Call for comments

LMS suppliers have indicated that, to a large extent, future offerings may well be cloud based, meaning the software and the resultant databases will be hosted on servers not owned by the library, with a high probability of being hosted on servers outside Australia.

Given recent examples of the unreliability of cloud-based services, such as the Swiss IT architect who lost thousands of photographs because Flickr mis-identified him as the subject of a complaint. (Initially he was told the photos were unrecoverable but later, and somewhat mysteriously, the account and most of the photos were restored.) Another, possibly more disturbing example, was the Egyptian government’s disruption of Web access during Egypt’s recent crisis; if entire populations can lose access to the Web is the cloud trustworthy enough to host our records?

At the Perth Library Camp 2011, James Hunt (me) from the City of Gosnells and Michael Wiebrands from Curtin University co-hosted a discussion session on the perceived inevitability of LMS suppliers switching all future offerings to cloud-based services and the potential risks and advantages.

Out of this robust discussion it became apparent that many library and information service staff and managers have concerns about the issue but, with long term planning and extensive consultation, it may be possible to ameliorate some, if not all, of these concerns.

To this end I have set up this page in order to provide an initial meeting place for interested parties to offer opinions and insights, ask questions and start collaborative measures and strategies to address our concerns.

I’m sure that, as we develop, a more formal structure or framework may be needed to foster our forward progress but, at this stage, I am envisioning this site as a kind of on-line white board where we can register our interest, maybe layout some dot points of your concerns and considerations, and start to establish the network that will give us all some measure of hope that we can be properly prepared to discuss our concerns with LMS vendors when the time comes.

(As an aside, I appreciate that this site may not be the preferred on-line resource for this discussion. Unfortunately, as some of you may be aware, I work behind the firewall-from-hell and the number of sites and services I can access while at work is substantially restricted. If anyone has suggestions for alternatives I am more than happy to see what I can access. Furthermore I promise to make the site a bit more interesting as we go along.)

Please, lets start the discussion; what do you think, what are you concerned about, how should we move forward?