Cloud-Based Services for your Library

In a technologically complicated, expensive and difficult-to-manage world where most institutions including libraries and their parent organizations are experiencing constrained conditions intensified by inadequate specialized staff, space limitations and particularly budget cuts, cloud computing can help them cope with such problems much more efficiently and cost-effectively. To respond to this need, the six-chapter book Cloud-Based Services for Your Library: A LITA Guide was published. Its major objectives are to help libraries considering cloud computing to start their exploration of these systems with a more informed perspective, to help bridge the gap between technical and organizational issues in technology adoption, to suggest approaches that work well in a virtualized environment and to provide readers with several cloud computing topics in theory and practice. Chapter 1, Cloud computing and virtualization in libraries, deals with an overview of the main theme accompanied by some elements and models of cloud computing and its implementation in libraries. Chapter 2, The landscape of cloud computing and virtualization adoption, reports on research carried out to examine virtualized and cloud computing adoption across the range of library IT services. Chapter 3, Selecting and implementing solutions, as a complement for Chapter 2, examines technical, organizational and environmental factors with a reference to library-specific ones affecting the adoption of cloud-based services. Chapters 4 and 5 mainly explore software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions in terms of their application and respective issues as well as characteristics along with some real examples. And finally, Chapter 6 entitled Best practice and recommendations, as a starting point for libraries which would like to move toward the cloud computing, suggests four approaches, namely, single-vendor cloud deployment, mixed-cloud management with SaaS, redundant and scalable multicloud deployments and distributed SaaS environments. As both libraries and librarians are increasingly shouldering heavy roles to keep themselves up with modern dynamic domains like cloud computing and virtualization, the book, in turn, helps librarians as pioneers of change refresh their attitude, approach, knowledge and skills in relation to the cloud-based services. Altogether, armed with helpful insights, concepts and examples, such an easy-to-read and well-ordered guide and text book, rooted in the knowledge, experience and empirical research of Erik T. Mitchell, can benefit librarians, information professionals, Information Technology (IT)-minded staff, interested researchers and Library and Information Science (LIS) professors and students. If we believe in the reality that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, reading works contributing in effect to the world of theory and practice will be highly predictable. It’s your choice!