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For Tom Shaw, associate director for digital innovation and open research at Lancaster University in the UK, the cloud is ‘absolutely fundamental to the way we operate as a library and has been for a number of years’. He said that, in addition to the


collections hosted on vendor platforms, with most of the library’s systems and software, the university has taken a strategic decision to use a software as a service approach. This includes using Alma as the main library system, Primo as the discovery tool and other cloud-hosted services. Only a few, more bespoke library services are hosted at the university and even these are on central university servers, not in the library. Such an approach has become


increasingly common over the past decade or so, but why has the cloud become a key part of many libraries? ‘We see real advantages in terms of


reducing the resourcing implications, the technical overheads of running things ourselves in-house,’ Shaw explained. ‘With Alma, for instance, we pay Ex Libris to run that as a service on our behalf. If it falls over that’s a phone call or a ticket we raise with them, which is a much more efficient way of looking at managing risk. We just don’t have the luxury of large numbers of staff who can do the sorts of things that need doing in a non-cloud environment, such as managing hardware and servers,


installing patches, upgrading software, as well as doing innovative stuff and building new systems. Cloud has enabled us to free up staffing resource to do the things where we get real impact and real value. And it is also about trying to avoid reinventing the wheel; we can buy something in that usually is better than what we would have built in-house.’


Benefits of scale Beyond technical capacity and risk, there are benefits of scale with pooling resources, as Matt Hayes, managing director, technology from SAGE (Talis & Lean Library), observed: ‘When we think about “libraries in the cloud” at Lean Library and Talis, we think less about the storage benefits and more about improved discovery of all the library has to offer, and the ability to provide added value on the open web, outside the library’s digital or physical infrastructure.’ One example he shared is that Lean


Library aggregates open access databases on behalf of libraries and provides libraries with tools to surface relevant content from these databases when their patrons encounter paywalls online. The tools also enable the library to provide added context to such content, to support their curation and discovery missions. ‘Moving library systems to the cloud


would allow for greater interoperability. In that respect, it makes it easier for libraries


“Beyond technical capacity and risk, there are benefits of scale with pooling resources”


to deliver their services or resource on third-party websites and platforms – essentially, wherever their users are,’ Hayes added. Gloria Gonzalez, senior agile product


owner at Zepheira, part of EBSCO, had a similar observation: ‘[Our] Library.Link Network is a cloud-based service that is platform agnostic, so it works with any catalogue that libraries use and it transforms their data into a format called BIBFRAME, which allows library data to become decentralised and helps libraries meet their users on the web where they’re searching.’ BIBFRAME is a web-native standard that


allows libraries to publish structured data so it’s more visible on the web. Gonzalez explained the benefits: ‘Previously to this new format being available, catalogues didn’t show up in library searches. They were not indexed by crawlers. In this new format, all of that [library] data is open on the web. Indexers can crawl that information and provide access into their search engines. Having the same


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