Resumen
In this article, the author discusses consortium's use of the international Z39.50 standard moves access to museum-based digital collections to a new plateau. The Consortium of the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) is leading an international effort to provide distributed search and retrieval of cultural heritage information. A primary aspect of CIMI's work utilizes ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995, an American National Standard protocol for information retrieval. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recently approved Z39.50 as ISO 23950. CIMI chose Z39.50 to enable uniform access to existing and emerging digital collections and the vast repositories of cultural heritage information resources. These resources include a variety of physical and digital objects like physical artifacts and digital derivatives of those artifacts, descriptive records designed for collection management, bibliographic records, full-text documents, online tools such as thesauri and more. CIMI's application of Z39.50 in the networked cultural heritage information environment is breaking new ground in distributed and integrated access to textual and nontextual digital collections.