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   Who is the Museum Afraid of? May it be a visitor, a state or a sponsor conflicts may arise everywhere
and with everything. - Museum studies things, moves them, and presents them to public and specialists.
This is always The state is always trying to sell something or to use cultural monuments for the benefit of the country or the state apparatus but not for the benefit of culture itself. This can be selling articles abroad or granting sacred objects on the basis of some political considerations. This is a normal situation because museum is culture and culture is in a constant conflict with the state. It also goes for the church. These conflicts are rather often fomented although as a matter of fact there are no solid reasons for the conflict. Yes, there are objects that participated in the rituals of the church and most of them are stored in the museums, yet there is no need to grant them. This is a question of preservation of the articles themselves and the museums - all that enters the museum becomes a part of a single organism that inhabits the storerooms, the exhibition halls and restoration workshops. If we extract something from somewhere we cause severe injuries to the museum. If we talk about the relations with the church then the recipe here is very easy: all the objects that ended in the museum during the Soviet times did not just 'appear’ to be there, they were saved. All the rest was sent for remelting. So every time the conversation starts with such remarks as ‘You are keeping stolen things’ I end it abruptly. Copies can be made from the most of the objects and they can function in the rituals just like the originals that should stay in the museum. All the rest can be well negotiated. The interests of sponsors and museums do not always coincide and in order to avoid conflicts there should be distinct and clear agreements about what is possible and what is not. When the sponsor visits the museum it is one thing, but when he wants to celebrate his wedding in the museum then it is totally another thing. We never do such things and for us, as the Imperial residence, one of the biggest museums of the world and the national shrine, this is absolutely unacceptable. But the Hermitage is the presidential object and this does not threaten us at the highest level. At the middle level such problems always exist but we have very distinct agreements with our sponsors so difficulties do not arise. Any human being constitutes a threat for the museum because the contradiction between storing and displaying is always risky and divergence of interests may happen everywhere. A conflict may arise between the visitors and the museum (a primitive example, it might be too cold for the person, but if it is warm for the person then it is bad for the paintings). Or there is a long queue to the ticket office, the person does not want to stand in a queue but at the same time the queue regulates the number of people present in the museum. There are fire safety rules in accordance with which a large number of people can not be in the museum. The number of places in the cloakroom is also limited. But the person wants to entre the museum at once. So there is a conflict. - Are curators, museum attendants and other staff members that one way or another contact with the visitors of the museum more focused on demonstrating or preserving? - Undoubtedly, the main goal of the museum attendants who are sitting in the halls is to preserve. There are guides who are demonstrating. In the Hermitage the museum attendants are not even allowed to give explanations to the visitors because that way they can be distracted from their main duty. Though, there are a lot of people in the museum and people can get lost sometimes so the museum attendants help them. But their main goal is to watch over that nobody comes too close, touches the paintings and that everything is in order. The goal of the museum attendant is also to preserve, to make sure that the objects are safe.Very often we have problems: when we need to transport the exhibits to the exhibitions the museum attendant seeks his or her objects to stay where they are for there is a risk that something might happen to them. Then we decide together whether this is overcautiousness or really a concern for the object. But at the same time there are departments in the museum that are oriented towards demonstration. For example, the departments of design have demonstration as their main goal; scientific officers try hard to make their halls interesting and informative. All that should be interrelated. - If we talk about the theft in the museums and refer to history then we see that the museum staff 'makes an exhibition of itself' more often then others. You have repeatedly stated in your interviews that before you were concerned with the protection of the outer boundaries and just now started to protect from 'your own people'. How painful is that? - We should protect from different people and those people who are called 'staff' are also different. However strange it may seem but in the first place we should protect from those who protect. They are responsible for the most theft: these were the policemen in the State Russian Museum, these were the people who installed the warning system in the Vienna Museum... There were cases of theft by the guards attending the personnel security systems at our museum. It should be pointed out that theft by the museum attendants is not possible without their participation. But, undoubtedly, we should exercise control over the museum attendants, it should be a flexible combination of surveillance and