The tool the team built, known as the Vocabulary Coordination System (VCS), offered a single production system that allows Getty staff to collect, analyze, edit, merge and distribute terminology generated by Getty departments and contributors at other institutions.
The Getty's technical staff supports the VCS, the Getty Vocabularies on the Web, Web-based forms for the automated contribution of single records, and programs to automatically load batches of contributed data in XML format. The team also supports programs to produce yearly exports in XML, relational tables, and the Marc (Machine-readable Cataloging) format for institutions and commercial entities that license data sets.
The vocabularies average more than 900,000 searches per quarter. The vocabularies are available to the accessible to the public for free at the Getty museum.