Nieuwe Instituut (NI) houses around 4 million pieces from the National Collection of Architecture and Urban Planning, managing a vast and valuable array of architecture and design archives. In a bid to improve accessibility to this archive, the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW) allocated 11 million euros in 2022. As part of this program, the Linked Open Data (LOD) project endeavors to unveil the richness of NI's archive to the public using semantic web technologies and facilitates LOD connections with other architecture collections.
During our presentation we showcase a series of projects that illustrate our journey with LOD. We provide an overview of the LOD transformation process and demonstrate how we link to external resources such as RKD artist and Getty AAT. Additionally, we discuss the Data Cleaning Initiative (DCI), which ensures the quality of our collection data by cleaning and enriching it. Within the realm of data enrichment, we highlight two initiatives: the Asterisk project, which offers more contextual information through critical review of archival description, and the AI-closed-beta project, a collaboration with Axiell Group, where we utilize AI discovery tools for entity recognition and provide semantic annotations from Wikidata. Lastly, we outline future directions as the OCW program ends.