Four theatres, four archives, one way in.

Four institutions, in two countries, with different descriptive traditions and materials of different natures: playbills and set designs, production photographs, audio and video recordings, administrative correspondence, annotated scores.

The difficulty was archival rather than technical: making collections described by divergent criteria searchable together without flattening their particularities, and without requiring each institution to redo its descriptive work from scratch.

A common descriptive level was defined, sufficient for cross-collection search, while each institution’s detailed description was left intact. Search operates on the common level; consulting an individual item returns the original description in full.

Multimedia material was treated as documentation in its own right rather than as an appendage: described, dated, attributed and made consultable by the same criteria applied to paper records.

The portal addresses the public, not specialists alone. The interface was therefore built for people unfamiliar with the structure of a theatre archive, with entry paths by production, by person and by date alongside the collection-level navigation intended for scholars.

Accessibility was treated as a design requirement rather than a final check: this is a public service, and compliance is a condition of legitimacy as well as of usefulness.