The collection lived in EMu, an on-premise collections management system that remains the source of truth. The platform had to keep serving researchers, universities and institutions while the data underneath it moved to new infrastructure.

I designed and led the ETL pipelines that moved the collection from legacy on-premise EMu onto Azure Blob storage, PostgreSQL, Typesense and Redis, adding AI metadata enrichment along the way so objects are easier to find across collections.

DataHub, the middleware layer that brokers every read against EMu, carries the auth, policy enforcement and audit logging that sit between the upstream catalogue and the search, cache and application layers downstream. I set its data governance, security and audit standards.

On the public site, search runs as you type against the Typesense index, with filters for categories, places and entities. A search for "shopping" returns 6,918 objects, the Parramall Shopping Centre neon sign among them.

More than 500,000 objects are now searchable by anyone, and the museum's public platforms served over 100 million API requests in the past year.

Anyone can save objects without an account. Saved objects stay in the browser, a counter in the corner keeps the tally, and My Collection turns them into a list that can be shared as a link or downloaded as CSV. The share link carries the object IDs in its URL, so sharing needs no sign-in.