St. Petersburg State University Edemes

Main article: Blockchain

2022: Presentation of the Edemes system

St. Petersburg State University has developed a system for identifying and monitoring the movement of cultural property "Edems" on the blockchain. The university announced this on May 19, 2022.

The main goal of this technology is to make the process of cooperation between museums and carrier companies simple and safe.

Services based on distributed registry technologies provide secure and reliable data storage. They allow organizations to build interactions, even if companies are not yet familiar with each other and trust relationships are not established between them. Records of any actions of communication participants are stored distributed in a private blockchain network. It is impossible to fake records, since the technologies used do not allow changing information, but only accumulate it sequentially. For this reason, services that are based on blockchain technologies are in demand in the absence of a single point of trust.

"Edemes" is a development for museums and galleries, for transport and insurance companies that are involved in the process of moving exhibits. The solution connects all organizations and creates comfortable conditions for tracking information about cultural values; accumulating statistical information and subsequent analytics, - said Dmitry Shishmakov, director of the Center for Distributed Register Technologies of St. Petersburg State University.

Public and private museums, galleries, collectors often move their exhibits to other organizations for temporary exhibitions. Edemes helps to make transportation convenient and safe for all participants in the process. In addition, the service allows you to comply with all legal requirements and record such important parameters as temperature, humidity and other conditions for the storage and transportation of cultural property.

Each item of cultural value is placed in a special box, on which anti-vandal labels are placed, protected from copying. This allows you to comply with the requirements for the reliability of the recorded information, and all user actions and attempts to make changes to the data are recorded in the system. In order to scan tags, you can use any smartphone that has access to the Internet. Such measures help not only to protect art objects from theft and falsification, but also to comply with the conditions of storage and transportation.

When the museum decides to send its collection to another museum or even to its branch, information about the point of departure and destination is entered into the system, a container is formed, the system generates a unique anti-vandal marking of this container. Along the way, a parcel can have as many control and transfer points as you like. Each of them records the time, geoposition, checks the integrity and compliance with the conditions of transportation and storage. Each action is additionally stored in the blockchain, which excludes the possibility of falsifying information or making it retroactively, - said Alexander Kireev, technical director of the Center for Distributed Register Technologies of St. Petersburg State University.

Edems provides for the export of collections catalogs to the program, so museums do not need to enter information about exhibits manually, it only needs to be supplemented with data on storage conditions.

In May 2022, the center is negotiating cooperation with major museums in St. Petersburg and carrier companies. New participants are connected to the service within two days: on the first day, special training is carried out, and on the second day, technical control is provided.

Moreover, the system is actively developing and in the near future will be supplemented by the possibility of booking and selling objects online right during the exhibition.