research with Temporal Topic Previews at Querying Time

April 20, 2015 / lottewilms / 1 Comment

This post is written by Dr. Jiyin He – Researcher-in-residence at the KB Research Lab from June – October 2014.

Being able to study primary sources is pivotal to the work of historians. Today’s mass digitisation of historical records such as books, newspapers, and pamphlets now provides researchers with the opportunity to study an unprecedented amount of material without the need for physical access to archives. Access to this material is provided through search systems, however, the effectiveness of such systems seems to lag behind the major web search engines. Some of the things that make web search engines so effective are redundancy of information, that popular material is often considered relevant material, and that the preferences of other users may be used to determine what you would find relevant. These properties do not hold or are unavailable for collections of historical material. In the past 3 months I have worked at the KB as a guest researcher. Together with Dr. Samuël Kruizinga, a historian, we explored how we can enhance the search system at KB to assist the search challenges of the historian. In this blogpost, I will share our experience of working together, the system we have developed, as well as lessons learnt during this project.

Researcher-in-residence at the KB

April 9, 2015 / lottewilms / 2 Comments

At DH2013, we presented a poster to ask researchers what they need from a National Library. The responses varied from ‘Nothing, just give us your data’ to ‘We’d like to be fully supported with tools and services’, showing once again that different users have different requirements. In order to accommodate all groups of researchers, the Collections department of the KB, who ‘own’ the data, and the Research department, where tools and services are developed, combined efforts and spoke to scholars to discuss the best method of supporting their work. However, we noticed that it was still quite difficult to get a good idea of how they used our data and in what way our actions and decisions would benefit them. Also, it seemed that researchers were often not aware of what activities the we undertake in this respect, which led to work being done twice.

Symposium Digitale historische kranten in aula Kon. Bibliotheek 24-03-2015

What’s happening with our digitised newspapers?

April 8, 2015 / lottewilms / 0 Comments

The KB has about 10 million digitised newspaper pages, ranging from 1650 until 1995. We negotiated rights to make these pages available for research and this has happened more and more over the past years. However, we thought that many of these projects might be interested in knowing what others are doing and we wanted to provide a networking opportunity for them to share their results. This is why we organised a newspapers symposium focusing on the digitised newspapers of the KB, which was a great success!

Prof. dr. Huub Wijfjes (RUG/UvA) showing word clouds used in his research.

Succeed project rated ‘Excellent’ by European Commission

April 1, 2015 / Sieta Neuerburg / 0 Comments

Author: Silvia Ponzoda
This post is a summary. The original article is available at: http://www.digitisation.eu/blog/european-commission-rated-excellent-succeed-project-results/

The Succeed project has recently been rated ‘Excellent ‘ by the European Commission. The final evaluation of the Succeed project took place on19th of February 2015, at the University of Alicante, during a meeting of the committee of experts appointed by the European Commission (EC) with the Succeed consortium members. The meeting was chaired by Cristina Maier, Succeed Project Officer from the European Commission.
Succeed has been funded by the European Union to promote the take up and validation of research results in mass digitisation, with a focus on textual content. For a description of the project and the consortium, see our earlier post Succeed project launched.

The outputs produced by Succeed during the project life span (January 2013-December 2014) are listed below.

Dutch digital developments

March 29, 2015 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/dutch-digital-developments/

Some interesting developments are taking place in the Netherlands with regard to (preservation of) the digital heritage. Initiated by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science the Network Digital Heritage (NDE) was set up. The participants in this network are national organizations with large digital collections, like the National Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) , the Institute of Sound and Vision, the Cultural Heritage Agency, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Archives, together with other partners like for example the knowledge center DEN.

Policy-based assessment of EPUB with Epubcheck

March 13, 2015 / Johan van der Knijff / 3 Comments

Back in 2012 the KB conducted a first investigation of the suitability of the EPUB format for long-term preservation. The KB will soon start receiving publications in this format, and in anticipation of this, our Collection Care department has formulated a policy on the minimum requirements an EPUB must meet to ensure long-term accessibility. The policy largely follows the recommendations from the 2012 report. This blog explores to what extent it is possible to automatically assess the EPUBs that we receive against our policy using a combination of the Epubcheck tool and Schematron rules.

Doe ik het goed? Over certificering in Nederland

February 18, 2015 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

De KB neemt deel aan verschillende werkgroepen van de NCDD (Nationale Coalitie Digitale Duurzaamheid). Een van de werkgroepen gaat over certificering van duurzame bewaarplaatsen van digitaal materiaal. In Nederland zijn er steeds meer organisaties die grote hoeveelheden digitaal materiaal duurzaam bewaren, de KB is er één van, maar ook het Nationaal Archief, Beeld & Geluid, DANS en 3TU hebben grote digitale magazijnen (repositories). Iedereen gaat er van uit dat deze instellingen professioneel werken en dat de digitale collecties daar veilig zijn. Maar toch zal dit vertrouwen periodiek duidelijk aangetoond moeten worden aan externe partijen: via audit en certificering. De NCDD werkgroep Certificering heeft zojuist een folder gepubliceerd, die je achtergrondinformatie over certificering geeft. Welke methodes zijn er, wat is de meerwaarde, en wie zou zich moeten laten certificeren? Je kunt de folder downloaden van de NCDD website

Barbara Sierman

Oops! Article preserved, references gone

February 16, 2015 / barbarasierman2013 / 0 Comments

Author: Barbara Sierman
Originally posted on: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/oops-article-preserved-references-gone/

Recently an article was published by Klein, Van de Sompel e.a. in PLOS1 (see under), drawing attention to the problem of “reference rot”. Reference rot is a combination of link rot (a reference to a link on the web results in an error message 404) and content drift (the page can be found but the content has been changed.) References in academic publications have a purpose: they underpin the argument. References can point to other scholarly publications but a growing amount of references in scholarly publications refer to sources on the Web. And especially these sources are prone to reference rot (the referenced “publications” having – at least theoretically – a bigger chance of being preserved by national libraries or organisations like CLOCKSS and Portico).