The 16 State Museums of Berlin - Foundation Prussian Heritage – do host a great variety of collections from art to ethnology and from Egyptology to Pre-history. In the past those museums had implemented their own databases – in some cases even several in one museum – and a lot of material is still documented in paper form.
In 1999 the decision was taken to introduce one common museum documentation system for all of them. Among other things this was done because one uniÞ ed public access interface should in future
allow easy and comprehensive searching of the museum holdings.
This decision puts up the challenge to bring together parts of the vocabulary in order to allow meaningful retrieval covering all collections. In order to provide for a common retrieval vocabulary
the decision had been taken to make use of the Subject Headings Authority File (SWD) of the German National Library (DDB). Thus, after overcoming the problems of migrating some 65 databases into the new system, the problem remains - to link this new overall vocabulary with the very different pre-existing vocabularies of the museums, - to Þ nd common rules for data Þ elds relevant for
all museums - to develop the workß ow for the implementation
of those rules - to discuss and agree on the use of other already
existing thesauri and classiÞ cations like TGN, AAT or ICONCLASS.
The presentation will summarise major results reached so far, problems encountered and outline the next steps
