Search results

The aim is to describe and discuss a searchable database on the internet that gives the possibility of searching simultaneously in the collections of three different types of heritage institutions, archives, libraries and museums.

Provides a description of the setting up of OKS in Denmark, a project which started in 2001.

The first edition of the database includes the digital catalogue records of these institutions, with 115,000 records, 8,000 of them with photos attached and including items such as printed material, books, leaflets, articles, newspapers and clippings, archives, sound records, films, videos, museum artefacts, among other elements. The records from the different institutions have been collected from the special databases of the three types of institutions and imported into one common database freely available on the internet. At the same time the creation of NOKS has shown the importance of developing standards in the field of cultural history.

A new update is now in progress with several improvements and alterations, the most important being the decision to use Dublin Core as the basic structure.

This article is a useful report of a project of interest to information management professionals and others interested or involved with cultural history.

In many countries, there is a growing interest in cooperation among archives, libraries and museums. For the sake of the interested user it is important to make it easier to obtain information from the different institutions, and so to make a crossover strategy to give people access to their cultural heritage. The goal is to provide people with the opportunity to search material in archives, libraries and museums simultaneously. Consequently, it is necessary to try to create minimum standards for cataloguing and description with the starting point in the standards already accepted internationally. In Denmark there have been some interesting projects the objective of which has been to make it possible to search for material in several institutions at the same time. NOKS is one of these projects, it is an abbreviation for Nordjyllands Kulturhistoriske Søgebase, which is a database with material about the cultural history of the North of Jutland. The project involved nine institutions. The records from the institutions have been put together in one database, which can be reached via the Internet address www.noks.dk. The database consists of 115,000 records, among them 8,000 photos, including different types of material, printed material, books, leaflets, newspaper clippings, archives, museum items, etc.