Delpher

Delpher is an online Dutch digital archive providing access to digitized historical newspapers, books and periodicals. Maintained by the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) in cooperation with regional libraries, universities and other cultural heritage institutions, Delpher assembles scanned pages with machine-generated full text to support research, education and public interest.

The platform offers a searchable corpus of millions of pages, primarily in Dutch but also containing material in other languages. Users can perform simple and advanced full-text searches, filter results by date, publication type and place, and view high-resolution scanned images alongside extracted metadata. Many items are in the public domain and available for download or reuse; others are rights-protected and presented with descriptive metadata or restricted access according to copyright rules.

Delpher is used by historians, genealogists, journalists and students for historical research, source verification and cultural studies. The site integrates with national and international heritage networks to improve discoverability and often links into broader digital collections. OCR quality varies depending on print condition and typeface, and users are advised to verify transcriptions against image scans. Access to Delpher is freely available online.