I just got the bill for the first month of hosting this blog on Amazon Web Services. The total for the month was $23.60, and includes:

• data transfer charges for all in-bound and out-bound content;
• a full-time use of a LINUX micro-sized Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (with backup to the Elastic Block Store (EBS));
• a Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket for static files (Cascading Style Sheet and JavaScript files, images, and other media); and
• use of the Amazon CloudFront content distribution network.

All told, I’m pretty pleased with the costs — particularly as I was considering the amortized cost of buying a new server to replace the one I had been using for the past five years. The itemized bill is included below.

Given the success and satisfaction level with this project on Amazon Web Services, I’m going to commit to a year-long “reserved” EC2 instance that drops the hourly cost for the instance even further. Based on running an instance continually for 732 hours per month, the cost for the EC2 part of the bill drops from $14.64 to $9.62. (The monthly total of $9.62 comes from $5.12 per month for the hourly charge plus one-twelfth of the annual $54 charge to reserve an instance.) Assuming the rest of the variables stay constant, that is $18.58 per month or about $220 per year.

If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of “disruptive innovation” in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to subscribe to my FriendFeed stream where these topics and more are posted and discussed throughout the week.

The User-Driven Purchase Giveaway Library

“[W]e have reached the important tipping point where digital files can be read on machines that are nearly as good as paper books and where paper books can be created and delivered nearly as quickly, cheaply, and reliably as digital files. This makes it possible for libraries to radically rethink their fundamental approach to providing documents to users.

In this EDUCAUSE Review article, David Lewis — dean of the IUPUI University Library — proposes a brief thought experiment where he argues that it is more cost-effective for academic libraries to stop purchasing physical items just-in-case. Rather libraries should acquire the rights for digital delivery and print-on-demand production of works from publishers, suggesting that the licensing and production costs would be cheaper in the long run than buying, cataloging, circulating, and storing the physical artifacts. Lewis mentions use of the Espresso Book Machine, a earlier topic on DLTJ and I’ve commented on Lewis’ work before, and I highly recommend looking at the full description of his thought experiment.

Amazon’s Kindle Singles e-books: One shrewd business move

Amazon’s Kindle store is getting more like a music store everyday. Now you can buy a whole book or just a single—an e-book that’s about twice as long as a New Yorker feature. In a statement, Amazon called on writers, business types and other big thinkers to create Kindle Singles.

This post on ZDNet is an opinion piece about Amazon’s announcement for the Kindle Singles program. A “Single” is intended to be longer than an article but shorter than a full length book — about 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages, according to Amazon’s press release). But what it really seems to be about is the disintermediation of traditional publishers in the Kindle digital distribution world.

Blackboard to Sell Online Courses Through New Partnership

Blackboard announced today that it is teaming up with a for-profit education provider, K12 Inc., to sell online courses to colleges that want to outsource their remedial offerings. The companies say their plan will offer a new way for students who lack basic skills to get caught up. Blackboard would sell online courses that are designed and taught by employees of K12. The courses would be delivered on the Blackboard course-management system. It is the first time that the company has sold full courses, and not just software to deliver them.

Very interesting. A posting at the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus news stream. This is arguably a Christensen-inspired disruptive path. Blackboard and K12 create a product that takes the unwanted consumers from market incumbents (those that need remedial work to meet the minimum standards for starting credit-earning courses). While doing it establish a tight vertical market where you can add value. Then move “up-market” and start to take other low-margin consumers from incumbents. Will we see Blackboard teaming up with for-profit education companies to offer associates and bachelor degrees next?

How energy-efficient is cloud computing?

Researchers have found that, at high usage levels, the energy required to transport data in cloud computing can be larger than the amount of energy required to store the data.

The researchers looked at the aggregation of energy needed to store and process data on a user’s own computer versus using servers “in the cloud.” The PsysOrg.com article is a brief summary of the study to be published in the Proceedings of the IEEE.

