Computerized methods for searching pictures are becoming more common. With these it ispossible to make powerful search requests using a combination of terms and search oncomprehensive descriptions of the pictures. The descriptions can encompass various aspectsof the content and allow different interpretations and levels of detail.This essay is about how you can examine and describe the content of a picture from manypoints of view. We have tried to identify differences in searching behaviour, and studiedsome methods for indexing of pictures. Our concepts are taken from the philosophy of artand from theories about the meaning of languages.In the future perhaps libraries can make pictures and illustrations in books available to thepublic, in a sophisticated system, for the purpose of providing visual documentation forstudy, research or other kinds of exploitation..

This thesis aims at exploring a national collaborative gateway-service, PictureAustralia, hosted at the National Library of Australia. This will be done by means of investigating some underlying principles for descriptive standards and conventions as of the library discourse which is the objective of bibliographic control and access. The reason to do this is to bring some main features of these principles into the context of a cross-institutional cooperation between libraries, galleries/museums and archives in a picture database service. The attention will lay on the objectives of what functions the system is designed to perform to give access, as defined by Elaine Svenonius in the Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization 2000, and how these objectives will affect this particular database-service collocating performance, which is a system- and logical approach. Though, this study will be done in an explorative and qualitative way, by a case-study, which is to examine some sample metadata records emanated from different institutions in this project.