Author Archives: Rosalyn Metz

Cloud computing is the new hot topic in IT. While many are talking about it, few actually understand what it is, how it’s being used, and what benefits it could offer to higher education. This session will first provide attendees with a baseline definition of cloud computing before moving into an attendee based discussion on how institutions are using the cloud. We will wrap up with a brief discussion on benefits of using the cloud. Participants will leave with a better understanding of what cloud computing is and ideas on how they can use it at their own institutions. Continue reading →

When most people think about cloud computing (if they think about it at all), it usually takes one of two forms: Infrastructure Services, such as Amazon EC2 and GoGrid, which provide raw, elastic computing capacity in the form of virtual servers, and Platform Services, such as Google App Engine and Heroku, which provide preconfigured application stacks and specialized deployment tools. Several providers, however, offer access to large public datasets that would be impractical for most organizations to download and work with locally. From a 67-gigabyte dump of DBpedia’s structured information store to the 180-gigabyte snapshot of astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, chemistry and biology to economic and geographic data, these datasets are available instantly and backed by enough pay-as-you-go server capacity to make good use of them. We will present an overview of currently-available datasets, what it takes to create and use snapshots of the data, and explore how the library community might push some of its own large stores of data and metadata into the cloud. Continue reading →