I didn't actually have to do this week's readings, but I found that I couldn't comment intelligently on anyone's reading responses without reading the articles. Then, once I read them, I figured I'd post. It's getting hard to find people to comment on and I need a couple, myself...
What is CLoud Computing?I thought this was a really useful analysis of the different methods of collaboration available in today's networked environment. I just finished doing a poster on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for 2000, and one of the things it discussed was "distributed GIS," where the different pieces, maybe even the application used to create and display the product, are in different locations. At the time I read about it, I was thinking how this would have the same equalizing and empowering effect for small-budget libraries as the internet did. Cloud computing strikes me as a similar thing, although I am looking at it more from a collaborative standpoint than a necessarily capitalist one. That being said, given the increasing stability that will come with experience I can see a time where there will be specialty libraries all over the country, and public and academic libraries will have access to their entirely digitized collections, and all of this will be accomplished through collaboration and the magical fuzziness of cloud computing...but maybe I misunderstood altogether...
VIdeoIt was difficult to pay attention because the narrator talked like a seedy investigative reporter and looked really strange. Anyway, it was good enough; it went over pretty much everything from the first article. It did provide examples of the different types of cloud computing, which is always a nice way to get something concrete in your mind.
Future of Libraries ArticleI agreed, pretty much 100%, with everything. Some of his suggestions for what libraries can do to cement their roles in the community and preserve the community history are things that I will bring with me to work to see if we can implement them.
