ARTchives: a Linked Open Data native catalogue of art historians’ archives

Art historians’ personal archives include a variety of sources documenting creators’ work, opinions, and methodologies. Such a wealth of information is fundamental to trace the trajectories of art history through the lenses of historiographical research. However, the potential of such collections is still unveiled, and performing cross-collection research is not possible via online catalogues. The ARTchives project aims at crowdsourcing curated information on notable art historians’ archives and providing scholars with a centralised access point to this heritage. In this paper we present the agile cataloguing process developed to support ARTchives contributors. ARTchives is based on a Linked Open Data native cataloguing system that leverages Semantic Web technologies and Natural Language Processing to facilitate data entry, editorial process, and data quality.