Computing at Kew

Like any modern institution, Information Technology underpins all aspects of the day to day operation of activities at Kew and Wakehurst Place. The IT environment at Kew is as diverse and varied as the organisation it serves.

Like any medium sized enterprise, Kew requires basic operational IT services such as email or finance systems. As Kew and Wakehurst are major visitor attractions, there are also IT services requiring overtly commercial applications including ticketing and retail systems. Kew's IT also supports the institution's varied scientific, academic and research interests. Due to the international nature of Kew's work, scientific IT projects often involve collaboration with peer institutions from around the world. (e.g. EDIT)

Kew's IT department forms part of the back-office: "Corporate Operations, Finance and Information" team.

The department provides a comprehensive IT support service to the organisation. This ranges all the way from from project inception and requirements analysis, through assessment and formal change control, through project start-up, procurement, build, testing and release and then subsequent support and maintenance, replacement and decommisioning. This covers all aspects of Kew's IT hardware, from PDAs, laptops and desktop computers through to servers, and the wide area storage and data network systems, as well as all aspects of the application services (databases, web, email etc) that run over Kew's extensive IT infrastructure.

Kew's IT Department is divided into six operational units:

• A "Project Management" team of PRINCE2 qualified project managers, coordinate the many and varied IT projects whether Scientific, Business or Infrastructural.
• The dedicated, in-house, "Applications Development" team of programmers and analysts develop and support the many scientific databases and applications, many of which are now available via the ePIC web site.
• The "Business Systems" team of programmers and analysts develop and support the integration of a growing number of business critical operational IT systems such as Finance, HR, Ticketing, Retail etc.
• The "IT Service Desk" provides the interface between the support teams and over 1000 registered users, both within Kew and Wakehurst and from around the world from staff and associated researchers. The Service Desk team provide first line incident management and handle service requests. They also provide all the day-to-day IT procurement services for the organisation.
• The "Network Services" team support the operation and administration of Kew's Windows based servers and services, notably Active Directory and Exchange 2007, as well as configuration and administration of over 1000 Windows PC clients.
• The "Unix and Comms" team support the operation and administration of Kew's Linux and Unix based servers and services, as well as the underlying infrastructural components such as Kew's virtual server environment, the data network described in more detail below, and its rapidly growing and developing storage environment.

Network Infrastructure

At Wakehurst, all buildings between the Mansion and Millenium Seedbank are connected to a multimode fibre backbone at between three nodes interconnected in a triangle at 1Gb/s.

Server Infrastructure

Data services run on a variety of platforms, with commercial applications running predominately on Windows servers and Scientific applications on Linux, though there are notable exceptions to this general rule.

Desktop Infrastructure

The standard desktop is Windows based, though our design and reprographic team are, as is often the case within the industry, based on Macs. Mac and Linux desktops are also used for some specific scientific applications.

IT Student Placements

Placement projects aim to give students experience of working in a busy and varied IT environment, whether in support roles or real-world software development tasks. This relationship has been of mutual benefit with the most visible results to date being the initial web-based interfaces to some of Kew's bibliographic databases (since redeveloped and incorporated into KBD). Other projects have resulted in software products in daily use behind the scenes at Kew. Some, based on MS Access include an IT asset management system, fault call logging system and slide collection database. More recent projects have been based around open-source components either modifying them to provide new features or integrating them into web-based database systems. Several students have subsequently gone on to casual and full-time jobs within the IT team.

Soon after Kew had initiated it's Herbarium digitisation initiative in 2000, this continuing relationship brought together Kingston's Digital Image Research Centre, and Kew's IT and Morphometrics and Identification unit. This led to an MSc project in 2003, which succesfully developed a web-based database using Apache and MySQL to provide a repository for morphometric data.

The two institutions continue to work together to investigate and develop new methods of using Kew's growing digital image resources.

1. J Clarke, S A Barman, P. Remagnino, K Bailey, D Kirkup, S Mayo, P Wilkin, "Ventation pattern analysis of leaf images", International Symposium on Vision Computing, Nevada, US, (2006)

• Directions for visitors to IT at Kew.

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