Call for Proposals KB Researcher

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands is seeking proposals for its Researcher-in-residence program to start in 2018. This program offers a unique chance to early career researchers to work in the library with the Digital Humanities team and KB data. In return, we learn how researchers use the data of the KB.

This year we invite academic researchers with a background in Humanities, Social Sciences, Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence to apply for one of the two following tracks: 1) an ‘open track’ in which we will address your Humanities or Social Sciences research question in a 6 month project using the digital collections of the KB and computational techniques. 2) An ‘information extraction track’ in which we invite Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence as well as Social Sciences and Humanities scholars to use or collaborate in our ongoing research on extracting structured data from our extensive collections of unstructured text.

For both tracks you will be assisted by one of our research software engineers. The output of the project will be incorporated in the experimental platform of the KB, the KB (link is external) Lab and is ideally beneficial for a larger (scholarly) community.

The KB and opening up our digital collections

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands, is a research library with a broad collection in the fields of Dutch history, culture and society. As a national library we collect and store all (digital) publications that appear in the Netherlands, as well as a part of the international publications about the Netherlands. The KB has planned to have digitised and OCRed its entire collection of books, periodicals and newspapers from 1470 onward by the year 2030. Over 60 million book-, newspaper- and magazine pages are currently available via the search portal www.delpher.nl (link is external). To further improve the usability of our content we aim to have all relevant names of persons, locations and organisations in our digital content reusable as linked (open) data by 2018.

The Researcher-in-residence project will be carried out in the Research Department of the KB and there will be two consecutive placements in 2018.

What kind of projects are we looking for in the open track?

We’re open to all kinds of projects that use our data and benefit your research and other users of the KB and/or the KB Lab (link is external). We encourage you to define your project by: 1. formulating a fundamental research question that stems from your field of expertise and that can be linked to the methods and techniques applied at the KB Research Department, such as Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). 2. formulating a project that preferably (but not necessarily) uses one of the following collections: journals (link is external), webarchive and catalogues. For more information about other possible collections, see our Data services website. We also offer derived datasets on our KB Lab (link is external) and you can browse through our collection of newspapers, magazines, radio bulletins and books on Delpher.nl (link is external). 3. formulating a project that is different from the previous executed Researcher-in-Residence projects in terms of data, techniques and research question.

Want to know more? Read all about it, on this website.