Case Study: Technisches Museum Wien opens 90% of its collection online for public access and collaboration with Axiell's Adlib

Transparency, sharing and collaboration – the Vienna Technical Museum opens up its object and archive database

Technisches Museum Wien needed to open up a largely hidden archive—about 160,000 items, only roughly 5% of which could be displayed—to public browsing and collaborative updating, replacing an ageing in‑house system and creating a controlled vocabulary for searching. To achieve this the museum worked with Axiell and adopted the Adlib database system to handle both object records and archival material and to build a comprehensive thesaurus for consistent discovery.

Axiell implemented Adlib (including its Thesaurus module) to publish the collection online, enable real‑time updates, and invite user contributions, while linking records to external open data sources and preparing a Linked Open Data interface. As a result, 90% of the museum’s ~160,000 items are now accessible via the website, users actively improve records with high‑quality contributions, and Technisches Museum Wien has become one of Austria’s first museums to make its collection so broadly available through Axiell’s solution.

Technisches Museum Wien

Harald Wendelin

Incharge of Digital Collection Management