Review of Getting Started with Cloud Computing: A LITA Guide. Eds. Edward M. Corrado and Heather Lea Moulaison. New York: Neal-Schuman Publisher, Inc., 2011. 214p. alk. paper, $65 (ISBN 9781555707491)

Tolley, Rebecca

English

East Tennessee State University

East Tennessee State UniversityDigital Commons @ East Tennessee State UniversityETSU Faculty Works Faculty Works5-1-2012Review of Getting Started with Cloud Computing:A LITA GuideRebecca TolleyEast Tennessee State University, tolleyst@etsu.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-worksThis Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in ETSU Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For moreinformation, please contact digilib@etsu.edu.Citation InformationTolley, Rebecca. 2012. Review of Getting Started with Cloud Computing: A LITA Guide. College and Research Libraries. 310-311.https://doi.org/10.5860/0730310 https://doi.org/10.5860/0730310 ISSN: 2150-6701Review of Getting Started with Cloud Computing: A LITA GuideCopyright StatementThe author retains copyright and thus is free to post the article on an institutional or personal web pagesubsequent to publication in C&RL.This review is available at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University: https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/5620310 College & Research Libraries May 2012scholarly book or journal article. We can look for ways to help learners make the curriculum personally meaningful so that they will accept the new information and be more likely to incorporate it into long-term memory. We can ensure that the curriculum includes a robust way for learners to act on the new information.Instructional Design for Librarians and Information Professionals provides an infor-mative and thought-provoking addition to the book-length offerings on instruc-tional design that have direct applicability for academic librarians. Other relevant titles include Laurie Richlin’s Blueprint for Learning (Stylus, 2006); Steven J. Bell and John D. Shank’s Academic Librarianship by Design: A Blended Librarian’s Guide to Tools and Techniques (American Library Asso-ciation, 2007); and Valeda Frances Dent’s Keeping the User in Mind (Chandos, 2009).In sum, there is much to appreciate in Farmer’s book, and little to criticize. I noticed several small editing errors, and the sample instructional design in chapter 3 needs clarification of the librarian’s role in the design and the lesson. But these are very minor blemishes in a strong and use-ful work. For me, the book’s greatest value resides in the opportunities it opens up for reexamining my options as a teacher through multiple lenses. Rather than limiting my concerns to the typical ones (selecting content; deciding how students will practice the skills I’m teaching; timing my classroom sessions; and assessment), Farmer invites me to consider much more. As I thought about topics such as the range of considerations in the preplanning stage of instructional design, how I might use the “Learning Activity Collaborative Plan-ning Checklist” to work more effectively with course instructors, and how I might employ agile design, I realized that Farm-er’s book has expanded my perspectives as a teacher and as a librarian.—Glenn Ellen Starr Stilling, Appalachian State University.Getting Started with Cloud Computing: A LITA Guide. Eds. Edward M. Cor-rado and Heather Lea Moulaison. New York: Neal-Schuman Publisher, Inc., 2011. 214p. alk. paper, $65 (ISBN 9781555707491). LC 2011-017261.A model volume appropriate for all types of libraries, Getting Started with Cloud Computing: A LITA Guide introduces and grounds readers to the changes, chal-lenges, and innovations promised by cloud computing. Roy Tennant’s foreword succinctly sums up the book as “chapter and verse” on how to effectively deploy them in your library. Within its opening chapter, “Perspectives on Cloud Com-puting in Libraries,” coeditors Heather Lea Moulaison and Edward M. Corrado provide a starting point for librarians with little knowledge of cloud computing and explain both its promises and realities. As experts in library technology topics, Mou-laison and Corrado vetted and edited each contribution to this guide, which covers librarians’ special concerns about data and issues of privacy, security, and own-ership that, perhaps, other organizations looking to cloud computing services may not concern themselves with. And they discuss the pluses of cloud computing: that it theoretically offers quick mobili-zation of services without an increase in personnel or infrastructure costs. Each subsequent chapter in part one primes librarians for comprehending all aspects of cloud computing. Rosalyn Metz’s “Understanding the Cloud: An Introduction to the Cloud” defines the cloud, lists five characteristics, three ser-vice models, and four deployment models, all