Collections as Data : interdisciplinary experiments with KBR’s digitised historical newspapers : a Belgian case study

Digital cultural heritage collections in libraries, archives, and museums are increasingly being used for digital humanities research. However, traditional ways of providing access to such collections, for example through digital library interfaces, are less than ideal for researchers who are looking to build datasets around specific research questions. Inspired by the ‘Collections as Data’ movement as an approach for cultural heritage institutions to prepare their digital 1 collections for analysis using digital methods, KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium, has embarked on a 24 month project called DATA-KBR-BE (2020-2022) to facilitate data-level access to its 2 digitised and born-digital collections for digital humanities research. This paper will: a) introduce the concept of ‘Collections as Data’ while exploring the opportunities and challenges for cultural heritage institutions; b) outline the DATA-KBR-BE project and the methodology for piloting ‘Collections as Data’ at KBR; and c) present the preliminary results of initial experiments to extract thematic datasets in support of digital humanities research scenarios as a first step towards designing a sustainable data extraction workflow for KBR.