University of Oxford

Success at a Glance

The University of Oxford is a rich blend of old and new. Its main library, the Bodleian Library, was established by Sir Thomas Bodley over 400 years ago and serves as the United Kingdom’s library of record, similar to the U.S. Library of Congress. Oxford’s permanent collection includes some of the oldest and most valuable manuscripts in existence.

At the same time, Oxford is at the forefront of digital technology. The library maintains an extensive collection of digital media such as electronic journals and e-books. Much of its historical collection is made available to scholars as electronic ‘surrogates,’ to improve access and to prevent wear and tear on priceless original manuscripts. Oxford collaborates with Google and other Web 2.0 enterprises to incorporate new technologies such as search and digital archiving.

The scope of the information management challenge is daunting. The university includes 119 separate libraries with a collection of 9 million books. Users request 9,000 library resources a week. Cataloging these materials and responding to these requests requires a specialized library management system (LMS) tailored for the large distributed university environment. Only a few vendors make such systems, including Sun partner VTLS, Inc., located in Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. Sun and VTLS have a strong partnership: Nearly 75 percent of VTLS implementations are on Sun systems.

In 2004, Oxford’s existing LMS was reaching its end of life. After an extensive evaluation, the university chose to replace it with VTLS Virtua software. Virtua won because it met a number of stringent criteria: support for Oxford’s consortium library model; ability to manage non-Roman scripts such as Chinese, Japanese and Arabic; and automated stack request support. This last feature will be particularly important as Oxford migrates its 9 million item collection to a controlled-atmosphere warehouse with robotic retrieval.

To host the VTLS software, Oxford also needed to upgrade the platform. “It was a no-brainer to turn to Sun,” says Dave Price, head of systems and e-research. “We’ve been a Sun site since 1991, installed a Sun 10 running SunOS 4.13 as a primary platform for our library systems.”

Oxford chose Sun Fire E2900 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. While some groups within the university are moving to Linux, Price stayed with a sure thing: “Solaris 10 provides an industrial-grade, bulletproof platform with the performance and support that Oxford needed to fulfill its mission.”

Oxford supports not only its own students and faculty but a worldwide research community, so around-the-clock operation is imperative, with no unscheduled downtime. The university wanted to have a fresh look at availability, so it called Sun. “Sun Professional Services was absolutely outstanding,” remembers Price. “And the team came up with the right solution, including Solaris Cluster 3.1 software. Our local Sun partner, Q Associates, provided helpful advice as well. Q Associates worked together with Sun from the first sales call. Personalization and attention to detail from Q Associates in partnership with Sun is one of the factors that made this solution work so well.”

Expecting to use the VTLS software for a decade or more, Oxford needed to be sure that the platform can grow with the university’s needs. The Sun/Solaris platform provides the right mix of affordability and scalability to ensure that Oxford will be able to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of students, faculty and scholars.

Sun storage is also making the grade at Oxford. A Sun StorageTek 5800 will be used to “ingest” outputs from the Electronic Ephemera project—digitized items from the world-famous John Johnson Collection— and also a large number of 19th-century books scanned for the Google Library Project. The Sun StorageTek 5800 system will be connected to a number of Fedora-based digital repositories, and the Bodleian Library expects to be able to exploit the special features of the Sun StorageTek 5800 system to accelerate Fedora-related processes and activities.

Sun Fire X4500 data servers are providing the ideal platform for consolidating file shares on the administrative side. But the most promising storage application for Oxford may be the Sun Honeycomb project. Jeffries explains: “Honeycomb is uniquely suited to our needs at Oxford. We plan to use it to store large digital objects as well as all the metadata associated with them. It’s like a digital bookshelf.”

While Oxford relies on a number of specific Sun technologies and products, the relationship runs much deeper. Sun’s commitment to the education sector gives Oxford confidence that it can continue to look to its evolving mission and not worry about infrastructure issues.

Price describes the challenges: “We take a long view here at Oxford. When David Vaisey was Bodley’s Librarian, he liked to say that most of our readers haven’t yet been born. These materials have to endure, and they have to be accessible, no matter how technology evolves.

“We’ve found that Sun is extremely willing to share in the problems and issues that we in the academic world are facing: rights management, metadata standards, digital preservation and many more. Sun participates in these discussions and that informs Sun’s product development.

“Oxford’s relationship with Sun goes beyond technology. Sun has the support and experience that we need for our digital library projects. Sun is committed to open source, giving us flexibility to grow and adapt. Other vendors go for the quick fix; Sun understands our long-term objectives and helps us achieve them.”

See related success story about how Oxford is replacing desktop PCs with Sun Ray systems to provide user access to the LMS.