Moving Libraries to the Cloud Roy Tennant

What Are You Talking About? A cloud is a common metaphor for the Internet:

Cloud Computing A style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet - Wikipedia Incorporates the concepts of: –Infrastructure as a Service (hardware capacity) –Platform as a Service (OS, solution stacks) –Software as a Service (applications)

Moving to the Cloud Moving to the cloud means moving computing tasks from in-house hardware and software to resources on the net Therefore, moving libraries to the cloud means moving library data and applications to the network level

Potential Benefits Low barriers to entry Pay as you go instead of capital investment No need to have local server capacity Software upgrades are automatic Saves staff

Potential Drawbacks Lack of complete control Reliance on network connectivity and speed

The Cloud From a Business Perspective

So What About Libraries?

An Example: Cataloging Card distribution service Local card catalog Catalogers Bibliographic records Added value

An Example: Cataloging Bibliographic utility Bibliographic records Local catalog Catalogers Added value

An Example: Cataloging Union catalog, Locally tailored and skinned Bibliographic records Catalogers Added value Benefits accrue to all!

OCLCs Expert Community Experiment Allowing wiki-like editing of WorldCat records Im very excited about the experiment and have already "updated" more records in the past month than I have in months previous to this – Nathan Putnam

Machine Services for Libraries in the Cloud

Data Layer Application Layer Presentation Layer Typical Application Diagrams from David Walker

Data Layer Application Layer XML layer API-based Application

Data Layer Application Layer XML layer Custom Presentation Layer API-Based Application

Sent to another source to retrieve

worldcat.org/devnet/

Mashed Libraries UK 2008

WorldCat Hackathon 2008

OCLC Bootcamp, Code4Lib 2009

Ways Libraries Are Benefitting from Moving Data to the Cloud

WorldCat Search API and Facebook worldcat/

WorldCat Citations in Facebook citemeapp/

Terminology Services for smarter searches

Visualizing WorldCat Holdings

WorldCat WordPress Widget

Mobile Web Applications

Mobile Web Applications

Android Application: CompareEverywhere

CompareEverywhere Splash Page

CompareEverywhere Searching

CompareEverywhere Search Results

CompareEverywhere Library Links

CompareEverywhere Library Information

A Library Catalog on an Android Phone

CompareEverywhere API Traffic Spike CompareEverywhere, Day 1

For more details … worldcat.org/devnet