SuperJANET: multimedia information services over a gigabit network

The Joint Academic Network (JANET) was established in 1983 and all UK universities and the institutes funded by the British Research Councils are connected to this optical fibre network, as are many other educational and research institutions, such as the British Library and the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland. JANET serves a population of over 50,000 terminals and personal computers, and through the world-wide Internet, millions of people are linked together in a vast global electronic village. It was used initially to provide researchers with access to remote computing resources. It was a network devoted to the 'big sciences'. However, in the past few years the network has become a vehicle for communication and for access to information resources. It is heavily used by libraries to give their users access to databases and to deliver documents between libraries.