TECC

TECC information services

A key component of the TECC project will also be to provide a rich collection of information resources to the people of Ternopil and the surrounding region. One of the central aspects of this effort is to integrate the on-line library services for the city of Ternopil and the surrounding region. The libraries of the four university members of the TECC will also participate in this effort. The details of this part of the project have not been settled yet, but we can provide some general idea of the scope of the effort. The libraries in the Ternopil region use a variety of systems and protocols, and any effort to integrate their services must deal with these differences. Among the systems used are the Ukrainian Fond House system (UFH) and the IRBIS system. Among the protocols used are TCP/IP, NetBEUI, Z39.50 System of Information Sources Cataloguing protocol (SCIF), and HTTP. We believe that the SCIF protocol provides the best platform for our purposes because it was designed for distributed use. The UFH and IRBIS client/server systems are the most common library systems in the Ternopil region as well as the most common systems for most Ukrainian universities. Consequently, we will not insist that all participants use SCIF, and will have to provide a SCIF interface to the various systems. We use the acronym TECC-IS to stand for TECC Information Services. The basic architecture for TECC-IS is the following.
1. Database and other information resources will remain with the current owner who will continue to have full control over them.
2. TECC-IS will receive data from the contributor in via whatever protocol the contributor is using.
3. The data owner has full control over access to any information resource.
4. TECC-IS will not be able to make any changes in the local databases. These can only be updated by the owner.
5. TECC-IS must provide a common interface that all TECC members can use. 6. TECC-IS must scale easily and interface smoothly into a Grid environment. TECC-IS must optimize requests directed to its various information providers. To improve performance of TECC-IS we will implement a cache server to store the most often requested information. This will speed up the response to the user and also reduce the load on the local system. We expect that TECC-IS will primarily be based on the TECC Microsoft IIS servers.