The National Museums Online Learning Project has been developed by a consortium of national museums and galleries within the UK and is a 3 year project funded by Treasury. The purpose of the project is to get the vast amount of content already on these national museum and gallery websites better used through the creation of online resources.

To enable the websites to be better used the outcomes will based on the partner websites within a peer-to-peer environment rather than a central portal. The enabling of end-users to efficiently search across the partner collections was deemed crucial for these online resources.

While the project is still under development, a substantial amount of technical resources have gone into investigating the federated search and the possible approaches. All of the approaches have issues associated with them and can be used for different purposes within different types of projects.

This paper addresses the questions around these types of federated searching and debates the models and possible solutions for the sector. It is hoped that the technical processes and models developed in the project will go some way to providing future frameworks for searching standards within the Cultural sector.