BAM – the joint portal for libraries, archives, museums in Germany intends to become a single point of access for cultural content and serves users who do not want to search several different databases at different servers using different search interfaces and vocabularies for access. In addition to combining different information services from different institutions in one point of access, BAM can also serve as a portal for a single institution’s libraries, archives, museums and media centres. BAM also tries to increase the visibility of the digital objects in the collections of the participants by cooperating with Wikipedia Germany and enriching articles with a link to content in BAM.
Table of content:
1. Introduction
2. BAM – A Joint Portal for Libraries, Archives, Museums
3. BAM Local – Uniting Different Branches of an Institution in one Portal
4. Increasing Content Visibility by Collaborating with Wikipedia
5. BAM and its Users
6. Conclusions
Since several years it has been observed that information offered by different know-ledge producing institutions on the internet is more and more interlinked. This tendency will increase, because the fragmented information offers on the internet make the retrieval of information difficult or even impossible. At the same time the quantity of information offered on the internet grows exponentially in Europe – and elsewhere - due to many digitization projects. Inasfar as funding institutions base the acceptance of projects on the observation of certain documentation standards the knowledge created will be retrievable and will remain so for a long time. Otherwise the retrieval of information will become a matter of chance due to the limits of fragmented, knowledge producing social groups.