E.D.P. (Electronic Data Processing)

Technical information

The C.E.D. of the Vatican Library began in 1985. The system it uses is a Geac 8000/F, with about ten terminals in serial connection to 9600 bpses. The birth of the Network URBS, five years later implies a substantial upgrade of the system and the number of the terminals, which rises to around forty, fifteen of which are connected in basic gang to 9600/bpses with the relative remote centers.
In 1994, with the beginning of the project of retrospective cataloguing of the Library, the operating system adopted UNIX passing the net Ethernet and the lines of connection with the remote centers to 64 K/bpses.
Today the C.E.D. manages two servers: UNIX  and AIX, one for the management of the cataloguing of the bibliographical data (by now over one million records) and one front-end toward Internet World.
There is also on line an NT server  for the sharing of the CD-ROMs, the images and the management of two nets in class C, with total assets of 268 IPs recorded with relative firewall in a LINUX environment and about thirty CISCO 2501 routers for the management and the routings toward the remote centers.
Currently the lines of connection are joined. The knots use 2 lines in fiber optics, whose speed of connection is of 2 Gbits toward the provider and 10 Mbits toward the WAN in Internet.
The systems are available 22 hours a day, seven days a week, and  may be accessed from  7.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. o'clock, from Monday to Friday.
The forms of access to the data are: street Internet, street Telnet, by modem with a PBX to 20 lines.
  
The Vatican Library has recently finished the procedure of migration toward a local system, that is placed side by side with that of the URBS Network, of which the Library continues to be a part. This development has involved the installation of a principal server for cataloguing, in the UNIX AIX environment and IBM 660 hardware, with the technology HACMP cluster; of a secondary system IBM 43-140 used as front-end toward Internet of the database of the Vatican Library; with a further system hardware HP server, in the Windows 2000 Family environment, for the management of the Web server and of the search engine for multimedia data.
In addition, since 2004, a mail-server has been installed in the LINUX environment, for the mail of the Library customers and a server and-commerce in the Windows 2000 environment, for the on-line sale of books published by the Library.
In the Library School of the Vatican Library there has been installed a server, in the LINUX environment, that goes from ROUTER and at the same time shares on-line the CD-ROMs for the 48 PCs that are used by the students. In the same School, there is also a UNIX AIX server, that is used by the students to practice cataloging.
Beginning in January 2006, the Vatican Library will make the migration operational from the GEAC Advance 6.7 application software to the GEAC Advance 2005, enriching the management of the different present catalogs with many operational functions and easily customized interfaces.
In addition, there is now operational a LINUX SUSE 9.0 server, developed in collaboration with the Software A.G. for the management of the database of the manuscripts, in XML language; further, with increased use, the other database will see a front-end toward the world WAN and behind, a true cataloging production system toward Intranet LAN.