Printed mass media and automatic digitisation: the case of Belgian illustrated magazines from the interbellum

This contribution aims to highlight the potential of automatic digitisation for the preservation and the valorisation of printed media heritage through the case of mass-market illustrated magazines produced in Belgium during the interwar years (1918-1940). As extensive bound collections of these resources held in KBR’s Contemporary Printed Books Department form the main corpus of the interdisciplinary research project ARTPRESSE*, which studies Belgian art and media landscape as networked structures seen through the lens of these serialised publications, their mass digitisation and disclosure on issue level questions and challenges current practices and predetermined goals. Starting from the manual digitisation workflow developed for bound periodicals collections in an early stage of the project, we will explain how extensive testing of semi-automatic scanning has yielded convincing results given the complexity and frailty of these collections and how this has dramatically widened the scope of the initial digitization objectives and research methodology. Fragile, but complete for the most part, and despite sometimes frequently requested for consultation, this corpus represents an extremely large and diverse quantity of materials that remain largely understudied. In pair with digitization and disclosure, we will argue that these ‘popular’ magazines, heavily image-loaded, hold strong historical, cultural and social relevance, not only for understanding Belgian art, but as ‘modern’ printed heritage should be of great interest as well for the scientific community as for a broader public.*ARTPRESSE is a research and digitisation project funded by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) within the context of its BRAIN-be 2.0 Framework Program, under the coordination of the KBR Digit Department, and with the collaboration of the Department of Literary Theory and Cultural Studies at KULeuven and the Contemporary Art History Department at ULiège.