More than 4 million pages will be digitised by 2027, doubling BelgicaPress’s current offering and systematically extending it to cover the period from 1951 to 1989. This is a major mass digitisation project, undoubtedly the biggest for 15 years. The project, financed from KBR’s own funds, will give the public the opportunity to consult Belgian newspapers from the second half of the 20th century online.

Today, the BelgicaPress portal brings together 139 titles of Belgian newspapers covering the period 1814-1950 held at KBR. Thanks to the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process, the portal offers 3,952,430 pages accessible online in full-text mode. In 2023, BelgicaPress was KBR’s most consulted online tool, with 129,000 consultations. The portal is mainly used for scientific and journalistic research and for illustrating teaching material, but is also sometimes used for legal purposes and in court cases.