Feature


Libraries, the cloud and Covid-19


Remote access to a library’s resources and services has become especially important following the emergence of the new coronavirus, writes David Stuart


4 Research Information October/November 2020


Libraries, like many institutions, have shifted away from local hardware and software installation and towards the access of services over the internet. The shift has been driven by the promise of both cost savings and the provision of better services. The Integrated Library System (ILS) has traditionally been the centre of a library’s technological infrastructure – integrating acquisition, cataloguing and circulation information – and these were some of the first services that libraries started to move across to the cloud around 10 years ago. Since then other library services have also moved into cloud environments, along with services of the wider institutions that are migrating everything from financial systems to human resource systems. The reason for the shift to the cloud is


simple, but the benefits are enormous, as Jane Burke, VP of strategic initiatives at Ex Libris (a ProQuest company) explained: ‘We release software into the cloud for everyone, ensuring they’re all on the same version. We can monitor the cloud’s performance 24/7 and can proactively stop anything bad from happening. We can also make improvements at a much larger scale. For example, this year we released a new version of the index for our discovery services – it has four billion objects in it,


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