Eight Dutch ethnographical museums¹ are currently co-operating to establish a common thesaurus. The thesaurus should provide standardized and yet flexible means of access to the documentation databases of the participating museums. These databases, to which data is now being consigned, will ultimately be linked to a common information system. For the moment, the project will confine itself to museum objects only. It will not concern itself with photographic collections or with museum libraries.

The thesaurus will be developed in Dutch and inductively (encompassing the collections of the participating museums), but as far as possible it adopts or adapts the structure and hierarchies of a published thesaurus (the Art & Architecture Thesaurus), or of internationally accepted agreements on terminology. Terminology for the thesaurus is validated and established by separate task forces in ten main cultural areas. These task forces consist of curators, documentation officers, registrars and the project co-ordinator.

African collections have been the subject of a pilot project. The museums there have collected the terminology in their documentation for the cultural provenance of these collections. The task force for Africa has selected and validated these terms. The approved terminology has been matched with the AAT; equivalent terms have been identified, while new (non-AAT) terms have been mapped into the AAT Styles and Periods hierarchy. All discrepancies with - and proposed additions to - the AAT have been reported to the editorial board of the AAT, and are now under evaluation.

Upon completion of the pilot project several decisions were taken. First of all, it was decided that the development of the thesaurus would culminate in a series of 'key milestone events', to be marked, in each case, by a newly-released version of the thesaurus. Synchronizing the process of input at the participating museums proved impossible. For each release of the thesaurus, the museums will draw up an agreement that specifies the level of their participation, viz:

• for which cultural regions they will be contributing terminology to the thesaurus;
• their participation (or not) in the task forces;
• and their target level of compliance with the requirements of the thesaurus.

Because of the great demands already placed on museum staff, the second decision was to limit the scope of the thesaurus for the time being to the following elements of core information in the collections: typology (object name, including indigenous and specific names), geographical provenance and cultural provenance (ethnonym, culture, style and period). This so as to ensure the parallel development of the databases in the museums and of the thesaurus in the common thesaurus project.

Development of the first thesaurus release has been divided into four key stages. In 1995 the terminology for the geographical provenance of the collections was sorted out and incorporated into a separate thesaurus facet. During 1996, the cultural provenance of the collections is being covered in a second stage, while the typological terms for the collections will be dealt with in 1997/1998. The thesaurus facets will be evaluated, implemented and - if necessary - updated during the second half of 1998 and the first half of 1999. During this fourth stage of the project, the first thesaurus release will be finalized and the participating museums will decide upon the project plans and the contents of the second release.
To safeguard the continuity of the thesaurus, the museums have set up a Foundation for the Dutch Ethnographical Thesaurus. This foundation comprises the management of the thesaurus project and holds the copyright of its products (thesaurus and thesaurus development software). The existence of the foundation underlines the commitment of the museums to their common goal: the establishment of an information system that will allow the museum community to work more efficiently with their collections and that will provide access to an interesting part of the world's cultural heritage.

Jos Taekema
(project co-ordinator, Dutch ethnographical thesaurus)
National Museum of Ethnology,
P.O. Box 212,
2300 AE, Leiden
The Netherlands,

	Tel.: 31 71 51 68 765
	e-mail: jos.taekema@tip.nl

1. Africa Museum (Berg en Del), Museum Gerardus van der Leeuw (Groningen), Museon (The Hague), Museum voor Volkenkude (Rotterdam), Nijmeegs Volkenkundig Museum (Nijmegen), National Museum von Volkenkude (Leiden), Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), Volkenkundig Museum Nusantara (Delft). The collections of these museums amount to about 500.000 objects.