Cloud Computing & Libraries

Hello, it’s Carly again, writing on cloud computing in libraries! I found these articles using Academic Search Complete (formerly Premier) through the Palomar College library databases.

If you’ve worked with Google Docs, you are probably already familiar with the process of saving a document from one place and being able to access it elsewhere. These are just the basic workings of cloud computing.

In the article On the Clouds: A New Way of Computing, author Yan defines cloud computing this way: “The term “cloud computing” means that: customers do not own network resources, such as hardware, software, systems, or services; network resources are provided through remote data centers on a subscription basis; and network resources are delivered as services over the Web.” (Yan, 2010)

It makes a lot of sense for libraries to use cloud computing instead of hardware, since there is so much data that needs to be stored, analyzed, accessed remotely, and also accessed by many different people. Cloud computing allows for limitless storage and ease of access. Where hardware storage solutions may seem “safer” they can ultimately fail. The odds of all the servers becoming inaccessible with all the data irretrievable in a cloud are very remote.

Sosa-Sosa and Hernandez-Ramirez write in their article A File Storage Service on a Cloud Computing Environment for Digital Libraries on the benefits of cloud computing. “Data availability, scalability, elastic service, and pay-per-use are attractive characteristics found in the cloud service model.” (Sosa-Sosa & Hernandez-Ramirez, 2012)

Being able to pay by usage is helpful for libraries, who always have budget constraints. If the data storage fee is becoming too large, the data can always be audited to pare down old statistics and things not in use, or those things could be transferred to external hardware storage while leaving the most important, relevant, and up-to-date information accessible in the cloud.

For more reading on what cloud computing is and how it works, including an argument against it, see this article from PCMag. 

I hope you’ve learned a little bit about how cloud computing works and how it can benefit a library.

Carly Janine Gutierrez
4/27/20

Works Cited

Sosa-Sosa, V. J., & Hernandez-Ramirez, E. M. (2012). A File Storage Service on a Cloud Computing Environment for Digital Libraries. Information Technology & Libraries, 31(4), 34–45. https://doi-org.ezproxy.palomar.edu/10.6017/ital.v31i4.1844
 
Yan Han. (2010). On the Clouds: A New Way of Computing. Information Technology & Libraries, 29(2), 87–92. https://doi-org.ezproxy.palomar.edu/10.6017/ital.v29i2.3147