At several places in
and outside the Netherlands Dutch language newspapers, books, magazines and
other text media were digitized and made accessible. The National Library of
the Netherlands , university libraries, Google Books and heritage institutions
have brought these files together and made them accessible. For example, more
than 30 million pages of original texts from more than 1.3 million newspapers
and 1.5 million magazine pages and more than 320,000 books from the 15th to the
20th century can be accessed via a single Internet address: www. Delpher.nl. You
can delve into this mountain with digital pages, browse and search for relevant
information, if you can read Dutch. The database has no English interface.
Digitizing books,
newspapers, magazines and other text media has already become a tradition in
The Netherlands. The National Library of the Netherlands has a number of major projects to its name. The
book selection Delpher emerged from e.g. National Library projects Early Dutch
Books Online and Metamorfoze, but also the Digital Library of Dutch Literature and
Google Books, in which Google collaborates with National Library of the
Netherlands . The historical newspaper and magazine collection is now also
impressive in terms of quantity and variety. Interesting are also scanned radio
news bulletins from 1937 to 1989.
What can you do with
such a mountain of information? You can spend much time to browse and jump from
one article to another article and achieve surprising results. And a targeted
search for eg. study purposes can yield a multitude of relevant results.
Furthermore, the database is not only accessible to study - and professional
purposes, but also individuals can retrieve a lot of information about their
family and environment.
In a study on the
history of digital publishing you can find a lot of material. The rise of the
newspaper archives, such as nationl paper NRC Handelsblad archive. Tap Viditel
and a newspaper article in the Leeuwarder Courant about the launch of the first
Dutch public online information service Viditel by former state secretary
Neelie Smit-Kroes in Sneek on August 7, 1980 comes up as well as the radio
bulletin that day with the notification of the launch of Prestel like videotext
system Viditel. And tap Electronic Publishing and an article in the NRC Handelsblad
will appear marking the publication of the book by Joost Kist, a later member
of the Board of Directors of Kluwer. Likewise search for CD-I and articles appear
about the launch by an enthusiastic Philips CEO Jan Timmer, doubts about the
success of the medium and the death blow in 1996 by Cor Boonstra. The
introduction of the Internet is marked by the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden with
an article of October 15, 1994 under the title: Netherlands struggling on the
electronic highway. Apart from this kind of interest, one can also look up
items from his/her professional life: companies where they worked,
publications, published or ads from a former employer.
For individuals
Delpher is a place for self-abuse. Tap your own name and look at the result.
For me there was a real surprise. I was born in January 1945. My parents lived
under the bridge of Arnhem in 1944, but had to evacuate to the east part of the
Netherlands. When I was born, no birth announcement could be sent to relative
elsewhere in the Netherlands, because there was no working mail service. But in
Delpher I found a kind of birth announcement in two newspaper items. I was not
aware of the existence nor had I ever seen them in my life.
Top item of May 7, 1945: my grandfarther requests information on family members. Item below of May 12, 1945: my farther responds telling where he is with his family and announces my birth.
Delpher is an ongoing
project. New books are added. The Google Books scanning program adds files.
Archives of post 1990 newspapers and magazines will be merged with the older
archives. Delpher can be called Mount Serendipity: you will always find
something unexpected and useful material, while you're actually looking for
something completely different.
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