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ARTICLE CONTENTS    »  National Libraries Demand Robust Technology    »  U.S. Library of Congress    »  The British National Library    »  The Russian State Library

Among the hundreds of thousands of libraries in the world, national libraries are a category unto themselves. These libraries are challenged by the nature of their mission, the demands placed upon them, and the unique nature of their collections. They serve as a national repository of literature produced in the country or about the country, resulting in a mandate to maintain huge collections of items — increasingly in digital as well as in print format. Special collections, often containing national treasures, are being digitized and made available to the public as well as credentialed researchers.

Tremendous amounts of data, including both information about the physical collection and the digitized objects themselves, create the need for massive amounts of storage and the ability to quickly locate and deliver this information. Serving as a resource to all the country's libraries and citizens, as well as to the government itself, national libraries also must be prepared to make services continuously available via the Web. Only the most robust, high-performance, and scalable computing platform can reliably satisfy these unique institutions.

The leading library software vendors develop on Sun to reduce risk and ensure that the resulting system is highly reliable, available, and secure. Sun's network-centric computing technologies provide the information systems platform for many of the world's most prestigious national libraries — including the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Russian State Library.

The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the United States' oldest federal cultural institution and has served as the research arm of Congress for over 200 years. It is also the largest library in the world, with nearly 128 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.

As soon as Congress moved to the new capital city of Washington in 1800, the Library was established with an initial collection of law and reference books. The Library's three buildings are named for Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison.

Not only does the Library of Congress maintain the American memory, it is truly an international resource. Two-thirds of the books and periodicals in its collections are in languages other than English. It houses information on virtually every country, region, national, ethnic, and religious group. The Library's Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Polish collections are the largest outside of those countries, and the Arabic collections are the largest outside of Egypt. The collection of Luso-Hispanic materials is the largest in the world; its collection of Judaica ranks among the largest anywhere.

In December 2000, Congress tasked the Library to develop a plan and lead an effort to make sure that important digital materials can be preserved for the national information reserve. The new digital technology offers great promise, but it also creates an unprecedented surfeit of data in an unstable environment. The Library's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) plan was approved by Congress in December 2002. It envisions a national network of committed partners, collaborating in digital preservation architecture. Over the next several years, the Library plans to seed practical projects and to sponsor research-advancing development of a national preservation infrastructure.

The Library of Congress is supported by Endeavor Information Systems' Voyager integrated library system, running on a Sun Fire15K with 40 processors.

The British Library

In 1972 the British Library Act was passed by Parliament, administratively combining: the library departments of the British Museum, the National Central Library, and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology. In 1974 the British National Bibliography and the Office for Scientific and Technical Information joined the UK's new national library.

To the library community and the public at large, the best known component of the new national library consisted of the library departments of the British Museum. The Museum's Department of Printed Books was founded in 1753, the year of the foundation of the Museum itself. Over the intervening two hundred years, the library of the British Museum had grown into one of the largest in the world, sustained by its privilege of legal deposit whereby it was entitled to a copy of most items printed in the United Kingdom — not only books and periodicals, but newspapers, maps and printed music.

Its impressive collection exceeds 150 million items representing every age of written civilization, including such items as the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci's Notebook, the Times first edition from 1788, and original manuscripts of Beatles songs. The Library's mission is to make the world's intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage accessible to everyone; principal user groups include researchers, businesses, the UK library network, young learners utilizing e-learning resources, and the general public. Over 16,000 people use its collections each day, and 4 million items are delivered yearly to patrons all over the world through the world's largest document delivery service.

The British Library runs on the Ex Libris ALEPH 500 product, utilizing Sun Fire V880 servers, Sun Fire V210 servers, and Sun Fire F6800 servers. Clive Field, the Library's Director of Scholarship and Collections comments, "While the British Library is unique in many ways, our basic system requirements are similar to those of other libraries — only on a much larger scale." Sun's highly scalable system architecture and fully isolated dynamic system domains ensure the Library can accommodate future growth while maintaining the highest levels of service.

Founded in Moscow in 1862, the Russian State Library is the largest library in Europe and the second largest in the world. The RSL acquires and stores national and foreign publications in 249 languages and holds over 42 million items. More than 1,400 new items are added daily. With a reading room seating capacity of 2,000, it serves about 5,200 visitors and registers over 200 new users every day.

The mission of the Library is to collect, preserve and provide access to the universal collection of documents that reflect human knowledge and are related primarily to Russia and its national interests. The library is unique in its comprehensiveness and the universality of its collections, which include many priceless books, maps, and manuscripts that date back to the 11th century. The RSL has its origins in the monumental Rumiantsev Library, which counted Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Mendeleyev, and Lenin among its regular patrons. The RSL is the country's leading cultural, educational, and scientific information center. Powered by a Sun Enterprise 450 server, the RSL utilizes the ALEPH 500 integrated library system from Ex Libris.

Sun's network-centric computing technologies provide the ideal platform for the library of tomorrow. Sun has had a consistent vision of open, standards-based network computing ever since the company was founded in 1982. Sun's history of innovation and leadership stretches from the TCP/IP communications protocol that propels the Internet to the widely adopted Java technology-used in everything from smart cards to supercomputers. Sun's strong presence in the library market is driven by the superior scalability and reliability of the Sun platform, strong relationships with best-of-breed library software vendors, and investment in the education community.

Click here to download the Sun White Paper titled "Sun in National Libraries."

For more information on Sun solutions for libraries, visit www.sun.com/edu/libraries, contact education_news@sun.com, or click here to have your local Sun representative contact you.