Delpher has been built up over the last decade and brings together digitized material from different sources: the large-scale digitization of newspapers funded by NWO (Databank Digitale Dagbladen), material digitized through the national preservation programme Metamorfoze, public-private partnerships for digitasation of books with Google and Proquest and other digitization projects.
The results of these projects have been brought together in the end-user service Delpher.nl in 2013, with millions of new pages added each year. In 2015 the integration of the Digitale Bibliotheek der Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL) within Delpher was established. Since 2017 several regional newspaper archives are also accessible via Delpher, which uses API to connect the regional newspaper datasets, such as Krantenbank Zeeland, Eemland archive, Noord-Hollands archive and Alkmaar archive. It is foreseen to link another five to six regional archives in the next year.
Delpher’s next ambition is to link external digitised periodicals to Delpher. A pilot project has started to connect statistical periodicals of the CBS to Delpher. If successful, more periodicals from other institutions will follow.
Since CLARIAHPlus is established as large-scale research infrastructure Delpher has been used in several projects that develop smart, user-friendly techniques to structure collections of data and make them accessible.