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Auckland museum enhances digitisation efforts with storage upgrade

A major storage upgrade is enabling the Auckland War Memorial Museum to safeguard its vast collection, ensure digital sovereignty and enhance visitor experiences using AI

Stephen Withers
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Published: 26 Sep 2024 12:00

The Auckland War Memorial Museum, home to New Zealand’s largest collection, with over four million items and the world’s leading assemblage of Māori and Pacific Islander artefacts, has undergone significant digital transformation.

When David McClintock joined as head of technology and digital five years ago, the museum’s tech infrastructure was underdeveloped. It lacked a cohesive environment, security policy and reliable disaster recovery capabilities.

A 2020 PC refresh, prompted by the need for remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic, led to the adoption of Dell PowerScale storage across three sites, meeting security and backup needs. The museum’s storage demands are growing 8-10% annually, and a refresh aims to provide 800TB of capacity at primary and backup locations.

One of the sites is remote from Auckland and stores 1PB of archival data, including immutable copies of key cultural objects. Having those was “a great relief to those around us in the organisation”, said McClintock. The museum also stores a smaller amount of data in Microsoft Azure.

Sensitive items, including certain Māori or Pacific Islander artefacts and human remains, are restricted from public access. The museum takes “digital sovereignty” seriously, and considers extending governance to include Māori and Pacific Islander perspectives – especially as some items have a cultural value that far exceeds their monetary value.

At the Dell Technology Forum in Sydney, where McClintock spoke to Computer Weekly about the museum’s digitisation journey, the idea that “data is land” was discussed, and that New Zealand should not repeat in the digital domain the mistakes of the past.

On the other hand, indigenous people around the world are understandably reluctant to put their cultural data into the hands of the big technology companies, but that can restrict access to information.

Although the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (Glam) sector is not well funded, it holds a lot of source material that could be made available to sectors such as education at a time when New Zealand has a new and exciting history curriculum, said McClintock.

Storage upgrade

The storage upgrade eliminated the need for outsourced tape backups, previously unreliable, and facilitated a seamless transition to Dell’s Apex backup services. The use of Dell’s Ransomware Defender also ensures system security by preventing actions like bulk file renaming.

The museum’s board questioned the absence of a cloud-first strategy, but McClintock explained the constraints in New Zealand at that time. The Dell storage service allows for future cloud scalability.

The storage system can now keep up with the work of the museum’s digitisation team, previously limited by old technology, and aligns with the CEO’s goal to increase digitisation efforts. Digital copies help address space and fragility constraints, reaching a wider audience.

Storage management is now streamlined, and the museum enjoys robust cyber security focused on business continuity and data integrity.

IT is also positioned as an enabler for the museum’s Path to 2029 programme, marking its centenary with projects such as digital asset management to make its collections more searchable, as well as enhanced data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.

The museum is looking to foster a data culture encompassing governance, sovereignty and collaboration to support its data and AI efforts, and one of the first steps is to get the right frameworks and models in place, said McClintock.

The potential AI projects are diverse. The collections teams would like to explore whether it can generate insights from a collection that might not be apparent to humans. The property services team is looking for ways to reduce the cost of maintaining a century-old building, for example, by combining weather and tourist-related data to make more efficient use of air conditioning.

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On the administration side, there is already some use of shadow AI, and while “cautious policies” are in place due to the cost of AI, McClintock doesn’t want to discourage adoption. The IT team will help generate the business cases for AI projects.

Initially, AI is only being used when people are in the loop. McClintock said this may be relaxed in future for certain areas, especially where the output is treated as a suggestion rather than a recommendation.

The museum also plans to enhance the visitor experience with AI and data. Among them is the possibility of allowing young visitors to create their own avatars before a visit, which would then speak to them while they are in the museum.

And with up to 500 students a day visiting the museum during term time, there’s an opportunity to provide them with a way to store the digital work so they can show their families in a few decades’ time.

McClintock sees various ways of using personalisation in conjunction with the use of the museum’s customer relationship management system, such as drawing visitors’ attention to items related to their most recent online museum searches, notifying them of relevant items that have gone on display since their last visit, and providing wayfinding to help them see objects of specific interest.

With a fit-for-purpose data storage system, he added, the Auckland War Memorial Museum is well-equipped to realise its digital transformation goals.

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