Archana Venkatraman

Research and advisory firm Outsell’s latest report that libraries are shifting from content to technology spending with initiatives such as digitising existing archives, acquiring native digital content, and developing digital storage and retrieval systems, is both cheering and disturbing at the same time.

Cheering because it heralds the coming-of-age of a traditional public sector foundation of information. The metamorphosis of old, dusty paper-rich libraries into something new, exciting and state-of-art sounds fabulous.

The research, covering public, academic and corporate libraries, alludes to another Outsell study of info pros that revealed a surge in respondents preferring to start research through their organisations’ intranets – up from 5% in 2001, to 25% in 2008 – rather than through the open web.

"This shift in searching behaviour means digital libraries and repositories will increasingly become go-to contacts for relevant, high-quality, and easily accessible business information," said Ned May, director and lead analyst at Outsell. "Libraries will remain vital in driving and managing content to meet this user demand."

As the choice of information-accessing platform changes, libraries must turn their attention from gathering content to accessing it. And they are.

But in shifting focus to technology, libraries will depend on two of the most useful cloud-based services – data storage and software as a service (SaaS) tools – to give subscribers remote access. And this is what is disturbing, because we are hearing of high-profile losses of cloud-based data.

Last month, Microsoft admitted that during an "outage" its Sidekick servers had irretrievably lost the digital data of millions of T-Mobile Sidekick owners. Its cloud backs up contacts, images, and other personal data stored on the mobile phones of Sidekick T-Mobile users. Later the same week, Microsoft corporate vice president Roz Ho said changes had been made to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick service and initiated a more resilient backup.

The time between the data loss and the announcement that data is being recovered seemed an eternity to T-Mobile Sidekick users, many of whom migrated from T-Mobile to its rivals.

The implications of such an outage for the libraries are likely to scare off those already wary of technology.

The incident must shake cloud service providers out of complacency on data backup and they must rebuild the reputation of cloud-based technologies.

Isn’t Google launching a UK-focused ad campaign encouraging companies to make the switch from on-premise email to its cloud-based Google Apps suite with features such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Gtalk? Really, what we need is a reassurance campaign that data held on a cloud is safe and secure.

Archana Venkatraman is a reporter for IWR

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