The institutes visited were selected because they are known to have some or much experience in the use of IT, or because they cover a very specific field. In that sense, these institutes are not a group that fully represents the cultural heritage field. From long term experience, it can be stated that most smaller cultural heritage institutes (and surprisingly many larger ones) have little experience with the use of IT, other than using computers for administrative purposes or, at best, collection registration databases. Also one has to take into account national differences. For example: countries with a rather centralist government (e.g. Denmark, France) tend to work towards national inventories of movable cultural heritage, while such national inventories are in less centralist countries usually only limited to the immovable heritage. In these latter types of countries (e.g. the UK or The Netherlands) the movable cultural heritage institutes are usually acting independently or cooperating on their own initiative.
To indicate what experience with IT the visited institutes said they had, a summarised overview is given below.
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Institution 19
As could be expected, the use of IT at the institutes of this survey varies enormously and the survey cannot therefore be regarded as a proper investigation in the use of IT in cultural heritage institutes. Even so, the survey more or less reflects the observations stated under section 4.1. A large institute can use it on a high level and a well established way because it might have a long term tradition in this field, e.g. the Danish National Museum national activities, the Science Museum and, in general, libraries that have a long cataloguing tradition. Such institutes have larger departments responsible for IT activities. Other large institutes are still experimenting with various IT applications beyond their cataloguing databases, e.g. the British Library or Netherlands Institute of Art History. Smaller organisations have either been experimenting with the use of IT, such as the Vikings in Ribeproject, or don't use much IT beyond administration and some collection registration (e.g. PiH).
Many institutes use tailor made software applications for their databases based on DOS, UNIX or Windows. For imaging a somewhat greater need for using standards seems to be felt, but many imaging projects are still in the experimental phase. Cooperation is dealing with pilot projects or externally funded (e.g. EC) projects rather than on structural basis to carry out major projects in cooperation. Important exceptions to this are the Danish National Archaeological and Artefacts inventories. But these are activities backed by national law. The national archival systems in The Netherlands are comparable.
There is a general interest is to have (collection) information available through the Web.