of which provide context for readers to relate their working knowledge of services to concepts. H. Frank Cervone’s “Cloud Computing: Pros and Cons” persuades li-brarians to introduce cloud-based services one at a time so that they may be agile in responding to changes, but also so that they are not locked into long-term stifling relationships with one vendor. “What Cloud Computing Means for Libraries” discusses the opportunities that cloud computing brings for information technol-ogy organizations to reallocate resources and reconfigure personnel. Carl Grant of-Book Reviews 311fers an uncommon perspective as a vendor in “Head in the Cloud? A Librarian/Vendor Perspective on Cloud Computing.” Grant reminds us that cloud computing isn’t new at all and lists AOL, Compuserve, and OCLC as the first cloud computing mod-els. He believes that U.S. libraries will not adopt cloud computing services as quickly as European libraries because of the issues associated with the Patriot Act, and he pre-dicts that the future of librarianship itself may be reinvigorated by cloud computing. Christinger R. Tomer and Susan W. Alman build a case for cloud computing in their contribution “Cloud Computing for LIS Education.” They cite research from the early 1990s criticizing the lack of informa-tion technology laboratories in which LIS students can learn, experiment, and build infrastructure that they’ll be working with as professionals. Tomer and Alman argue that cloud computing laboratories are es-sential professional learning tools in LIS and archival programs. Specific technology is covered in the second part: Discovery, Koha, OCLC, DSpace, file-sharing, and SharePoint. John Davison’s “Building Push-Button Reposi-tories in the Cloud with DSpace and Ama-zon Web Services” provides a step-by-step model demonstrating how the University System of Ohio and Ohio’s private col-leges collaborated by using open-source software to store growing sets of digital collections. After much collaborative work and investment in infrastructure, the DRC cloud project offers a quick model for libraries and organizations within Ohio.Case Studies comprise the third and fi-nal part of the book. They range from using Amazon S3 service, which allows remote storage, to keeping LibGuides in the cloud, to the use of Dropbox by embedded librar-ians, to the use of Google Calendar, to using Google Forms in reference and instruction to using Ning and using VoiceThread in library instruction. And there’s a dissent-ing voice that cloud applications may not be the best solution. Edward Iglesias offers cheaper alternatives to OCLC and Amazon S3 in “Using Windows Home Server and Amazon S3 to Back Up High-Resolution Digital Objects to the Cloud,” without, per-haps, little additional training and a lower annual cost in the end. “Parting the Clouds: Use of Dropbox by Embedded Librarians” illustrates the use of a cloud file storage service used by embedded librarians at Murray State University in Kentucky. As the librarians worked and taught in various places, accessing their teaching materials from a central place was imperative. Since the university already had an internal server that the librarians used, Dropbox was considered redundant, but appropriate when librarians traveled off-campus and couldn’t access the shared campus drive. Anne Leonard’s “From the Cloud, a Clear Solution: How One Academic Library Uses Google Calendar” focuses on the good and bad aspects of the service and recommends that other libraries try it for improved productivity. Ann Whitney Glea-son and her colleagues at the University of Washington learned a valuable lesson, which she shares in “Not Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining: Using a Cloud Application May Not Always Be the Best Solution.” She concludes, after describing the experience they had using DimDim, a cloud comput-ing Web conferencing software, that “the best software for a particular application is sometimes not free.” The third part concludes with a promising cloud comput-ing product, VoiceThread, which Jennifer Ditkoff and Kara Young implement within library instruction sessions. While librarians may be familiar with many of the cloud computing services cov-ered in this guide, it offers some novelty in the ways in which they are employed by libraries to improve coordination and productivity, solve file-storage and file-sharing problems, and encourage student engagement in library instruction and use of library resources and services. Librar-ians embarking on cloud computing forays may benefit from information gleaned from the three parts of this guide, just as LIS students may be introduced to the topic via this LITA publication.—Rebecca Tolley-Stokes, East Tennessee State University.

Review of Getting Started with Cloud Computing: A LITA Guide

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