ALM – Archives, Libraries and Museums Working Together to Give People Access to Our Cultural Heritage

Author: Ruth Hedegaard,  Vendsyssel historical Museum, Historical Archives, Denmark

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Abstract

In Denmark, as in other countries, there has been growing interest in cooperation between archives, libraries and museums, promoting a cross-strategy for giving people access to our cultural heritage. This has resulted in a project that combines the digital records from three different organisations into one database, called NOKS.

NOKS is a searchable database that gives the possibility of searching simultaneously in the collections of three different types of heritage institutions, archives, libraries and museums. The first edition of the database includes the digital catalogue records of 9 institutions, in all 115,000 records, 8,000 of them with photos attached. Many different items such as printed material, books, leaflets, articles, newspapers and newsclippings, archives, sound records, films, videos, museum artefacts etc. are included in the database.

The records have been collected from the individual databases of the three types of institutions with their different ways of cataloguing and these have been imported into one common database.

A new update is now in progress with several improvements and alterations, one of the most important ones being the participation of another Danish county (Vejle). This shows the potential of having a national database with access to our common cultural heritage.

Another significant aspect of the project was the decision to use Dublin Core as the basic structure.

The creation of NOKS has shown the importance of developing standards in the field of cultural his-tory, and several attempts have subsequently been made in that direction. www.noks.dk is available on the Internet, free of charge.

About the author

Since 1983 Librarian at Vendsyssel historical Museum. Responsible for the reading room and enquiries from visitors for the cataloguing of the library of the museum, and of printed material and the collection of photos.

1996 participated in an archive course of 3 month at the French National Archives in Paris.

2001 worked for 5 weeks at Scandinavian Institute of Vilnius University in Lithuania, cataloguing Danish books from their library