  Digital libraries oftentimes provide access to historical newspaper archives
via keyword-based search. Historical figures and their roles are particularly
interesting cognitive access points in historical research. Structuring and
clustering news articles would allow more sophisticated access for users to
explore such information. However, real-world limitations such as the lack of
training data, licensing restrictions and non-English text with OCR errors make
the composition of such a system difficult and cost-intensive in practice. In
this work we tackle these issues with the showcase of the National Library of
the Netherlands by introducing a role-based interface that structures news
articles on historical persons. In-depth, component-wise evaluations and
interviews with domain experts highlighted our prototype's effectiveness and
appropriateness for a real-world digital library collection.
