Early on the morning of 22 September 1882, the Garden Palace Exhibition Building in Sydney’s Inner Domain burned to the ground, taking with it the original Powerhouse Museum’s collection, including irreplaceable public records and objects. Lost to posterity were many First Nations artefacts and the first simultaneous census of all Australian colonies. The erasure of these priceless stories left glaring gaps in Australia’s sorted colonial history. Today, as individuals and institutions grapple to un-pick a tangled past, such tragedy serves as a stark reminder of why archive preservation and curation are so critical – it is how we remember who we are.

In the century and a half since the devastating fire, the Powerhouse Museum grew into the most significant branch of Australia’s largest museum group, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS). The Powerhouse’s world-class collection stands at the intersection of science, arts, and technology, engaging communities with contemporary ideas. Today, as part of a multi-billion-dollar NSW-government-supported renovation and expansion initiative, the Powerhouse is completely reimagining how they preserve and share over half a million items, ranging from designer shoes to locomotive engines. With the multi-pronged strategic objectives of public engagement, research support and innovation, promoting craftsmanship and artistic taste, and broadly illustrating industrial development and invention, finding a scalable, secure, and customisable data management solution was paramount. Like the most well engineered shoes or trains, Mediaflux^® by Arcitecta is a robust and efficient data mover, putting data where it’s needed when it’s needed.

It is interesting to understand what would entice such an entity as the Powerhouse Museum to engage Arcitecta to overhaul their digital asset databases. Like many long-lived collections, the Powerhouse’s grandfathered file systems were straining under the load of modern digital assets, and they realised the necessity to rebuild the dyke without pulling out all the thumbs stuck in over the ages. With structured data stored in myriad labyrinthine silos, it was becoming arduous, if not outright impossible, to know what all they had and where. This created the additional issue of eating up valuable storage space with duplicate files. Enter Mediaflux to solve these intertwined problems with powerful and elegant solutions, which will enable more agile and innovative data use into the future.

Extraordinary collections require inspired and innovative curation. Just as a museum is more than a physical container to hold assembled artefacts, so too Arcitecta delivers more than an ordinary data management tool. The Powerhouse representatives were thoroughly impressed as the collaborative team began to explore the Mediaflux platform’s broad capabilities and flexibility. After seeing how Mediaflux could slice through Gordian knots of data storage, archival, retrieval, and security, MAAS pushed for rapid implementation of the bespoke management solution for Powerhouse’s unique digital holdings, whilst facilitating the museum’s objectives to safeguard their archives and make them publicly accessible.

Just as a museum is more than a physical container to hold assembled artefacts, so too Arcitecta delivers more than an ordinary data management tool.

The value of an extensive and diverse public collection lies in community engagement with it. If people can’t find what they have, it defeats the point of storing it. What Arcitecta is building with Powerhouse will not only streamline and optimise their internal workflows, but provide stakeholders with the power to easily discover anything in their holdings and everything connected to it by significant relationships.

Partnering with Arcitecta is both a credit to and a boon for the Powerhouse. Founded at the junction of science, technology, and the arts 25 years ago, Arcitecta is the quintessential choice to tackle this significant upgrade. Both the Powerhouse Museum, and Arcitecta fully embody the transformed historic spaces they occupy to build bridges between repositories of accumulated knowledge and communities into the future. In partnering with Arcitecta, the Powerhouse leverages this natural synergy to their best advantage and validates Mediaflux’s^® capacity to deliver in the significant cultural asset space.

Mediaflux^® encapsulates several ideal capabilities for tackling the digital asset management challenges posed by the vast and varied Powerhouse data. The fully customised and customisable platform will allow Powerhouse to manage their collections in an entirely new way. The initial DAM overhaul focusses on workflows and internal user requirements, allowing museum curators to know what data they have and generate maximal value from it. The flexible interface means modifications and upgrades will now require only hours to days to implement, rather than months or even years to create.

Eventually, the interface will expand to facilitate secure outside access. This forward-thinking approach Powerhouse is taking is highly sophisticated for an enterprise beyond the tech world. Allowing internal and external stakeholders to easily and seamlessly access digital assets without initially knowing exactly what they’re searching for opens exciting new research, curation, and learning opportunities.

Integrating an agile, comprehensive platform, with its capacity to manage data of any form at any scale, will allow Powerhouse to optimise costs and data flow between people and systems whilst ensuring resilience and access control. Mediaflux^® enables both internal and external stakeholders, along with project management applications, to interact with digital assets of interest without the potential to compromise the collection. Additionally, it provides seamless data curation, protection, and long-term preservation, all of which are invaluable to a museum enterprise.

Beyond the powerful in-built Mediaflux^® capabilities, Arcitecta brings an entire ecosystem of creative passions, research awareness, and technical skills to the Powerhouse partnership. Placing empathy at the core of every collaborative relationship Arcitecta enters, we start the conversation with two fundamental questions, “What data do you have?” and, “What do you want to do with it?” In this way, each project is imbued with deep understanding from the outset, ultimately ensuring the most efficient solution deployment.

This partnership marks an exciting new venture for both parties, with the vision towards setting a new benchmark for museums. Much like the process of digitising physical assets, which requires thorough assessment of their state prior to digital image capture, pre-planning how to handle vulnerable objects, and carefully designing workflows, Arcitecta immerses their unified creative and technical team in early discussions to understand the nature of data holdings and the desired management outcomes. Thus, producing tailor-made user interfaces and data migration solutions to exact specifications without compromising control or accessibility.

Built from a foundation of shared values and aesthetics, the symbiosis between Arcitecta and the Powerhouse shows exciting potential to grow into a long-lived and frontier-expanding partnership.