Today we toured Dutch royal library in den Haag and then heard about some of the exciting work being done by Erik Boekesteijn around the world with libraries and information systems. It sounds like he has left a mark on several institutions that capture my interest including libraries in New Zealand and the DOK library in Delft that we'll visit at the end of our trip.
Lotte Wilms presented after Erik and told us about the 4-year-old KB Lab community hub that offers digital access to data and offers an API so that developers can access the images, metadata, and text. Their holdings include Dutch historical newspapers, books, radio bulletins, and medieval illuminated manuscripts. She also talked about CHRONIC, which gives access to classified newspaper images from 1860 to present. This works heavily with artificial intelligence to create data.
Next we heard from Kees Teszelskzky, who curates the digital collections. We spoke about the difficulty of collecting social media posts because of privacy issues. Even if a user opts in for inclusion in the public domain, the commentators and reactors might not. It's possible that the posts could be saved in a "dark archive" and not shown to researchers for 150 years, but dark archives are not allowed in the Netherlands. The best they can do for now is archive the links to social media posts.
