National Library of the Czech Republic as End-User of the Research Networks Adolf Knoll deputy director

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 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. BOTH SENTENCES ARE TRUE

PROVIDER Increasing network performance END-USER Increasing data processing INDIVIDUALS Academic-drivenPublic-driven Higher speed Grid computing Higher speed Grid computing Thinner – but still acceptable - data files for the same objects Increasing traffic How to pass through the 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, …)