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.

During all this process in the last three years with the GLAM digital program, there’s been huge amounts of changes. To have a static sort of golden image has been crucial, and to do that, if we are trying to build out, scale out infrastructures, it would have a huge cost. The first thing that I looked at was exploring the cloud options, and I was interested in solutions like {AWS} Snowball and the Storage Gateway. They load up the data, and its on the cloud. And then I can fill out the infrastructure as much as I want. The main data is in the cloud, and it’s safe. And we can start working on the rest of it.

It’s almost like a transition mechanism where we start working on the data before it goes to the cloud. And I’m also looking at a cloud clearing house because there’s a lot of data exchanges that are going to come up in the future, vendor to vendor, vendor to us, and us to the public, so it sort of presents itself as a kind of junction. What is going to fill the junction? I think the obvious answer is there.

Vellante: Can you talk a bit more about sustainability? You’ve mentioned that a couple of times. What’s the relevance?

Babu: Sustainability means that you buy a system and you over-provision it, so you’re looking for 20 terabytes over three years. Well, let’s go 50 terabytes, and something that’s supposed to be here for three years gets kept going for five. And when it breaks, the money comes in. That was the kind of a very brief way of sustaining things. That clearly wasn’t enough, so in a way we are looking for sustainability from a new function.

We don’t need to look at long-term service contracts. We need to look at robust contracts and having mechanisms in place to make sure that whatever data goes in comes out as well. That was the main driver. And plus, with the cloud, we are looking at the least model, where we’ve got an annual expenditure set aside.

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.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE