Yeh, have to agree with Seb here, the vast majority of ‘detailed’ online Museum collections just aint visible to Google. Doing that itself is a vast task, which is why I and others were pretty excited about dublin core as a basic minimum interoperability standard, oh, years ago.
It gave people building systems something simple but structured to aim at – instead of the ‘voodoo’ that Google SEO can be.

It has its problems. When I developed the Data Locator idea at the NHM, we realised that DC didn’t fit that well and ended up using something even simpler (and user oriented) to map all our online collections data into.

Theres also the problem that different museums name things differently and order collections differently. Mapping them was/is tricky, leading to incomplete cross-collection query results, Thats what led me into the Semantic stuff – tools to aid those mappings (Cue arguments on social tagging!).

So, sorry Mike I have to disagree on this one. Museums etc as a sector mucked up bigtime by not building a national ‘unit level’ metadata repository (that itself could perform SEO!). I know MLA are trying, but really not hard enough!