RTU is the largest University in Latvia. It was founded in 1862 as the the first higher educational establishment of Latvia. There are 8 faculties at the RTU:
 

• Faculty of Architecture

• Faculty of Civil Engineering

• Faculty of Chemical Technology

• Faculty of Mechanical Engineering

• Faculty of Electrical and Power Engineering,

• Faculty of Computer Science and Computer Engineering

• Faculty of Engineering Economics, and

• Faculty of Radioengineering and Telecommunications.

Because of the technical capabilities of the university, it was involved in the country's academic networking development since the very beginning.

2. ACADEMIC NETWORKING DEVELOPMENT IN LATVIA

The development of Academic Networking in Latvia began in 1993 with two main communication computer centers in Riga Technical University (RTU) and Latvia University based on mainframes IBM 4381. The technical and ideolo-gical development of networking in both universities went along one road - the process of gradual evolution without the use of clear and concrete conception. The main tendencies in this stage were to collect the basis of network technical support, to prove new technical possibilities and to acquire experience there-fore the use of E-mail, FTP from mainframe of the universities in terminal regime.

Since 1994 the development of network in RTU reached a new turning point - varied advancement processes turned to specialized activities with concrete purposes. The advancing generator became and has stayed today - the automation of administrative management of RTU in all fields with the use of network. RTU was the first of the Baltic universities to accept this kind of project, which includes the creation and use of students' register, enrollment, staff's register, teaching board, finance and other databases applied in net-work regime with multiple accesses.

RTU is not a united body. It has many units in Riga, as well as subsidiary branches in other cities such as Liepaja, Ventspils, and Davgavpils, thus we were forced to solve the communications problems. In order to have radiolinks among several units of RTU, local ethernet networks are acquired in Riga territory with the speed of 2 Mb/sec. We have obtained experiences in using telephone lines and some optic cable lines between buildings.

3. THE USE OF INTERNET

The use of the Internet, the world's largest and fastest growing computer network, at RTU began in 1993 when the mainframe IBM 4381 (with 64 ASCII terminals) and the Sun server (Sun SPARC station 10) together with two workstations had been set up in the Computing Center of the Faculty of Compu-ter Science and Computer Engineering. At that time, two mainframes were donated by the IBM Corporation to Latvia -- one to RTU while the other to the University of Latvia, and three Sun servers to the Muenster University. In a short time, specialists of the IBM Corporation, Muenster and Vienna Universi-ties prepared the staff for the maintenance of computers and software. The unified software and hardware for all three Baltic countries were then inte-grated in the computer systems. Both the donators and users of computers found the experience productive. The donators were able to capitalize their resources while the users were able to gain new experience.

In the beginning the Internet was used only for electronic mails and file transferring purposes. The mailboxes were created only for faculty members and staff and with some exceptions for excellent students. The main direction of sending and receiving information was from the Western countries. The work then was pleasant due to short time of processing information and trans-ferring the data through the Internet as well as the relatively small number of users. Yet at present, there is an abundance of users of the Internet, espe-cially in Riga, and there are many bottlenecks in the local networks. The response time from remote servers is sometimes simply too long. It is not unusal to register a speed of receiving information via Netscape at about 30 bytes per second or slower. Although this is too slow, yet the number of users who want to work in the Internet, especially among students, still remains very large. Currently many students are permitted to use e-mail only.

The software tools used at RTU for working on the Internet are different. The mainframe works with the VM/ESA operating system. Users can commu-nicate with the Internet in two ways:

4. EXPERIENCE IN ACADEMIC NETWORKING

The RTU staff has gained considerable experience in their involvement in the academic networking development since 1993. They have learned a great deal and felt strongly concerning the following:

• FDDI Optical Communication Lines Are Essential

We have learned that online connection with large databases with sizes at 30 MBs and more is effective only with the kind of configuration where the main units are connected with optical communication lines forming FDDI united area. AT RTU, this installation of optical lines will be completed in the beginning of next year, and only then the high-speed information delivery will function well at the RTU. This will be an important step in the use of network - where the network will be able to carry out concrete tasks in the study process with network access from computer workstations from all RTU units. And only then local information unit of the RTU Scientific Library (RTU SL) will become a virtual information source with remote access possibilities.

The RTU SL is seriously coming to it, the bibliographic subdivision of electronic information technology is made, specialized bibliographic staff is trained in Internet area.

• Users Must Be Trained for The Use of Internet Information Sources

We have realized that the inexperienced users can not be productive in the use of Internet in facing the sea of information available in the cyberspace.

• CD-ROM Information Sources Are Effective

We have realized that when the library is losing its walls, it will be effective to use CD information sources in the network domain. The library bibliographic acquires the CD titles, then they can select the needed information and re-package it in writeable CD for further dissemination. RTU is making use of several CD products, and then they will introduce them for wider and more effective use via network service through the use of multi-CD cartridge units.

The last two have been incorporated into the activities of the Scientific Library of RTU to be elaborated in the following sections.

5. RTU'S SCIENTIFIC LIBRARY

The Science Library of the Riga Technical University (RTU SL) was founded in 1862 as the library of the first higher educational establishment of Latvia. The library collects materials and scientific literature in all subject areas taught at the RTU.

In the beginning of 1995, the library had a collection of 2,070,000 volumes which include 1,536,000 volumes of books, 451,000 volumes of journals and 83,000 volumes of others publications.

Library also collects publications of the Riga Technical University's teaching staff and researchers as well as the information about the Riga Tech-nical University. The holdings are located in the main library and 4 branch libraries in Riga and 3 branch in Liepaja, Daugavpils and Ventspils. The library serves all students, graduate and postgraduate students, professors, and staff of the RTU, as well as readers from other establishments. Readers from other institutions can use books in reading-rooms only. The number of readers is 12,000. The library staff helps readers select materials from the library's collections, offers bibliographic information and reference services, borrows literature from another library by means of Interlibrary loan. Beginning with January 1995 the staff assists readers in conducting searches in the library's electronic catalog via the use of the library's automated system, ALISE -- a Latvian integrated library system, developed at the library of University of Latvia. The library has 84 staff members.

6. LIBRARY AUTOMATION

The process of the automation of the library began at the end of 1993 when five personal computers were set up. Nowadays, the library has the Local Area Network (LAN), in which 11 personal computers are connected. Users of LAN can reach Wide Area Networks (WANs, mainly the Internet) through Radio Link. The LAN of the Library is joined to Rector's office LAN and student class PCs' LAN. Novel NetWare 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, MS DOS 6.2 and some other Beta versions of software are used. There is a great need for licensed program products, such as: National, Baltic and Cyrillic fonts and keyboard drivers, Windows NT, MS Office for Windows, software for net-working and others. As Windows NT or Windows 95 can be used with RAM above 4 Mbytes there is a need of more powerful PCs.

Since the end of 1993 the integrated library system, ALISE, has been installed. This is a locally developed library automation system and is unable to operate in multi-user ONLINE mode as a remote server. ALISE is used for acquisition, cataloguing, circulation and searching. From the beginning of 1994, all new literature has been entered into the electronic catalog by means of ALISE. The readers can also access CD-ROM databases by using personal computers.

7. LIBRARY'S FUTURE PLANS

The Library plans to automate in several phases in the following directions: connection of the Branch Libraries into a common network and their automa-tion, use of bar code technology for registration and reservation of books, and improvement of readers' information services. These services are to include searching printed materials in the electronic catalog, scanning the documents themselves into a computer, editing them, and printing them. Readers are also to be able to search, retrieve and output (on screen or printer) materials available in both the CD-ROM databases and on the Internet.