December 21, 2001 Twenty-three libraries and two public schools in Allegheny County, PA can share information and accommodate remote conferencing.
Yipes Communications Inc. (www.yipes.com) has completed Phase I of a 250-mile optical data network linking libraries across Allegheny County, PA for high-speed Internet access, information sharing and remote conferencing.
The network already serves 23 member libraries of the Allegheny County Library Association and two public schools. When completed next year, it will serve an additional 22 libraries outside the city of Pittsburgh.
Yipes, based in San Francisco, is building the far-flung data highway for eiNetwork (www.eiNetwork.net), an umbrella organization created to harness the latest in database and networking technology to make information more readily available to the public. This partnership of the Allegheny County Library Association and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh is funded by the Allegheny County Regional Asset District and private foundations.
eiNetwork provides electronic access to all Allegheny County Library holdings, extensive full-text databases and Internet service to 1,800 desktops. Last year, eiNetwork chose Yipes to upgrade network capacity to enable higher-speed Internet service and advanced applications such as videoconferencing. Several dozen libraries are now converting from frame relay connections as slow as 384 kilobits per second to optical networks from Yipes running at 5 Megabits per second. The main office of eiNetwork has a 50-Mbps pipe to all the libraries and a 10-Mbps connection to the Internet through Yipes.