trust. It is impossible to manage without trust in the museum system: the museum attendant moves the exhibits, changes the dating, the objects are taken to the exhibitions... And, indeed, there can not be a hundred percent safety guarantee, otherwise it will be impossible to organize exhibitions and research. I believe we had too much trust on the assumptions of the previous time. Now the psychology of people has changed that is why we should enhance the control. And the most important here is to be in the constant state of alarm, readiness and intensity, but at the same time we should understand that the situation might change. Now the control has been tightened, may be there will be a moment when it is relieved. Yes, there are regulations, rules but they protect us only partially. That is why we should constantly change protection schemes (like in a secure setting), change security systems, actions in various emergency situations. The Hermitage has always received plenty of money for the security that is why we try to project our technical systems in the way when they are changed every five years. A flexible system that will bevsensible to any changes is needed... Alongside with this we should not forget that our main threat is flood, fire and war. - Are you ready for such emergency situations now? I have read that in 1941 the main exposition was prepared for the evacuation in just six days. At the same time I got a distinct feeling that it was possible only because the directorate, despite all the accusations in the overcautiousness, was stocking up containers and packaging material. - The directorate was not overcautious; it was, on pain of death, complying with the order to be ready for the evacuation. At the same time the director could be shot for alarmism, so there was risk in both situations. Now our museum (like any other regular museum) has the action plan for any situation: where people should assemble, and where things should be assembled, where and how the evacuations should take place. Naturally, a modern war is totally different; it won’t happen that we load everything on two special trains and send them to Sverdlovsk. But we are ready for the present day wars this is why we have the department of emergency situations. Although, if we look upon this realistically, then we should speak about readiness for the terroristic attacks, fires and floods rather than wars, so the most part of our technical means is aimed at that. At the same time the human factor is very important: we can install a lot of sensors, but if they go off then the people should be present on the site. There should be a fire station (we have this), policeman battalion (it is standing guard over the perimeter)... People react better than any equipment. - How often do you turn to the external organizations that insure protection? How do you select them? - There is a policemen battalion that guards us; it also provides security when we transport the objects. We are constantly in touch; we have agreements, now we are negotiating the establishment of several more policeman posts. Our protection is carried out by the state structures although there were attempts to do this with the help of some private security firms. The security firms have their own advantages and disadvantages, but they also make it more complicated, particularly, from the bureaucratic point of view. - As far as I understand, the serious problem is the obligatory necessity to invite tenders for the facilitation of security services or installation of the security systems for the museums since all the participants should be provided with the full information about the object and that is a serious safety risk. - This is absolutely correct. The 94th federal law as it presents itself as totally subversive. This is the reason why I should provide all the tender participants with all the materials in order to choose who will protect us. So far we managed to avoid such situations and we do not invite tenders. But I hope that soon this law will be seriously reconsidered. - How did you manage without the tenders? For example, a biometric security system was installed in the Hermitage... - We installed it on a trial basis and you don’t need a tender for this, it was installed free of charge. When we implement it on the regular basis we should find a way to manage without tenders. - Quite often the Hermitage organizes the exhibitions in the provinces. How do you estimate the overall level of protection of the Russian museums? Do they have any serious problems with the security protection? - We have a very strict and tough security policy. There is a list of Despite all the talks I nevertheless believe that the Russian museums in general are protected rather well, no worse than other museums in the world. And it seems to me that we should be grateful to them for remaining unchanged while during the last 20 years almost everything in the country changed the form of property and the owners. Those exhibits that were missing during the inspections are so few in comparison to all those that were preserved in the museum collection. Unfortunately, nowadays the money matters the most not just in Russia but all over the world and the understanding that the museum is a special place, where one should not speak loud, steal, even if you are a thief, is fading. We are producing more and more advanced security systems but people’s psychology is changing so we have to come up with the new ways of protection. Such is life. Director of Security magazine, N 2 March 2009
