Digital research environments are confronted with a gap between simple search interfaces and advanced functionalities for (text) analysis. Researchers can usually choose between either a user-friendly search interface to read individual sources with few or no options for analysis, or API-access or data export which necessitates coding skills for advanced analyses of (big) datasets. In the present study we explored whether the KB, the national library of the Netherlands, could develop a digital research environment for historical text collections that bridges this gap and offers advanced analysis tools that are sufficiently usable for scholars (and other users) without programming skills, a so-called ‘text suite’.