Listen up: Rock and roll artifacts under surveillance

IP network surveillance technology keeps an eye on Bruce Springsteen's 1957 convertible, Mick Jagger's 1972 jumpsuit

NEW YORK -- The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex keeps decades of music alive through rare videos of rock's greatest musicians playing on wall-sized screens, along with a display of prized artifacts including guitars, clothing and original sheet music from legends like John Lennon and Mick Jagger.

Turn it up to 11: Tech's contributions to rock and roll

Guarding the extensive collection, which is located in New York City's SoHo area, is a priority. Guards with Motorola radios and chic black suits man their posts, while shatter-resistant transparent casings surround many items (though not the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible owned by Bruce Springsteen .

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NEW YORK -- The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex keeps decades of music alive through rare videos of rock's greatest musicians playing on wall-sized screens, along with a display of prized artifacts including guitars, clothing and original sheet music from legends like John Lennon and Mick Jagger.

Turn it up to 11: Tech's contributions to rock and roll

Guarding the extensive collection, which is located in New York City's SoHo area, is a priority. Guards with Motorola radios and chic black suits man their posts, while shatter-resistant transparent casings surround many items (though not the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible owned by Bruce Springsteen .

Keeping an eye on nearly every inch of the display collection is a networked IP-based video surveillance system with more than 40 discretely placed Mobotix cameras integrated into the larger IT control room at the museum. Motion detectors are in place, too.

"Some artifacts are particularly valuable," said David Waggett, general manager at the museum, which opened about a year ago as the annex to the main Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

Not only does the Annex hold Bruce Springsteen's famous Bel Air, but also there's the 1964 album "Meet the Beatles" signed by all members of the band a few days after their historic TV appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. There's also John Lennon's Vox prototype, a special guitar/organ hybrid and a piano he used, plus Ringo Star's drumhead from 1964 used in the film "Help." Exhibits also hold the colorful jumpsuits worn in concert by Mick Jagger and Elvis Presley and much more.

Recognition of musicians by the museum starts with induction to the Hall of Fame, which can take place "25 years after your first album," Waggett says, adding that naturally the technology of recording means something different today than it did in the dawn of rock.

In the New York museum, there's a wall of tribute that comes alive electronically with a musical sampling of each honored rock star and rare film footage of them. Whether it's rock's early age with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, or the more recent vintage (Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, U2, Elton John, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper, the Grateful Dead), the audio-visual is exhilarating -- and distributed via a digital IP broadcast through servers housed in the museum's IT control room.

No security incident has directly threatened the valuable artifacts themselves, but the museum's network did once get hit with a computer virus, which disrupted the network and the audio-visual broadcast streams. Waggett believes the virus was introduced by a contractor's USB token, though it's hard to know for sure. But Windows-based servers had to be patched and the virus cleaned up.

The Mobotix cameras on the IP-based network can be operated remotely by museum employees from their PCs, so they can observe different locations in the museum.

Working at her PC, Assistant Operations Manager Nicole Fernandez showed how it's possible to pan and zoom an IP-based  camera located on a ceiling or wall in various areas of the museum. Though it looks real-time, the streaming image is actually a fraction of a second delayed and delivered off a server. Fernandez says the museum had Mobotix set it up this way because it facilitated the return of the camera to the proper angle without employees having to do that manually.