Building Bridges: steps towards a seamless information environment

The cultural heritage sector has an established tradition of collecting and preserving information and resources, whether physical or otherwise. Libraries, too, have long gathered resources (books) and information about those resources, often preserving them for extended periods of time. In other communities, the story is the same -- government archives in many countries often encompass centuries of accumulated knowledge. It remains largely true today, though, that the knowledge held within these curatorial traditions is mostly unavailable for examination alongside the resources of other traditions; whilst it is relatively straightforward to locate reliable descriptions of books about Washington *or* objects from Washington *or* the archives of the Federal Government, it is somewhat less easy to search simultaneously for books *and* objects *and* archival material. In this paper, a number of the major benefits for such cross-community searching are addressed, and the key obstacles to such a scenario will be discussed. Current and evolving standards activities will be examined, concentrating specifically upon those, such as the Dublin Core or Z39.50, which offer the potential to facilitate the unlocking of community resources for widespread access.