One Step Closer to a National Digital Library

Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America’s collective intellectual wealth within everyone’s reach? Robert Darnton, the historian who directs the Harvard University Library, has been one of the most public champions of the idea. This past weekend, Mr. Darnton convened a group of 42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds to talk about how to build that library. In a short statement, the group endorsed the idea of “a Digital Public Library of America,” envisioning it as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources” drawn from the country’s libraries, archives, museums, and universities.

This is another short news post from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus news stream and it takes the form of an interview with Robert Darnton. Although the details of a U.S.-oriented National Digital Library still seem to be sparse — the most comprehensive information comes from an article by Darton in the New York Review of Books — the implementation of this concept is certainly something to keep an eye one.

Last Friday, Andrew Pace (Executive Director of Networked Library Services for OCLC) was interviewed by Richard Wallis of Talis on OCLC’s recent announcement of a cloud-based library management service. As part of that conversation, Richard and Andrew touched on the ongoing debate on the OCLC record use policy. Below is a transcript from that part of the interview (with time markers from the start of the interview).

Richard Wallis (27:00)

What about [libraries'] local data? By providing data up onto the OCLC platform, will that data be restricted in its use — how they can use it — or will it be totally open for them to use it in any way that they want to?

Andrew Pace (27:17)

That data is the library’s data.

Richard Wallis (27:21)

One of the reasons I ask that question is obviously we’re aware of the issues about bibliographic record reuse licensing that is going on at the moment. Do you see that conversation having any impact on the back-end data or the usage statistics data or anything like that?

Andrew Pace (27:41)

I imagine there will be service-level agreements we’ll build for the data that are going into library management services, but I am reluctant to combine what is going there with the record use policy discussions. I think as the record use policies are under revision — they are under discussion right now — I think libraries are cognizant of all of the data issues, but I am reluctant to tie the two together completely.

Richard Wallis (28:11)

So you probably see the bibliographic conversation separate from the raw data type conversation.

Andrew Pace (28:20)

Yeah, I think they are related to each other but I think they are separate conversations.

I think this is absolutely the right answer, and I’m glad to see the distinction between the shared bibliographic data and the holdings/circulation-transaction data so cleanly separated. They are related, but in the case of the former it is truly the library’s data. Earlier on in the interview, Andrew addressed the issue of how OCLC would respond to disclosure requests from law enforcement agencies.

Richard Wallis (21:35)

How would OCLC handle an inquiry under the [USA] Patriot Act or something like that?

Andrew Pace (21:42)

I might beg off on that as being a legal question, but it is one that we have asked about what it means for that data. I’m not sure it is going to be entirely different than how libraries would have to deal with it on a local system.

Richard Wallis (22:02)

I suppose the only concern is if you have the records for transactions in a signifcant number of libraries, it may actually be somewhere that government star people might want to wander and ask questions. I suppose that is where it is different in this environment.

Andrew Pace (22:20)

Yeah, and what I’m arguing is that it would be similar situation to software as a service or other hosted applications as well. But I’m not going to attempt any kind of legal answer since I’m not a lawyer.

Richard Wallis (22:37)

Ah, that’s disappointing. I could have quoted you back to yourself in a year’s time, but never mind, I understand why you ducked that question. I would have done so as well.

For me, this is further evidence that OCLC would consider the transaction data to be owned by the library. I’m not a lawyer either, but this would seem to push the responsibility for responding to a law enforcement agent request to the member library. Hopefully, there is legal precedent to make that stick.

Overall, it is a good interview that really puts some added definition to the plans for WorldCat Local Library Management Services.

Last week, OCLC announced a “strategy to move library management services to Web scale.” With this move, OCLC is rebranding “WorldCat Local” to include functions typically associated with an integrated library system. From the press release:

OCLC plans to release Web-scale delivery and circulation, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components to WorldCat Local, continuing the integration of library management services to create the Web-scale, cooperative library service. OCLC will begin piloting the Web-scale management service components this year.

