This paper describes the concepts behind MARS, a research tool which, by means of a common thesaurus structure, enables organizations to exchange digital images and documents, and merge the descriptive data and metadata of their collections. This is seen as one of the key issues, along with interoperability, for electronic libraries and collections of the future. The Museum Archive Retrieval System (MARS)* is ideally suited for all sorts of knowledge sharing and exchange and has been successfully applied to Holocaust memorials and museums.† The information exchanged between these types of memorials and museums is scattered between, and within, many institutions; as well as existing in several different languages and holding many synonyms or translations for the same place, event or person etc. MARS was designed to allow multiple museums to share their data with one another and has tremendous exploitation potential in other areas where sophisticated content management and archiving functions are required.

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This paper describes the concepts behind MARS, a research tool which, by means of a common thesaurus structure, enables organizations to exchange digital images and documents, and merge the descriptive data and metadata of their collections. This is seen as one of the key issues, along with interoperability, for electronic libraries and collections of the future. The Museum Archive Retrieval System (MARS) * is ideally suited for all sorts of knowledge sharing and exchange and has been successfully applied to Holocaust memorials and museums. † The information exchanged between these types of memorials and museums is scattered between, and within, many institutions; as well as existing in several different languages and holding many synonyms or translations for the same place, event or person etc. MARS was designed to allow multiple museums to share their data with one another and has tremendous exploitation potential in other areas where sophisticated content management and archiving functions are required. 2 *MARS is a Microsoft ® Windows NT ® application, with much of the business logic implemented as COM objects. The business objects' data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 7 database. The front end is written with Borland ® Delphi™, and the business objects in C++ using Microsoft Visual C++ ® with the Active Template Library (ATL) and standard C++ library. The C++ code uses the ADO interface to Microsoft OLE DB to communicate with the database server.†The research has been carried out under the EU's ESPRIT programme and the results and objectives of the EU's Telematics for Libraries programme [6].

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