Bright future for libraries in the cloud

Academic Library Student Learning Concept

Siân Harris looks at what role cloud-based services play in libraries today, their benefits and limitations and what challenges remain.

For Tom Shaw, associate director for digital innovation and open research at Lancaster University in the UK, the cloud is ‘absolutely fundamental to the way we operate as a library and has been for a number of years’.

He said that, in addition to the collections hosted on vendor platforms, with most of the library’s systems and software, the university has taken a strategic decision to use a software as a service approach. This includes using Alma as the main library system, Primo as the discovery tool and other cloud-hosted services. Only a few, more bespoke library services are hosted at the university and even these are on central university servers, not in the library.

Such an approach has become increasingly common over the past decade or so, but why has the cloud become a key part of many libraries?[…]