Joconde

The Base Joconde (Eng. database Joconde ) is a non-commercial database of the French Ministry of Culture ( Direction des Musées de France).

The Joconde lists the holdings of French art museums in the form of an online inventory. Under a surface Joconde combines three databases on the fine arts, the archeology and ethnology. The name refers to one of the most famous paintings shown in France, called the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, in French as La Joconde.

History

The ideas of the French Revolution also foresaw a free access to national cultural heritage. Such a distribution key for sculptures and paintings collections was created to ensure equal access to these cultural assets to secure the Chaptal decree. A database, which inventories the sculptures and paintings collections, was in 1975 created and offered to the French Minitel platform from 1992. In 1995, the database in the World Wide Web. 2004, the service was expanded to include data on the archeology and ethnology.

Mission

The Museums of France was of 4 January 2002 assigned four permanent tasks by law 2002-5:

• Preservation, restoration, research and round out their collections
• Ensuring access to the collections for the general public
• Development and implementation of training and
• Ensure equal broad access to culture for all
• Contribution to the advancement of knowledge and research on culture and its dissemination

Functions

Joconde manages 427,500 objects from 60 national museums of France, of which 245,200 with at least one picture ( Release 26 April 2010). It offers comfortable search functions ( index structure, thesauri ) and shortcuts. There are offered online exhibitions and theme tours. The database provides virtual exhibitions encouraging, to visit the real exhibitions in the museums. The images appear first in low resolution and are accompanied by detailed scientific text documents with bibliographies. The display is only available in French.