Seminar ‘Mining digital repositories’ – National Library of The Netherlands

Libraries want to understand the researchers who use their digital collections and researchers want to understand the nature of these collections better. The seminar ‘Mining digital repositories’ brought them together at the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) on 10-11 April, 2014, to discuss both the good and the bad of working with digitised collections – especially newspapers. And to look ahead at what a ‘digital utopia’ might look like. One easy point to agree on: it would be a world with less restrictive copyright laws. And a world where digital ‘portals’ are transformed into ‘platforms’ where researchers can freely ‘tinker’ with the digital data. – Report & photographs by Inge Angevaare, KB