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Journal of Web LibrarianshipPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjwl20

Cloud Computing and Your LibraryErik T. Mitchell aa Z. Smith Reynolds Library , Wake Forest University , Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USAPublished online: 26 Feb 2010.

To cite this article: Erik T. Mitchell (2010) Cloud Computing and Your Library, Journal of WebLibrarianship, 4:1, 83-86, DOI: 10.1080/19322900903565259

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Journal of Web Librarianship, 4:83–86, 2010Copyright © Erik T. MitchellISSN: 1932-2909 print / 1932-2917 onlineDOI: 10.1080/19322900903565259

web.tech.lib

Cloud Computing and Your Library

ERIK T. MITCHELLZ. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA

TECHNOLOGY PROLIFERATION

The number of ways in which we access information is making our per-sonal computing environment very complex. My own personal computinginfrastructure includes two personal computers, multiple data-subscriptionservices, two external hard drives, a smartphone, and an MP3 player. Whilemy information technology access is fragmenting, my need to access my in-formation at any one point or place is growing. This creates tension betweenhow I manage information and its availability in my everyday life.

I recently found that my library has been dealing with these same is-sues as we reexamined how well our computing infrastructure supports ourlibrary services. As part of this discussion, we talked about cloud comput-ing but were not sure how it fit our needs. Like many organizations, we hadmultiple local servers, each of which supported different applications. Imple-menting a new application meant finding available resources and ensuringthat this new application would not conflict with our current environment.This was only one of a number of underlying technical issues that added alevel of complexity to providing user services. We wanted a platform thatoffered us easy scalability along with redundancy and security but found thatachieving this with traditional in-house servers was cost-prohibitive. Lookingfor an easier way to allocate technology resources, and wondered if cloudcomputing might help fill that need. Cloud computing refers to a wide fieldthat includes hosted applications, Web-based client services, and distributed,platform-independent server architectures. Cloud services tend to be groupedinto three types: software, platform, and infrastructure. Our library was al-ready a heavy user of hosted software services and wanted to find out how a

Address correspondence to Erik T. Mitchell, Assistant Director for Technology Services, Z.Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109. E-mail: mitcheet@wfu.edu

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distributed server architecture would provide us with the infrastructure weneeded for some of our core systems.

Finding solutions that help you virtualize or “go cloud” has gottenconsiderably easier in recent years, for example, implementing cloud-based data storage used to involve custom solutions and an in-depthunderstanding of computing infrastructure. Now, services such as Drop-box (http://dropbox.com) and MobileMe (http://www.me.com) have madethis process as simple as saving your data to a local folder on yourhard drive. What is particularly amazing about the proliferation of ser-vices like this for end-users is that studies are beginning to show howcommonplace these sorts of services and computing paradigms are be-coming. For example, the 2009 Educause Center for Applied Research(ECAR) study discussed the growing use of cloud-based services by un-dergraduate students (http://www.educause.edu/ecar), and the 2009 Hori-zon report (http://www.educause.edu/ELI/2009HorizonReport/163616) ob-served that cloud computing solutions are within a one-year implementationhorizon. The next obvious question is, “What does knowing that our patronsare more comfortable with network and cloud-based solutions mean for howwe approach providing services to these patrons?”

THE VALUABLE DATA IS NO LONGER OWNED

One of the first big shifts in how libraries manage resources was themove from print-journal purchasing models to database-subscription andelectronic-journal purchasing models. Libraries found that this transitionhelped them scale their resources and provide better service just by think-ing a bit differently about their services. Likewise, current cloud-computinginitiatives allow technologists to think about how we handle our comput-ing resources. Shifting to cloud solutions gives libraries an opportunity toreallocate resources and improve service.

The kicker is that libraries do not really have an option anymore. Dis-tributed digital library models like the HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org)are based on the idea that the really interesting stuff, the connections be-tween data, cannot be owned or kept in a single place. Likewise, our patrons’use of computers has changed. We have less control over their computingplatform and have to provide services in a context in which our patrons havean expectation of seamless interoperability and appropriate contextualizationof services.

Cloud solutions allow a library to respond more quickly to serviceneeds by allowing a library to scale its technology resources, employ apay-on-demand resource model, and provide IT infrastructure on a sub-scription model that could otherwise be difficult to acquire and manage.Some of these services offload technical management responsibilities and

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Cloud Computing and your Library 85

even provide a level of data management for libraries. There are a host ofmanagement possibilities, from the newly formed DuraCloud project (http://www.duraspace.org/duracloud.php) to offerings from commercial vendors.But using cloud services often mean more than purchasing access toa specific system. A number of hosting companies offer dedicated vir-tual platforms that enable libraries to completely control their comput-ing environments. For more complex needs, companies such as Amazon(http://aws.amazon.com/ec2) provide infrastructure services as opposed toserver hosting.

FINDING YOUR PLACE IN THE CLOUD

Cloud computing is based on the simple concept that systems and data canbe stored and accessed over the network using virtual servers to handlethe heavy lifting. Cloud computing uses virtualization to separate softwarefrom hardware, provides centralized security along with high-speed internalcommunications, and serves advanced data management needs where clientcomputing is impractical.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t risks and downfalls with cloud comput-ing. For example, network connectivity is not a guarantee, and we cannotalways rely on being able to connect to our data. Likewise, agreeing to acloud service places a lot of trust in a company or service with which youmay feel little affiliation. Finally, for some patrons and institutions, engagingin social activities in the cloud is rife with privacy concerns. Add to thisthe need for a new set of skills to implement and manage complex cloudservices, and the whole thing may seem to be a bit too much. At its core,however, cloud computing allows libraries to re-examine their resource al-locations.

Making the decision to use cloud-based services means balancing theelements of cost, risk, and benefit to decide whether those services advancethe mission of the library. When done correctly, though, cloud services offerthe opportunity to increase functionality and to work with our patrons innew and hopefully unexpected ways. When faced with the idea of movingfrom local solutions for our library data and applications to cloud-basedsolutions, we sat down and asked what cloud services we needed. Somevital ones came to mind: file storage, archiving and preservation, applicationhosting, and scalable production environments.

Rather than coming up with a perfect plan, we decided to just try afew things. We worked with virtualization applications (e.g., http://www.virtualbox.org) to get an understanding of how virtual computing environ-ments worked. We launched development servers on Amazon’s EC2 ser-vice and began setting up new services in the cloud as opposed to onour local servers. Along the way, we found many of these enterprise-level

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systems had individual-scale counterparts. Continuous data protection/fileco-location services, such as Dropbox (http://dropbox.com), make it simpleto backup and replicate your data across multiple machines. Virtualizationservices such as VirtualBox, Google’s upcoming Chrome OS, and Web-basedsolutions like g.ho.st (http://g.ho.st) provide computing environments basedon the idea that your computing platform is separate from the machine youwork on. While the move required us to reconsider how we approach ourdata storage and application management and how we think about technol-ogy as a subscription service, it is also positioning us to be able to respond topatron needs more quickly by scaling and adapting our information systemsto meet their needs.

What I have taken away from the process so far is that while cloudcomputing adds a level of complexity to our computing environments, thatsame complexity comes with a new set of tools and services. These toolshelp us deploy services faster and on a much larger scale than we could dootherwise. Further, community-focused applications allow libraries to builda service together rather than working on projects in isolation. I expect thechallenging part of this will be less about technical hurdles and more aboutfiguring out how to reshape our library and provide services to better fit ourpatrons’ needs.

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