This thesis aims at exploring a national collaborative gateway-service, PictureAustralia, hosted at the National Library of Australia. This will be done by means of investigating some underlying principles for descriptive standards and conventions as of the library discourse which is the objective of bibliographic control and access. The reason to do this is to bring some main features of these principles into the context of a cross-institutional cooperation between libraries, galleries/museums and archives in a picture database service. The attention will lay on the objectives of what functions the system is designed to perform to give access, as defined by Elaine Svenonius in the Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization 2000, and how these objectives will affect this particular database-service collocating performance, which is a system- and logical approach. Though, this study will be done in an explorative and qualitative way, by a case-study, which is to examine some sample metadata records emanated from different institutions in this project. These records will be chosen on the grounds of similarities in format and motif and institutional origin of the pictures that are described, for the purpose of discussing noticeable differences with regard to the mapped data from different professional domains to a common metadata format, Dublin Core, in this cross-domain service, PictureAustralia. This comparative approach will be done with regard to the common understanding of the entries, title, author/creator and subject as of the bibliographic discourse.