What’s in the Cloud?

There are a variety of cloud-based services in the library world. The most obvious is cloud-based access to a library’s book and AV collections through the online catalog (OPAC) that is part of the library’s integrated library system (ILS). OPACs can be overlaid with cloud-based front ends or recommender systems to make them more user-friendly. Bibliocommons is an example of a cloud-based front end for public libraries that works in tandem with a variety of ILSs. Bibliocommons and competing offerings from other vendors not only replace the search and discovery functionality of the OPAC but can also replace some patron account-related tasks, such as placing holds, paying fines, and updating user profiles. Some also provide a discovery experience based on community-contributed content, such as user-generated tags and reviews. Discovery layers like Serials Solutions’ Summon, EBSCO’s EDS, Ex Libris’s Primo Central, and others are meant to access all of a library’s data silos, not just resources cataloged in the ILS. Such discovery layers can provide access to special collections in the institutional repository and to products hosted outside of the library. For example, scans of public domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository can be found via the discovery layer of its academic library partners.

If a library wants more than the discovery layer in the cloud, library technology vendors including Innovative Interfaces and OCLC have either implemented or are in the process of launching completely new ILSs in the cloud, and open source providers, such as ByWater Solutions, can deliver cloud-based hosting services for the Koha ILS.

Electronic resources can also be made available through extramural repositories. Google Scholar incorporates metadata from journal indexes, article repositories, and other sources to offer web-scale access to scholarship that can be accessed at a patron’s library of choice. OverDrive, the most popular library ebook vendor, works with public and academic libraries and is making strides to integrate seamlessly with online library systems. 3M’s new ebook service, unveiled last year, permits users to sync their reading on multiple devices but still requires an initial download of the entire ebook file (that is, patrons don’t read a streaming book but a downloaded one).

Citation management software in the cloud can double as a platform for sharing content, forming communities around research topics, and recommending resources. Mendeley, for example, offers citation management through a web browser, though, to be fully functional, users need to download a client to their local computer.

New services may offer innovative approaches to managing scholarly communication electronically. Third Iron will let academic researchers browse and save new journal content through a service called BrowZine, available for the iPad.

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Other services and products may also be of interest. Mobile phone apps can add value to cloud-based library data. OCLC’s WorldCat mobile site aims to direct patrons to the closest library owning a certain book by mashing-up data from WorldCat holdings, library locations, and user locations. StackMap shelf-mapping software is a new service that allows libraries to show users a map of the book’s physical location in the library based on a prerecorded call number range. Unlike radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, which potentially allow for real-time search of a book via location tracking, this service is less dynamic but nonetheless useful.

Lastly, backups to the cloud can protect all kinds of library data—from repository contents to blog posts—from loss owing to fire, flood, local power blackouts, or other natural or computer-related disasters that could cause data to disappear. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform is a cloud service in the technologist’s sense of the term: it is scalable, metered, dynamic, and completely hosted by the bookselling giant. Libraries with technology staff can
use EC2 to implement virtual servers.