Resumen
This article focuses on virtual museums in France. For the past 25 years, France's cultural heritage has been indexed by conservation professionals and art historians, creating valuable text databases. The fact that there is a state agency-the French Ministry of Culture-dealing with cultural issues has helped this process, particularly in creating rich (from a scientific point of view) thesauruses for the various fields of French culture. The Ministry of Culture's information system is organized around a set of three major databases, each containing approximately 80 fields (e.g., keyword, numeric data; free text). The size of an average record is approximately 1,200 bytes. These databases are supported by a proprietary product from Groupe Bull SA called Mistral, a powerful document-retrieval system French conservation professionals are accustomed to using. Because the user interface is not suited for the general public on the Internet, we decided to incorporate some World- Wide Web query capabilities and Z39.50 compliance, an ANSI/NISO protocol (also known as ISO 23950) defining a standard communication method for the purpose of information retrieval.