The ETH Library is making its image collections future-ready

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich has successfully migrated a large part of the ETH library's extensive electronic image collection (E-Pics), which was previously based on Canto Cumulus, to the cloud-based platform Sharedien Content Hub.

Thanks to the dedicated work of the teams from ETH, brix and Sharedien, the image archive of the ETH Zurich Library was put online after around a year as the first E-Pics catalog with a new front end – created using brix:anura. This marks the successful completion of the first subproject. Around 1.6 million assets with a data volume of 48 TB were transferred to the new system together with all metadata. Thanks to the package-based migration, the risk of errors was reduced considerably, and the freeze times were distributed and kept short.

As part of the project, not only were general concepts for the set-up and migration developed, but numerous developments were also realized. In close collaboration with ETH, software solutions developed by brix such as the General DAM Migrator and brix:anura with Web Components were further developed to optimally fulfil ETH's specific requirements. Another important component is the newly developed asset order service, which makes it possible to request assets that cannot be downloaded for legal reasons. In addition, the Sharedien DAM has been further developed in several areas through intensive dialogue with ETH to better meet the specific needs of ETH.

The migration of the other image catalogs is progressing rapidly. After the successful start with the first catalogs, 20 more with a total of one million assets and 26 TB of data are pending. We will be making further optimizations and developing new functions to meet the high demands of ETH. Our goal is to have migrated all catalogs to Sharedien by February 2025 and thus fully equip the ETH Library with a modern digital asset management solution. We look forward to continuing our constructive collaboration with the dedicated teams at ETH and Sharedien.