This increases compatibility and enhances searchablity among similar collections. All collections are searchable together in the Image Services access system. At the same time, the collections are searchable independently by the unique attributes of each. Relational data structures are flattened for efficiency. In the future, searches will be expanded with standard vocabularies.
Departments can choose management systems appropriate to needs and available resources.
The majority of the content providers have extremely limited resources for providing reliable public access. Image Services has robust servers, backed up, constantly monitored, and with advanced baseline services such as institutional login. Database records can not be edited through the Image Services system.