Exploring audiovisual archives through aligned thesauri

Abstract

As audiovisual archives are digitizing their collections and making these collections available online, the need arises to also establish connections between different collections and to allow for cross-collection search and browsing. Structured vocabularies, made available as Linked Data, can be used as connecting points by aligning thesauri from different institutions. In this paper, we present a case study where partial collections of two audiovisual archives are connected by aligning their thesauri. We report on the conversion of one of the thesauri to SKOS and on the subsequent application of an interactive alignment tool “CultuurLINK”. Finally, we introduce an cross-collection browser which uses the produced alignment to allow users to explore connections between the two collections.