The British Museum collection, spanning two million years of human history, is expanding online thanks to a comprehensive web hosting platform from Vialtus Solutions, formerly Pipex Business. 260,000 of the museum’s seven million treasures have already been uploaded to the new website, www.britishmuseum.org, with the remaining items to follow in phases.

Housing one of the finest collections of art and antiquities from ancient and living cultures, the Museum has continually sought to increase accessibility to diverse audiences across the world. Now, harnessing the latest in internet-powered, always-on technology, the British Museum is truly enabling information sharing on global scale.

Mary Pitt, Project Manager, IS department, British Museum, explains, "We launched into a demanding timetable with Vialtus Solutions to get the platform ready within six weeks, which was achieved. Vialtus helped us overcome the technical issues we had with the set up of the server infrastructure and made proactive recommendations for improvements in other areas, including monitoring and bandwidth.

"The website is not merely a source of information about the Museum," continues Pitt, "but a real insight into the collection and a natural extension of our core purpose, so it is vital we have a hosting platform that can deliver. Our account team at Vialtus Solutions has remained consistent and this has been invaluable throughout implementation, as has their public sector experience."

Vialtus Solutions provides 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 worked in partnership with the Museum’s content management solution (CMS) provider, WS Atkins, to ensure 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.

Maria Cappella, managing director at Vialtus Solutions, comments, "We are extremely proud of the work we have done and continue to do with the British Museum. Network resilience, scalability and technical knowledge have been delivered with great success and we look forward to helping the British Museum get all of these amazing artefacts online."