The benefits of archives, libraries and museums working together: a Danish case of shared databases

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.