A hundred and fifty years of Schouwen-Duiveland’s history unlocked.
For a long time it was the newspaper for Schouwen-Duiveland: the Zierikzeesche Nieuwsbode. In the last decennia sales went down and in 1998 the curtain fell: the paper was bought by the Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant and disappeared from the racks.

The bound newspapers had been gathering dust in a bank vault for years. The papers could be consulted on microfilm, but that meant taking a trip to the archive. Now, however, tens of thousands of pages of the Zierikzeesche Nieuwsbode are available online, unlocking an important source for the history of this Zeelandic eiland. You can now visit www.krantenbankzeeland.nl for historical research or a chance to reminisce.

Recreational Fishing Matches and Dike Breaches
The newspaper bank is a cooperative project between the Zeeuwse Bibliotheek and the municipal archives of Goes, Schouwen-Duiveland, Tholen, Noord-Beveland, Vlissingen and Sluis. A part of the volumes that are now online was scanned by Pictura. Pictura also provided the newspaper viewer for the website. This is a tool to view the newspapers online, browse through them and search them. Pictura used OCR (optical character recognition) to convert the newspapers into searchable digital textfiles so the many tens of thousands of pages can be searched with ease. Browsing endlessly through bound newspapers in search of that one specific article – whether about a drowned recreational fishing match in 1972 or about the terrible dike breaches of 1953 – is a thing of the past. With the new search feature your data surfaces in seconds.

“It is just as simple as a search engine on the internet. You can search by date but also for keywords or even a series of years. If you want to read about the war years or the time of the North Sea flood of 1953, your results show all the pages for those eras. The beauty of it is that the keywords are highlighted within the newspaper articles so you no longer have to read everything. What used to take our employees as much as two weeks to find out, now takes only about an hour,” says Johan Francke, information specialist for the Zeeuws Documentatiecentrum. (PZC | January 9th 2008)

Addition:
Since January 2008 the Zierikzeesche Nieuwsbode (1844-1944 and 1948-1998), the Zierikzeesche Courant (1809-1889) and Vrije Stemmen van Schouwen-Duiveland (1945-1947) are accessible in the newspaper bank.