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The Project | Approach

Material Selection and Preparation

For Dutch Prints Online, a selection has been made of early prints from 1781-1800 using content-based and practical criteria. For example, books printed in Gothic typeface were left out because the OCR process does not yet yield the desired results. The materials are prepared for digitisation. Each book is judged as to whether its physical condition could withstand scanning and OCR. Books that are found to be too fragile, that cannot open properly or for which the OCR process would not yield sufficient results, are removed from the selection. In addition, the books are examined for fold-out maps or illustrations. The findings of the material preparation stage are recorded in a database.

European Invitation to Tender

The invitation to tender is being issued by order of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. The scanning and OCR processes are included in the same tender invitation in order to ensure that the one product properly abuts with the other, an issue that proved important when contracting out other, earlier projects executed by the KB.
The remaining parts of the project are not covered by the European tendering regulations because the individual amounts are less than the rewuired minimum. A public tendering procedure has been opted for.

Development of the Web Service

The early prints will become digitally available through the website of Dutch Prints Online (www.dutchprintsonline.nl). The materials on this website will be made available by providing access to not only images of the books, but also full-text files, so that they are completely searchable. Furthermore, extensive search options will be offered by adding a limited set of metadata from the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN). Every book can be found on its own URL, which will become accessible through both the Dutch Prints Online website and the STCN descriptions. Various international standards in use at the KB are used to open up the books to the public and make them available.

In short, the digitised books are made accessible by:

  • the addition of the STCN descriptions
  • the addition of structural metadata so that the digital books can be browsed through
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) so that key words can be used to search the text
  • the addition of word coordinates so that search terms can be highlighted in the images of the pages found

Prince2

The project is being carried out according to the project management methodology Prince2. The organisation, responsibilities and project management are structured according to this methodology.

Costs

The costs of the project amount to EUR 3 million and are funded by a one-off contribution from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, granted in March 2006.

Schedule

The entire project will take 36 months to complete. The project started on 1 May 2007.