British Museum

THE CHALLENGE
The British Museum has continually sought to increase accessibility to diverse audiences across the world, engaging not only with the collections, but also with the cultures and territories that they represent. The Museum is based on the practical principle that the collection should be put to public use and be freely accessible. To ensure this ongoing challenge is met, the Museum has fully embraced the world wide web and put this medium to work.

THE SOLUTION
Vialtus Solutions scored top marks in the British Museum’s supplier evaluation in areas that included network reliability, technical skills, support services and public sector knowledge. Vialtus implemented a six server hosting platform for the British Museum, including two data servers, two web servers, one search engine server and one ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) server. The ISA server sits behind the web servers with complex cacheing rules, ensuring that the thousands of images can be efficiently stored for secure and rapid access by the public-facing website. The initial batch from the collection consists of 260,000 2D images of prints, drawings and other flat items, with additional objects, including images of 3D objects, to be uploaded over the next two years. Vialtus Solutions ensured a fully integrated hosting environment for the collections website. The collections site links seamlessly through to other areas of the Museum’s business, including the ecommerce shop www.britishmuseum.org/shop. Vialtus Solutions has also improved security by implementing and managing the Museum’s firewall environment. In addition, Vialtus has already enhanced the British Museum hosting platform to accommodate an historical timelines website. This involved adding two extra servers to cope with content and web demand.

RESULTS
The Museum’s demanding timetable, which required Vialtus to get the platform ready within six weeks, was achieved. Vialtus helped overcome the technical issues the British Museum had with the set up of its server infrastructure and made proactive recommendations for improvements in other areas, including monitoring and bandwidth. Now, harnessing the latest in internet-powered, always-on technology, the British Museum is truly enabling information sharing on a global scale. 430,000 of the Museum’s seven million treasures have already been uploaded to the new website - www.britishmuseum.org, 40 per cent of which have accompanying images, with the remaining items to follow in phases. Records and images of 3D material currently available include those from the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Asian and African material.

THE FUTURE
The British Museum is also working with Vialtus to implement another server for a further web service to be provided in association with other Museums. The additional server is for the National Museum Online Learning Project.