Digital artefacts send Victoria & Albert on storage quest

The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is upgrading its storage systems to cope with the demand for images across its website.

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Alongside the growing digital asset library of its physical collections, the museum, which specialises in art and design, is also compiling an archive of wholly digital artefacts for posterity and the storage upgrade will form the cornerstone of the strategy.

Talking to silicon.com, V&A head of information systems services Sarah Winmill said the image library contains 50,000 images of artefacts, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the 4.5 million objects in the museum's collection.

The museum's storage system is reaching capacity just as it is starting to realise a remit for reaching out to people who are unable to physically visit the building, sited in west London, through its website.

"Our website is of huge importance in our remit of opening up interpretation around our collections. We are pushing the boundaries around making print quality images available to the public online, which means opening up our internal storage architecture," Winmill said.

Along with pictures of artefacts, the museum also displays documentary images of work going on to restore objects within its workshops.

The V&A has invested in a storage system from Hitachi Data Systems with 120TB of capacity designed to support the museum's strategy for growth in digital assets for the next five years.

Winmill said the museum is now collecting digitally native artefacts, which have no physical shape, so the only way to view them will be through the museum's website.

The storage architecture will have a mirrored system, installed this spring, as a back up to make sure that any of these digital collections are not lost if the primary repository fails.

The storage system went live in October but the switch over from the legacy platform, provided by EMC will not take place until the end of 2009.