Collections online

The Museum of Paleontology, at the University of California, Berkeley was one of the first richly constructed museum Web sites.

Another galvanizing events in terms of museum collections online was when the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco put up The Thinker, which currently includes over 70,000 zoomable images of about 50% of their collection.

Soon after the Library of Congress put its vast card catalogs of over 115 million records online, its American Memory project was a landmark effort to provide contextual structure for raw dta, and it has been adding important collections, such as the FSA photographs of the Great Depression, ever since.

Not long after, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), launched an online version of their Leonardo collections system, which included links to bibliographies, provenance, and floor plans of the buildings, when appropriate.

(1998) ArtsConnectEd is a joint project of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, which presents in depth information about the collections, archives, and library holdings at both institutions.

The Art Museum Imaging Consortium (AMICO) includes selected digitized images and collection records from 24 of North America's largest art museums. Currently, only thumbnails are viewable in a combined searchable database.

Australian Museums and Galleries On-line (AMOL) takes a different tack than AMICO by allowing distributed searches from a single form of over 400,000 records from dozens of institutions. Sarah Kenderdine's paper, "Inside the meta-center: a cabinet of wonder," is an excellent history of AMOL as well as many of the philosophical and practical issues of making museum resources accessible online.

The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), used to have a centralized database of its members' collections, but recently it too has moved to a distributed model. Karen Neimanas and Kati Geber write about the process in "From 'Come and Get It to 'Seek and You Shall Find': Transition from a Central Resource to an Information Meta-Center."

The Getty Information Institute's a.k.a Database Project seeks to use automated query expansion to enrich the searching process of multiple databases simultaneously.

The Arts and Humanities Data Service is a Union catalog of over 5,000 resources (databases not records) in four areas: Archaeology Data Service, History Data Service, Oxford Text Archive, Performing Arts Data Service

The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network provides access to collection records, multimedia records, and over 100 "multimedia essays."

The Thinker