The Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography is a publishing house and a scientific institution (defined by a governmental act as a public institution of relevance for the Republic of Croatia), which has been involved in lexicography and encyclopedistics since its foundation in 1950.

Its main mission is to systematize, preserve and communicate scientifically verified knowledge across the broadest span of fields and disciplines, as well as to contribute to the understanding of Croatia’s natural, historic and cultural heritage, and to preserve its cultural and social identity. Over its 75 years of existence, the Institute has produced more than 450 volumes of various reference works (encyclopedias, lexicons, dictionaries, atlases, bibliographies, journals, special editions, etc.). The Institute’s potential lies in the huge resources of created and stored knowledge, while digital technologies have transformed the ways in which it is presented and facilitated its distribution, accessibility and usage (Jermen & Jecić, 2018; Jermen & Jecić, 2020).

The systemic digital transformation of the Institute was initiated in 2008, when it started developing freely accessible collections of digital editions, a rather innovative endeavour in Croatia at the time. This poster presentation aims to give an overview of the development of the Institute’s digital collections, which currently comprise approximately 400,000 articles from 30 editions available in open access.

Since 2008, print editions have been continuously digitised to become freely available to users in their original print version via the platform Portal of Knowledge (https://enciklopedija.lzmk.hr/), which was launched in 2009. This collection currently offers open access to eleven digitised editions covering fields such as biography, literature, film, medicine, technology, etc. In 2023, new features and an updated interface for the Portal were implemented, and it now also provides access to the ongoing online editions, Croatian Encyclopedia and the Croatian Encyclopedia of Technology, as well as to the Collection of Encyclopedic Heritage, serving as the main access point to the Institute’s online content.

The launch of the online edition of the aforementioned Croatian Encyclopedia (https://enciklopedija.hr/) in 2013 was a key step in the Institute’s digital transformation. This is a constantly updated and expanded comprehensive general encyclopedia, based on the print edition published in 11 volumes from 1999 to 2009, which was authored and edited by over 1,000 high-profile experts and has become established as one of the principal digital reference sources in the Croatian language, with up to 50,000 page views per day.

The Croatian Encyclopedia of Technology was launched in 2014 as the first Croatian encyclopedia simultaneously published in online and print editions on the Portal of Croatian Technology Heritage (https://tehnika.lzmk.hr/). The Portal provides content-related data in each article, primarily aimed at linking to external sources, thus serving as the basis for interoperability with digital repositories of other cultural and research institutions. In 2023, the Atlas of the Croatian Technology Heritage was launched – a new functionality for connecting encyclopedic articles with space (Tolj Smolčić, 2025).

The Collection of Encyclopedic Heritage (https://e-bastina.lzmk.hr/) was launched at the end of 2023 and offers access to twelve digitised archival editions printed from 1954 to 1996, dedicated to medicine, fine arts, forestry, agriculture, seamanship, sports, etc. A new model had to be designed and implemented to digitise these editions for online publication (Kraus et al., 2024).

All the aforementioned editions and collections, as well as additional digital content (e.g. the scientific journal Studia lexicographica or more than 2 million leaflets of the Catalogue of Retrospective Bibliography of Articles), are openly accessible via the Institute’s website (https://www.lzmk.hr/e-leks/online-izdanja).

In addition to facilitated access and searchability, diamond open access professional encyclopedias enable the dissemination of reliable, scientifically verified information and direct interaction between experts and the wider public, thus serving as a specific genre or channel for knowledge exchange between academia and society (Giménez Toledo et al., 2022; Sivertsen et al., 2026). Furthermore, they provide the possibility of linking to digital data and collections of other research and cultural institutions, thus contributing to the networking of knowledge (Jermen & Jecić, 2018).