Martijn Kleppe (41) is Head of the Research Department of the KB, National Library of the Netherlands. Trained as historian, he wrote a dissertation on photographic iconic images by building and applying computational techniques. Before moving to the KB, he was a researcher in several European Digital Humanities research projects that focused on opening up (audio) visual and textual archives by using techniques from the National Language Processing Domain, speech recognition and computer vision.
At the KB, he now leads the Research Department that covers topics such as digital preservation, copyright, public library research, Data Science, and improving the usability and discoverability of digital content by applying AI techniques. He actively sets up research projects and consortia to stimulate the use of the digital collections of the KB and to implement the results within the organization in order for the general public to get better, richer and more innovative access to the national cultural treasures.
Martijn is board member of CLARIAH, the national digital infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities (NWO), one of the founding members of the Cultural AI Lab, chairs the Research Advisory Board of the Network Digital Heritage (NDE), and he is member of both the National Research Council for Heritage (NWO, OCW & RCE) as well as the Scientific Technical Council of SURF.