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Indianapolis skyline:

On November 5th I had the chance to present at IOLUG as part of their fall symposium on Cloud computing. I spoke on both the ZSR experience in moving to the cloud and in how cloud computing impacts IT and libraries in general. If you are interested in what I said, you can see the slides right here:

The rest of the day included some very interesting presentations ranging from uses of Google Docs to analysis of cloud-based discovery services. I have included a few notes below:

Noah Brubaker and Serri Parker gave an interesting comparative analysis of discovery service providers (Summons, Primo, Aquabrowser, Ebsco discovery, Innovative Encore). In addition to using a thematically appropriate racing theme they differentiated the systems based on specific features (e.g. item availability service, harvesting/indexing process, interface, faceting). Their evaluation themes included User needs, Librarian expectations, service models (Web Service, API, local indexing).

Ultimately the consortium they discussed selected Primo, citing catalog and library service (link resolution, holds, requests) integration, FRBRization, and Find a Database integration, ability to influence relevance ranking, database facets. The WFU experience with previous federated search products was not always positive so it was interesting to see the developments of these systems and find out more about how these issues are viewed in a selection process.

The afternoon began with “Storage as a service: Library digital collections in the cloud” by Chip Dye at IUPUI. His system hosts 1TB of data and 15TB of digital objects. He gave an overview of the DuraCloud platform which includes replication, retrieval, transformation ,streaming and bit integrity checking services.

Chip also covered Dspace 1.7 feature – Arichival Information Packages which works with the Duracloud syncronization service which pushes the AIP contents to the cloud. DuraCloud also includes a restore tool to download content. He observed that storage is competitive, that bandwidth is costly, internet latency is high. Michael Will speculated about whether or not Dspace would support direct-to-cloud storage (which is a really neat idea)!

Following Lunch we heard form Bill Helling, Kathryn Mills and Emily Griffin on Google apps and how it can be used to foster collaboration. They talked about how they used Google Docs in a systematic way to collaborate, schedule and document work. They provided an interesting overview of features and limitations and demonstrated pitfalls (Issues with pptx files, gaps in editing and presentation mode). While we have some experience working with Google Docs here it was really interesting to see what a significant impact incidental use of Google Docs can have on our workflows and approach to data collection.

Unfortunately I had to head out early to catch a plane back to NC so I missed a presentation by Andrew Pace on Web-Scale Management Services, a new approach to library information systems. I did have the chance to attend a session a week later in Durham, NC (which is also a post in the pd blog!). Many thanks go out to Richard Bernier, Michael Witt and the entire IOLUG community for being such great hosts. The day was a really interesting event and I look forward to seeing what they have planned for the spring!