Matapihi

Matapihi is a free collaborative service stretching across New Zealand's collective cultural archive (see also: PictureAustralia and Images Canada). The search tool provides access to the digital collections of art galleries and museums, as well as the National Library archives, so you can fish for anything from contemporary artworks, to rare documentary of the infamous lockdowns, and the end of the golden weather, not to mention the Turnbull Library catalog spanning across the entire history of New Zealand newspaper cartoons.

Matapihi is a great example of how XML metadata can be used in a more active context - content is shared across the organizations using RDF, with a metadata schema based on the Dublin Core framework. Nothing is stored centrally except the metadata, which makes the architecture easily expandable to cover more collections and organizations in the future.

I did notice after trying a few searches, that there are a few areas of coverage that are still quite patchy - I guess now that the framework is there, it's up to all the historians, librarians and curators to start filling in the details. It will be interesting to watch this evolve.