Anjanesh Babu, Oxford GLAM | On the Ground at AWS UK
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 09/05/2019

Anjanesh Babu, Systems Architect & Network Manager, Oxford GLAM, talks with Dave Vellante at AWS UK HQ.

#AWS #OxfordGLAM #theCUBE

https://siliconangle.com/2019/05/17/qa-oxford-university-museums-digitize-collections-247-virtual-access-awspublicsectorsummitlondon/

Q&A: Oxford University museums digitize collections for 24/7 virtual access

With more than 8.5 million treasured objects in its care, the Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) of the University of Oxford contain some of the world’s most significant collections, such as the Einstein blackboard, the Oxfordshire dinosaurs, and Egyptian mummies. With so many items in its care, GLAM can’t display them all. In fact, it only has floor space for about 1% of its collection at any point.

Museum management is now relying on cloud technology to digitize some of the items that can’t be physically displayed so they can virtually share them with visitors 24/7.

Anjanesh Babu (pictured), systems architect and network manager at GLAM, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during theCUBE’s special coverage of the AWS public sector portfolio at the company’s London headquarters. They discussed the challenges of digitizing artifacts and cultural items, how the cloud is making things easier and safer for museums, and how GLAM is achieving sustainability (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Vellante: Tell us about Oxford GLAM.

Babu: We are part of the heritage collection side of the university. I’m here representing the gardens and museums. In the division, we’ve got world-renowned collections, which have been held for 400 years or more. It comprises four different museums and the Oxford University Botanic Garden and Arboretum. In total, we’re looking at five different divisions spread across probably 16 different physical sites.

The focus of the division is to bring out collections to the world through digital outreach and engagement. Sustainment is big, because we are basically custodians of our collections and they must be here almost forever, in a sense. We can only display about 1% of our collections at any point, and we’ve got about 8.5 million objects, and the majority are in storage. One way to bring them out to the wider world is to digitize them, curate them, and present them, either online or in another form.

Vellante: You’re digitizing all these artifacts and then making them available 24/7; is that the idea? What are some of the challenges?

Babu: The first challenge is that only 3% of objects are digitized. We have 1% on display, and 3% are digitized. It’s a huge effort. It’s not just scanning or taking photographs. You’ve got cataloguing, accessions, and a whole raft of databases. And museums, historically, have got their own separate database collections. But the public just wants to look at these objects. You don’t want to see what belongs to the Ashmolean Museum or where the picture belongs. You just want to see the items and see what the characteristics are.

For that, we are bringing together a layer which integrates different museums. These museums are culturally diverse institutions, and we want to keep them that way because each has got its own history — a kind of personality to it. Under the hood, the foundational architecture systems remain the same, so we can make them modular, expandable and address the same problems.

Vellante: How are you architecting this system, and what role does the cloud play in there?

Babu: In the first instance, we are looking at a lot of collections that were on the premises in the past. We are moving as a SaaS solution at the first step. A lot of it requires cleansing of data. This is the state of the images we aren’t migrating. We sort of stop here. Let’s cleanse it, create new data streams, and then bring it to the cloud. That’s one option we are looking at, and that is the most important one.


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Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)