A practical approach: the quest for a large-scale newspaper digitization workflow

Abstract

In 2006 the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) set up a production chain to digitize 8 million newspaper pages in five years' time. Although the library had gained valuable experience with digitizing the Dutch parliamentary papers, the project Databank of Digital Daily Newspapers (DDD) – the largest digitization project in the history of the KB – took everything to another level: processing an average of 200,000 pages per month put high demands on the whole organization, in terms of staff, IT-infrastructure, technical solutions and workflow management. Digitizing on this scale inevitably means moving from state-of-the-art, ‘boutique’ digitization towards a workflow where quality is counterbalanced by arguments of quantity. This paper is about the practical choices made in this context by a heritage institution that – after nearly 15 years of experience with digital – is rapidly transforming into a truly digital library.