The image processing and database system in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo: an integrated system for art research

In Japan, art museums have created databases for management, educational and promotional purposes, rather than for research. At the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, a group consisting of a librarian, three curators, and a systems specialist, embarked in 1984 on a four year project to assemble and test a system which, utilising machine-readable thesauri and classification systems developed in Western countries, will, it is hoped, facilitate research into Western art.