Creating Scalable Digital Libraries

Like many other media content providers, libraries and museums are increasingly moving their content onto the Web.  While the move itself is no easy process (with digitization, web development, and training costs), being able to successfully deliver content to a wide audience is an ongoing concern, particularly for large libraries.

Much of the concern is financial, as most libraries do not have the internal budget or outside investors that for-profit businesses enjoy.  Even large university libraries will face serious budget constraints that even other university departments, such as science and technology would not face.

Creating a scalable infrastructure and also distributing a large digital collection that can handle multiple requests, requires planning that many librarians have not even imagined.  They must stop thinking in terms of "one-item-per-customer" and start thinking in terms of numerous users accessing the same information simultaneously.

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Content Delivery Networks (CDN) – a comprehensive list of providers

We build web applications…and there are plenty of them around. Now, if we hit the jackpot and our application becomes very popular, traffic goes up, and our servers are brought down by the hordes of people coming to our website. What do we do in that situation? Of course, I am not talking here about the kind of traffic Digg, Yahoo Buzz or other social media sites can bring to a website, which is temporary overnight traffic, or a website which uses cloud computing like Amazon EC2 service, MediaTemple Grid Service or Mosso Hosting Cloud service. I am talking about traffic that consistently increases over time as the service achieves success. Google.com, Yahoo.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Plentyoffish.com, Linkedin.com, Youtube.com and others are examples of services which have constant high traffic. Knowing that users want speed from their applications, these services will always use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver that speed. What is a Content Delivery Network? A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. This will help scaling a web application by taking a part of the load from the service servers. Read the entire article about Content Delivery Networks (CDN) list of providers at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

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