Libraries Taking up Residence in the Cloud

In her online Stacking the Tech column, LJ Academic Newswire contributor Ellyssa Kroski explores the number of libraries around the country that have already begun to adopt cloud services to take the pressure off their IT departments and increase efficiency:

The OhioLINK library consortium is using Amazon's Web Services to host a handful of their Digital Resource Commons repository instances such as Kent State's Centennial Collection and is testing server administration in the cloud, as well as the limits of DSpace repository software.

The District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) is using Amazon's EC2 service to host its web site and, according to Director of Information Technology Chris Tonjes, "This provides us with rapid scalability [and] redundancy (if one Amazon data center fails, a mirrored version of our site is on another and can come online in less than 30 minutes)."

[DCPL is] also using Amazon's S3 service to backup their ILS, their upcoming digital repository uses Flickr and Amazon EC2, and the District of Columbia government will soon be adopting the GAPE version of Gmail as its enterprise mail platform. Tonjes adds that "Server virtualization + cloud computing give us great speed and flexibility and typically are significantly cheaper than enterprise data center-based infrastructure."

The Eastern Kentucky University Library is using Google Docs to collect responses to web forms, Google Calendar for instruction and meeting rooms, and Google Analytics to collect statistics about their web site, catalog, and blogs.

At Western State College in Gunnison, [CO], they are using Google's App Engine for their ELibrary and have also migrated two Microsoft Access databases that they used for serials circulations and government publication management to that service.

For more from the column, see http://bit.ly/librarycloud