How to preserve the contents of the safe that is wide open? Ask the Director of the Museum Director of Security is starting to publish a series of articles that will tell about the special features of the protection of the enterprises and organizations workings in various sectors. The standing head is opened by the story about... the museum. Perhaps, this is an unexpected but at the same time a no less logical decision: the main goal of the museum is to preserve the cultural values so it is a kind of a security enterprise per se. At the same time the museum has to provide access to these values so the question of the security is pressing. From the point of view of the interest to the work of the security services
the State Hermitage Museum ranks first. As one of the oldest museums in Russia
it uses, probably, the widest range of security measures from the ratter
cats to the biometric systems. The museum where the The fund storage of the Hermitage is a complex of buildings of the restoration and storage Staraya Derevnya centre, the construction of which still continues on the skirts of St. Petersburg. The first stage was instituted in 2003 and according to the director of the State Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky it is the most protected museum storage in the world. That means that it can become a model for providing safety of cultural values. The construction of the second stage, which is the main building of the storage, started in 1990, later it was frozen and the works resumed only in 2005. And as Mikhail Piotrovsky is telling us at that the activation of the construction works was directly influenced by the incidents of theft from the storerooms of the Hermitage. Before that the financing of the construction and the equipment for the storages of the Russian museums was done reluctantly: ‘Nobody understood why it was the storages that were so important but not the restoration of the gilding in the museum halls." But now according to the main specialist of the security services of the fund storage Oleg Boev, ‘neither a cat, nor a bird except perhaps a spider’ will break inside unauthorized, and by the time the second stage is instituted a ‘security super system will be installed here and by its ideology it moves to the forefront in Europe’. The new building of the fund storage is, of course, devoid of charm of the old times and pathos of the imperial palace. At the same time it represents practically unlimited possibilities for the projecting of the security and fire alarms, the systems of conditioning and ventilation, heating and water management, access control and video surveillance, - the blocks that compose the security of the museum in whole and its exhibits inìparticular. OBSERVING THE OBSERVING The security system of the fund storage itself is a compound integrated
complex that consists of the modules of the security alarm system, access
control, video surveillance system, system of biometric control, system
of recognition and recoding of the moving vehicles and so forth. All the data
is entered to the main console of the integrated security system.
Moreover, there is a number of the additional submodules such as the graphic
workstation that demonstrates visually all the premises of the storage
and all the sensors installed in the premises are connected to it (volume
change sensor, All that is happening in the fund storage is in the vigilant eye of the closed circuit television. Naturally, it is impossible to visually track all what is going on at all the sites. But in this case this is not necessary: the video surveillance system acts as the subsidiary. If the alarm goes off the readings of the cameras that are the closest to the site of occurrence will be displayed and the operator will be able to see everything what is going on with his own eyes and immediately react: without leaving his place he can block the doors, limit access rights on the card of the staff member, etc. Sitting by the monitor the operator is able to have full control over
everything up to opening and closing of the doors (their state is displayed
in The system of the perimeter security is based on the classic scheme:
the external mechanical fencing (it is a very light fence that does not encumber
space) and the infrared perimeter security system that as a whole
create some kind FRONT-DOOR SECURITY OF THE 21ST CENTURY But the threat can be not just external but also internal. After the case of ‘theft from the Hermitage’ the internal security policy was reconsidered in the biggest Russian museum. Now all the staff members of the fund storage are supplied with access control cards so that all their movements are regulated firmly by the security services. The rights are assigned on the program level since every staff member has his or her own routes and to Oleg Boev if the person is occupied on the first floor then he or she has no need to work on the fifth floor so he or she won’t be able to access there. The first 'check point' that is faced by the staff members when they
come to work is the point of the biometric control where they should 'show
their face'. Until the person is identified his or her access card remains
blocked. Operation principle of the biometric system is based on the analysis
of the brainpan parameters that is why any external changes (such as dental
abscess, bump on the head, change of a hairdo, etc.) present no obstacle
for the identification. Usually biometric security systems work on identifying
faces by the comparison of the number of dots. The system installed in the Staraya
Derevnya is more advanced; here the so called mask of curvature
is laid over the parameters so the identification is possible for full
face and half face and it is impossible to trick it by presenting a photograph.
