National Library of the Czech Republic as End-User of the Research Networks

Adolf Knolldeputy directoradolf.knoll@nkp.cz

Characteristics

A lot of content for research 6 million volumes

9,000 manuscripts 3,900 incunabula 150,000 old printed books Rare modern collections in several

domains Fully computerized

155 Mbit/s connectivity to CESNET2 academic network (not member)

100 Mbit/s between two main buildings 100 Mbit/s LAN with 1 Gbit/s backbone

between servers

Data traffic: received

Access to large paid databases – mostly textual data

Normal web and e-mail traffic Co-operation between libraries

Bibliographic records Scanned articles for interlibrary loan

Not critical from the point of view of external connectivity even if a lot of users (480 networked worstations for staff and users + servers, notebooks, etc. up to 560 units)

Web archiving activity (critical as to access speed for harvesting and storage space)

Data traffic: produced and offered

Bibliographic data Large bibliographic databases (OPAC

and Union Catalogue – millions of records, some of them may point to illustrative images of old prints or full text of articles from periodicals)

Scanned catalogues ca. 5 million records (TIFF files, several KB)

Data produced and offered

Digitized content: Ca. 1,000,000 million pages of

periodicals (acid-paper) Ca. 410,000 manuscripts in high quality Ca. 130,000 pages printed books in

lower quality Production covering also collections

of other institutions + archival storage + delivery

Digitized contents

Typical files: 1 – 2.6 MB JPEG periodicals 1 MB access files for manuscripts, JPEG Up to 8 MB access files for maps, MrSID

Robotic storage on magnetic tapes Slow access, source of errors

My friend used to say:

Your HD is never big enough.

vs.

Your HD is always big enough.

PROVIDERIncreasing network

performance

END-USERIncreasing data

processing

INDIVIDUALSAcademic-driven Public-driven

Higher speedGrid computing

Higher speed

Grid com

puting Thin

ner –

but

stil

l acc

epta

ble

-

data

file

s

for t

he s

ame

obje

cts

Increasing traffic

How to pass throughthe bottleneck?

Foreseen future

Implementation of large disk storage and access facilities

Production of optimized (smaller) access data files from the archival ones (optimized JPEG; wavelet compression, MRC-based formats as DjVu or LDF)

Separation of access systems from the archiving ones More co-operation within the Czech Academic Network

for storage and access reasons (web harvesting, large data files) to share technological resources

Will be implemented as far as we are able to secure necessary funding (higher connectivity, more flexible storage facilities, more sophisticated applications, more processing, …)

Sharing digital content in international co-operation (common gateways: historical research, musicology, digitized periodicals, …)