The UK Mirror Service

A new service funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) and supported by Sun Microsystems will make it easier for Internet users to access the most popular academic web-based materials. When these are hosted on servers overseas, and particularly the USA, access can be slow for users in the UK. The UK Mirror Service offers "mirrors" or duplicates of the most frequently accessed overseas web-hosted files, so that users can access an up to date copy held on servers in the UK, making access much quicker and reducing transatlantic network traffic. The Service provides an intuitive interface which makes it very easy to browse or search the web sites, with online help and a help desk to provide additional support.

The UK Mirror Service currently holds more than 1.3 million items, all of which are freely available to members of the UK Higher Education community. The collection includes the HENSA collection of free software and a range of multimedia and other non-text items, such as MIDI files of classical music, and the collection continues to grow. The Service will provide access to all forms of no-charge electronic data including software, databases, graphics, audio and visual material (including video) and mirrored web pages. It will also bring together access to other mirror sites with relevance to Higher Education, especially the SunSite at Imperial College London, which offers a wide range of public domain software and information resources to the academic community.

The main benefits to users are the improved speed of access, the intuitive interface with its powerful search engine and the comprehensive help service. Individual Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) will benefit from reduced costs and there will be widespread benefits across the HE sector because of the more efficient use of network bandwidth.

The UK Mirror Service has grown out of HENSA, the Jisc-funded software archive. Based at the University of Kent and Lancaster University, HENSA has been the main source of electronically distributed public domain material in UK HE since 1992. The UK Mirror Service is very resilient because it is hosted at two sites, which helps to spread the load across the network infrastructure and is invisible to the user.

Funded by the Jisc, the UK Mirror Service has received generous support from Sun Microsystems. The Service is being developed in collaboration with HE partners including subject gateways and the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) and will continue to foster partnerships within the HE community. These will ensure that its collection is always relevant and that the service responds to user needs.