The scanner also reads the heat coefficient so the identification can
be passed only by a live person, The biometric system combined with the personal access cards is a perfect
PLEASE, DO NOT TOUCH The fund storage of the Hermitage works on the principle of the open
storage, i.e. the most valuable exhibits are available for the examination.
The only difference from a regular museum is that the visitors do not
come here individually, but only with the guide. That is why there is the third
security line, namely, the protection of the exhibits from the visitors.
Here various methods are used including psychological. As Oleg
Boev tells, when the alarm system was assembled in the premises the lamps
that had not been yet inserted in the cabling were blinking from time
to time, it appeared that it disciplined the excursionists (among them
there were many children whose behaviour is rather emotional). After that
the security services asked the specialists from the maintenance department
not to hide the alarm system but to leave it in view; it perfectly fit
into the One more innovation in the sphere of physical protection of the exhibition that is implemented in the fund storage is the approaching sensor that reacts to the attempt to break the prohibition 'please, do not touch' but not to the violation of the prohibition itself: if the visitor comes too close the warning signal is heard. Pressure sensors are also developed: they remember the weight of the exhibit that is put on top of them and react to any changes in the pressure in one way or another. Any attempt of physical influence on the exhibit results in the activation of both sensors and that produces the overall alert. In order to describe the methods of physical protection of the exhibits used in the fund storage in detail, as stated by deputy director of the Hermitage Alexei Bogdanov, at least one semester is necessary (exactly one semester is dedicated to the course that is given by the museum employees to the students of the University of Technology, future specialists in the museum security). But according to Oleg Boev even now security systems follow through with the status of the museum and its level. There are lot of innovations ahead. For example, now the new biometric device is tested in the fund storage. This device allows recognizing a person in motion by identifying his or her parameters literally on the run. ALL THE BEST TO THE EXHIBITS "I believe that security is a complex of measures combined as a single whole and the main merit of our system is exactly the interaction of all its modules," says Oleg Boev. And this does not differ in word and in deed: the security in the Staraya Devernya means not just physical, but also fire and even climate security. "The main goal for all of us is to preserve the objects of the cultural
heritage that is why it is extremely important to follow the microclimate
parameters inside the premises where the exhibits are kept," the leading
engineer of the conditioning system Ivan Obmornov demonstrates
the system of conditioning and ventilation that adjusts the air to the set
parameters of temperature and humidity. The automatic system that
is operated by the computer secures the necessary temperature in the storage
premises, restoration laboratories and administrative premises. At the same
time ‘the interests of the exhibits’ take priority: according to Ivan
Obmornov ‘it is For each of the 38 storage premises the parameters set by the attendant
are strictly observed: the The work data of other technical systems is also displayed on the control panel of the climatic systems. Here, for example, one can receive the data about the work of the boiler house, the outdoor lighting and so on. In cases of the deviance the alarm signal is heard and the operator makes the decision about further actions. Any computer-controlled system has one disadvantage: they are too closely
connected with electricity. That is why the fund storage provides for the double
security: besides the two power lead terminals with the automatic
changeover from the city there is also the Fire protection is at once carried out by the two The passive one is used in the premises where people work; it reports
the control panel that there is ignition somewhere. The active one, which
is a gas The gas station is not located in the basement or in the technical attic premises (as usual), it is situated in the very centre of the building so the gas reaches the premises as fast as possible. Depending on the remoteness of the storage room the gas should reach them within 13 up to 53 seconds. However, so far the active The employees operating the
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