Cloud computing in libraries

 Cloud Computing in Libraries

A little after I entered high school, around 10th grade in 2010, the commercialized version of the cloud had just become available to anyone who had the money to buy the storage that didn’t require any physical form. Just three years before, while in junior high, I had been using floppy disks to store word documents. Then in 8th grade I was the proud owner of a high-capacity USB also known as a jump drive or thumb drive (pick any name for the device but it was small and held the papers of my entire 8th grade english career!). You may be wondering what I meant by high-capacity; that USB contained a whopping 1 gigabyte of drive!  The cost was $35 in 2008 and I treasured my beloved USB that parents paid what was essentially a blood price.

Fast forward to 2025 and now the standard storage amount for a Google Drive is 15gb. You can sign into your email anywhere with wi-fi access and the document you’re working on is available to be picked up. No updating a new version to a physical device. Libraries are all about the physical version: books, DVDs, CDs. But now that we’re moving away from physical media, how does cloud computing play a part in what feels like the natural evolution for libraries? Marshall Breed writes that the management of library systems will now be going through a cloud based system, in their next phase of life, via third party vendors.

How intriguing, in about a decade and a half of its existence, that the cloud has replaced the need for physical storage as well as implementing centralized systems. I do believe that the issue of vendors will become a bigger problem if we rely on Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. instead of ourselves for such systems.

*Ariana Johnson-Lopez

Breeding, Marshall. (2019). Managing Tech and the Impact of Cloud Computing on Libraries. Computers in Libraries, 39(2), 9–11.