There are many thing going on here. So, in order to get our bearings I think it is useful to break this down into two parts: the broader scope of web-scale integrated library system components and the narrower scope of the “quick start” trial version of the patron interface to WorldCat.org. But first we need to tackle the phrase “WorldCat Local.”

What is “WorldCat Local”?

OCLC now seems to be rebranding “WorldCat Local” from a discovery layer service to a replacement of a local integrated library system (although OCLC seems to go through great pains not to use the phrase “integrated library system” to describe this new offering). This rebranding varies depending on the page you are viewing: the press release has the quote at the top of this post while the first link in that press release (to the Web-scale, cooperative library management service) seems to speak of WorldCat Local in its 2007 definition. Andrew Pace’s blog post is somewhere in the middle: “OCLC is extending the WorldCat Local platform to include circulation and delivery, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components.” In a conversation on the Code4Lib IRC channel, Roy Tennant says “AFAIK (as far as I know) WorldCat Local, which formerly was completely bounded by the catalog part, now will have different components, one of which is the catalog.”

Since the branding seems to be in flux, in this post I’m going to refer to WorldCat Local Web-scale Management Service (WCL-WMS) and WorldCat Local Discovery Service (WCL-DS). Any resemblance to current or future OCLC product names is quite definitely a coincidence.

Web-Scale Integrated Library System

OCLC’s vision is similar to Software as a Service (SaaS)¹ but is distinguished by the cooperative “network effect” of all libraries using the same, shared hardware, services and data, rather than the alternative model of hosting hardware and software on behalf of individual libraries. Libraries would subscribe to Web-scale management services that include modular management functionality. Moreover, libraries would benefit from the network-level integration of numerous services that are not currently part traditional integrated library systems, e.g., Knowledge Base Integration, WorldCat Collection Analysis, WorldCat Selection, WorldCat Local, etc..

Further down the Web-scale management services page there is a list of proposed services: Web-Scale Circulation and Delivery, Web-Scale Print and Electronic Acquisitions, Web-Scale License Management, Web-Scale Self-Configuration, Web-Scale Workflow, and Web-Scale Cooperative Intelligence. The list also has brief descriptions of each of these services.

Trial Version of Patron Interface

Initial Thoughts

It is this second effect that has caught my eye the most. When pushing the back-room library automation tasks of circulation, acquisitions and such from local systems to “the cloud”, we’re fundamentally talking about a system migration. We’ve got to unload all of the records from our current system, massage them however we need to, put put them in another system. The twist comes from the fact that the other system is not the library’s own. I have no doubt that OCLC can work with existing ILS vendors to migrate their information into OCLC. My questions and concerns come at the other end — what if you want to migrate from the cloud back to a local system?

This is where considerations of OCLC-as-a-cooperative take over. If OCLC were acting as a cooperative — acting on the best behalf of its members — there would be no question that the data could easily come back out. The announcement, backlash, and response to the proposed changes to the record use policy are, however, a dark cloud² over any reading of OCLC’s intentions. In a world where I could trust the cooperative to provide single-item lookups and batch aggregated extracts of holdings and acquisition data from the SaaS, what OCLC is offering could be a good thing. If it came along with demonstrations of real cost reductions (not simply “reducing the rate of rise” of costs) it would be even better. But OCLC has turned into a behemoth much larger than the collective whole of the collaborative, and I’m not sure I can trust them (collectively) at this point farther than I can throw the headquarters building in Dublin, OH.

Other Interesting Tidbits

In a future post, I’ll start to summarize the reactions to the OCLC announcement.

Footnotes

1. Software as a Service is a model for deploying software where a firm provides the hosting and support of a system for a client. For example, Google Docs is a SaaS deployment for office automation applications and Salesforce.com is a supplier of a customer relationship management system. As opposed to a model of software-purchase-plus-maintenance, SaaS involves a ongoing subscription fee. For more information, see the Wikipedia article on the topic.
2. Please pardon the cloud-computing pun.