Museums worldwide strengthen data foundations and enhance end-user experiences

Much like a seasoned boxer, who requires solid yet agile footwork to deliver a knock-out performance, museum’s worldwide are looking to invest in their data foundations in order to have the ability to bamboozle their target audiences. Not that Museums are trying to knock-out their customers….but well, you get the idea; when it comes to technology, a quality end user experience is predicated on reliable well-structured data.

Recently, the Imperial War Museum has opted for Spectra’s product offerings, which have proved an affordable and well weathered option for them to increase the capacity of their digital archives — which weighs in at over 500 terabytes…and counting. The increased storage will utilise Tape technology — which allows the museums to store its digital assets on multiple storage systems, to preserve and protect for many years to come.

Reliable? Tick.

Affordable? Tick.

Agile?

Hmm…tape technology is synonymous with long latency periods for random memory access as a deck must wind an average of one-third the tape length to move from one data block to another. So if you’re looking to link these data to a user-friendly interface then good luck my friend. Rather, Chief Information Officers of major museums these days are taking a more holistic view of data infrastructure, in which data is standardised from the back-end all the way through to the galleries, so the end-user experience can be understood objectively, stirring more effective discussions. This standardisation of data alludes to industry best practices such as creating company-wide key definitions dictionaries. Taking up a bottom-up approach and putting the energy in early will save time-draining inefficiencies downstream.

Elsewhere in the world, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles county and the UK’s National Holocaust Centre have both invested heavily in newer technologies, Virtual Reality and 3D Projection coupled with a bit of Natural Language Processing (NLP) respectively. In the case of the latter, Holocaust Survivors who regularly hold Q&A sessions with young children to speak about their experiences were invited to record their words digitally over an average period of 5 days answering hundreds upon hundreds of questions, all of which would be carefully catalogued to be transformed, queried and invoked at a later date. Big data comes neither cheaply nor easily, to benefit from the analysis of running complex algorithms on large data sets requires data to be meticulously recorded. Companies can benefit from attaining big data in the long run if the databases it chooses and the respective structures are well designed from day one.

This has been just my view on but a few of many recent advances in Museum technology space — feel free to challenge, support or just comment.