Bringing innovations into practice: approach and lessons learned of the KB, national library of the Netherlands

Presented during the LibrarIN Conference in Madrid, 23 May 2025. Abstract: The KB is the national library of the Netherlands. We bring research, reading, discovery and lifelong learning within reach of everyone in the Netherlands. At home and in the library, online and offline. Since our foundation in 1798, our aim has been to collect as many publications as possible, that were written in or about the Netherlands. From medieval manuscripts to newspapers, and from Donald Duck magazine to historical and present-day novels. Our repository in The Hague stores over 121 kilometers of written heritage. Increasingly more of our collection is now digital. Our e-Depot contains over 40 million digital newspapers, books, magazines, e-books and websites. We also help researchers to find digital sources and datasets. Together with the public libraries, we are committed to promoting reading, digital inclusion and lifelong development. We also host services such as the Online Library, Delpher and DBNL (the Digital Library for Dutch Literature). In order to achieve these goals now and in the future, we constantly do research ourselves about current and future innovations. This allows us to improve our internal processes, innovate our customer services and discover possible future directions of the organization. We do this in a structured manner by means of a research agenda and collaborations with our networks of universities and cultural organizations. In this presentation will describe our research agenda, how we organize it internally and how we bring innovations into production. This includes our collaborations within the Future Libraries Lab as well as the Cultural AI Lab . And we will show some of our experiments such as automated generation of metadata, conversational agent systems to explore medieval manuscripts, or responsible recommenders in the public library sector. To structure these kinds of research initiatives, we apply technology readiness levels in three stages: Exploration, Proof-of-concept and Pilot. After the third stage the results should find their way into practice within the organization. We will conclude our presentation by sharing our lessons learned and future plans.