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.

Mmmonk was a collaborative project between the Public Library of Bruges, Ghent University Library, Diocese of Ghent and Major Seminary Ten Duinen in Bruges. The aim was to improve digital access to some 820 medieval manuscripts from four abbeys in Ghent and Bruges. This included digitising manuscripts, creating metadata and collecting manifests from external collections. For this, Mmmonk used IIIF, a digital innovation for more sustainable and efficient management and use of digital images. Moreover, Mmmonk contributed to the development of IIIF by experimenting with metadata aggregation and the visualisation of annotations on medieval manuscripts. On 17 February 2022, Mmmonk organised a closing event at - KBR focusing on manuscripts and IIIF. In the morning, team members presented the Mmmonk project. After lunch, there was the 8th session of IIIF Fridays, with examples of IIIF implementation in data management and research. All presentations were recorded and are available on Mmmonk.be.

This article focuses on the agency of the different players involved in anti-Jansenist book censorship during the Malines archiepiscopate of Humbertus de Precipiano (1690-1711). It builds upon recent scholarship that emphasizes the ambiguous task and divided loyalties of censors. This essay chooses to study the actions of officials inside censorial institutions as well as the strategies printers, authors and book agents pursued when facing a rigorous anti-Jansenist censorship. During his archiepiscopate, de Precipiano reformed pre-publication censorship in order to halt the spread of Jansenist ideas. He was unsuccessful, however, because the printers received approbations from Jansenist censors. I argue that, in the case of Jansenism, the fidelity of censors to this religious movement prevailed over their loyalty to ecclesiastical administrations and the insistence on upholding the norms. Even in a mono-confessional context characterized by book censorship aimed at defending orthodoxy from internal threats, actors such as censors allowed their personal beliefs to guide them, with the result that pre-publication censorship was inefficient.

Mrs Louis Solvay (1877-1962) gave her collection of French illustrated books to the Royal Library of Belgium in 1961, with some archives. Her modern books were binded by the best French bookbinders of her time. She ordered eleven bookbindings to the Art Deco artist Pierre Legrain (1889-1929) in Paris. Her library includes some letters and invoices of Legrain. His letters inform us about the collaboration of the French artist with the Belgian collector : projects, designs of bookbindings, leathers and other materials, the artist’s illness and death and the collaboration of Mrs Solvay with the heirs of Legrain, his widow Marie-Juliette Franco and his son-in-law Jacques Anthoine-Legrain.

As most religious institutions in the later Middle Ages, the convent of Mariënhage in Eindhoven had its library, of which only very few traces have come down to us. These remains allow us, however, to reconstruct an intense intellectual life around books. Mariënhage probably produced liturgical manuscripts for other convents in the region and the spiritual life of the convent was enhanced by religious anthologies made in the convent itself. Apart from these, Mariënhage had one of the largest libraries in the Low Countries, which not only contained theological works, but also an important collection of historical writings. The latter is due to the donation of the private library of Nicolaus Clopper the Elder of Brussels. His son, Nicolaus Clopper the Younger, compiled an impressive chronicle of the history of the world, two copies of which have survived. The Royal Library of Belgium holds two manuscripts from this former convent, a devout booklet conceived for internal use in the 1520s and a historical manuscript from the actual library, which has a rough draft that probably may be linked to the world chronicle mentioned above.