Open Collections

Ross, Dian Marie

University of British Columbia

Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) are host to cultural treasures and historic records but face inherent challenges maintaining accessibility and traceability in their legacy collections. Rolling COVID-19 lockdowns (2020-2023) limited access to primary materials, while user expectation of digital access to collections continues to grow. With renewed digital access, however, comes new challenges in authentication and provenance tracking: collection digitization and monitoring of cultural artifacts introduces new lines of work for institutions already constrained by budgets and staffing. Furthermore, recent high profile insider thefts at the British Museum and ransomware cyberattacks on the British Library and Berlin Museum für Naturkunde (Natural History Museum) have highlighted shortcomings in legacy cataloguing systems and collection safeguards, emphasizing the need for a distributed system of cataloguing and provenance tracking. Building upon previous explorations of this topic, "NFTs: Tulip Mania or Digital Renaissance?", "Analogous Analogues: Digital Twins and Hardware Tracking in GLAM Collections," and "Respect des Fonds: a Novel Approach to Live Monitoring of GLAM Collections Using Distributed Ledger Technologies & Digital Twins" (submitted), a novel design solution is presented for tracking and monitoring GLAM collection objects via Internet of Things (IoT) locational and environmental sensors connected to a controller with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This hardware oracle interfaces with a trusted and flexible digital twin, selected from an analysis of databases, and underwritten by a private distributed ledger technology (DLT). This structural architecture is then assessed against a physical and digital (cyber) threat model and behavioural modelling is used to simulate each design component as interacting finite state machines (FSMs). Ongoing work includes a real-world, physical implementation of the provenance tracking system in an industry environment using Private Key Infrastructure (PKI) to implement verifiable credentials.

Text

2024-12-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89939

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/