Hildelies Balk – Pennington de Jongh is Head of the section European Projects for Research and Development in the department of Innovation and Research of the KB National library of the Netherlands. Her section acquires and runs research projects on interoperability, digital preservation, digitisation and access with partners in and outside Europe. Hildelies holds a PhD in the History of Art and is an experienced researcher and manager in the field of cultural heritage. She joined the KB I n 2006 as head of the National programmes for digitisation. The obvious need for improving access to the digitial content created in these programmes gave rise to the forming of a European consortium to adress the challenges in OCR in mass digitisation of historical text. Hildelies coordinated the forming of this consortium and the writing of the proposal, resulting in the IMPACT project, led by the KB. She is project director of IMPACT and responsible for sustaining the results and the expertise of this project in a Centre of Comptetence to be launched at the end of 2011.

LinkedIn profile