Protecting Priceless Artefacts

Welcoming thousands of visitors daily, this prestigious UK museum displays and stores millions of items across a primary facility and two satellite sites.

As well as artefacts on permanent display, the institution is responsible for securing precious items on loan from organisations worldwide and protecting specimens vital to ongoing academic research.

For the past 15 years, Synectics has worked closely with the museum’s security team to ensure the right integrated surveillance solution keeps its facilities safe and secure.

Motion-triggered incident response in action

Video surveillance forms the heart of the museum’s security system, with more than 1000 cameras across the main site alone. All these camera feeds are monitored from a central control room 24/7.

Synergy’s ability to manage and pair video footage with other systems and data sources unlocks many key capabilities for the museum.

For example, should an exhibit’s motion detection system be triggered by touch or movement, this automatically prioritises video from the nearest camera for the control room team. Crucially, it also pushes an alert with location information to radio handsets used by the museum’s security guards – enabling them to quickly head to the incident scene to assess the potential threat.

Making history accessible with strict control systems

Synergy also integrates the museum’s intruder detection and access control solutions, enabling security personnel to monitor and manage access to specific areas closely.

As well as being vital to keeping the wrong people out, this also means the museum can confidently grant access to curators, researchers, and university students who need to handle, log, or study artefacts in the museum’s vast collection – either at the main site or at a separate storage facility.

Attempts to gain access with the wrong authorisation credentials are immediately flagged, and all legitimate movements are logged to create clear audit trails should any incidents occur that require investigation.

Failover measures that mean the museum stays open

When you’re protecting priceless items, any coverage loss is a risk – whether the cause is equipment failure or something more malicious. System failure could result in a specific area or even a whole site closure for this customer.

To avoid this, the museum has a Synergy failover, which fully replicates the primary system during an outage. It is also in the process of linking the primary and satellite sites so footage from the main site can be viewed elsewhere.

The future of history

Keeping the system up to date is important for protecting visitors and artefacts, so the museum is continuously working with Synectics to optimise its existing system, as well as looking at future upgrades. This could include adopting CAD mapping to visualise the intricate layout of exhibitions in more detail.

In the future, Synergy will provide video analytics and AI requirements, allowing the museum to build on the current automated incident response procedures.