JANET is the United Kingdom's Academic and Research Network; it is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and managed by a private company set up for the purpose, UKERNA. The identifier of JANET addresses is ac.uk. Several hundred institutions are connected, including all universities and most colleges of higher education as well as research institutes.

 SUPERJANET is the name used for the high speed part of JANET. The name was introduced in 1989 for a new initiative to provide an advanced optical fibre broadband network at an affordable price for the higher education community. SuperJANET consists of a number of MANs (Metropolitan Area Networks), including the London MAN to which Middlesex University is connected. SuperJANET allows JANET to transport video and audio as well as other data.

 The different kinds of security encompass:

Breaches of confidentiality ranging from intrusion of privacy to theft of intellectual property.

Dissemination of unsolicited and unwanted and possibly offensive and illegal material

Destruction of information and disabling of remote systems (hacking)

Misuse of the publicly funded resource which may be illegal and do not benefit the community paying for the resource

 This means:

Exercising responsibility as to who may access JANET

Taking measures to protect against attack from hackers

Enforcing a local disciplinary policy (for example, withdrawing passwords from offenders.)

 Increase in traffic has led to the setting up of the MANs and other kinds of collaboration. Recent privatisation of the telecommunication providers at local and national level has led to a variety of companies able to provide parts of the network and a subsequenet dropping in rental prices.

 Within the area of libraries, the HEFC has set up a project called eLib (the electronic libraries project). Many different kinds of project are funded here including projects to enable:

 seamless searching of catalogues in different institutions using different software and hardware which can be implemented with the Z39.50 protocol

• gateways into information and gateways into gateways to impose order on the amorphous data on the WWW
• digitising of data which though important to researchers will never be commercially digitised (e.g. historical documents and early periodicals)
• the creation of 'hybrid libraries'