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A cloud can be private or public:

As with any business related activity there are both risks and opportunities associated with using cloud computing services.

potentially a number of business and information risks associated with using cloud computing services.

noted that even if the cloud computing environment is managed wholly within NSW an appropriate risk assessment of the service and the provider should occur.

level of risk that an organisation attributes to a proposed cloud computing arrangement will vary according to the content or subject matter of their records

The content of the contract in these types of service arrangements is very important.

What are others saying? Australia Australasian Digital Recordkeeping Initiative (ADRI), Advice on managing the recordkeeping risks associated with cloud computing, July 2010, available at http://www.adri.gov.au Defence Signals Directorate (Commonwealth), Cloud computing security considerations, April 2011, available at http://www.dsd.gov.au/infosec/cloudsecurity.htm Department of Finance and Deregulation (Commonwealth), Cloud computing strategic direction paper: opportunities and applicability for use by the Australian Government, April 2011, available at http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/strategy-and-governance/docs/final_cloud_computing_strategy_version_1.pdf

International Archives and Records Association UK and Ireland, Cloud computing toolkit: guidance for outsourcing information storage to the cloud, August 2010, available at http://www.archives.org.uk/images/documents/Cloud_Computing_Toolkit-2.pdf – this guidance contains a comprehensive overview of the range of cloud computing services available and the recordkeeping considerations that apply to each CIO Council and Chief Acquisition Officers Council (USA), Creating effective cloud computing contracts for the Federal Government: best practices for acquiring IT as a service, February 2012, available at http://www.cio.gov/cloudbestpractices.pdf – this is a comprehensive and useful document for those seeking to procure cloud computing services

As individuals and members of organizations, we’re already choosing between desktop applications and cloud applications when it comes to e-mail, RSS, file storage, word processing and other simple applications. Sooner or later we’ll have to make this choice for mission-critical enterprise applications too

Libraries may soon be building and managing their own data centers.

For more practical, technical explanations of cloud computing, check out the Wikipedia article the Anatomy of Cloud Computing the MIT Technology Review Briefing on Cloud Computing.

For a discussion of problems and concerns about the digital cloud, read: How Secure is Cloud Computing? Security in the Ether Industry Challenges: The Standards Question

Thomson Reuters OpenCalais

OCLC's WorldCat

Before we began our work on the Commons on Flickr, some museum colleagues were concerned that engaging with the Flickr community would increase workloads greatly. While the monitoring of the site does take some work, the value gained via the users has far outweighed any extra effort. In some cases, users have dated images for us.

In subsequent use of the Flickr API, we appropriated tags users had added to our images, and now include them in our own collection database website (OPAC). We also retrieved geo-location data added to our images for use in third party apps like Sepiatown and Layar.

In our case the purpose of creating an API was to allow others to use our content.

So consider the questions above not in the context of should we or shouldn't we put our data online (via an API or otherwise) but rather in the context of managing expectations of the data's uptake.

Steps to an API

several important things which had to happen before we could provide a public web API. The first was the need to determine the licence status of our content.

The drive to open up the licensing of our content came when, on a tour we conducted of the Museum's collection storage facilities for some Wikipedian

This prompted Seb Chan to make the changes required to make our online collection documentation available under a mix of Creative Commons licences. (Chan, April 2009)

Opening up the licensing had another benefit: it meant that we had already cleared one hurdle in the path to creating an API.

The Government 2.0 Taskforce (http://gov2.net.au/about/) was the driver leading us to take the next step.

"increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information"

the first cultural institution in Australia to provided a bulk data dump of any sort.

The great thing about this use is that it exposes the Museum and its collection to the academic sector, enlightening them regarding potential career options in the cultural sector.

I will briefly mention some of the technical aspects of the API now for those interested. In line with industry best practice the Powerhouse Museum is moving more and more to open-source based hosting and so we chose a Linux platform for serving the API

Images are served from the cloud as we had already moved them there for our OPAC, to reduce outgoing bandwidth from the Museum's network.

Once we had the API up and running, we realised it would not be too much work to make a WordPress plug-in which allowed bloggers to add objects from our collection to their blogs or blog posts. Once built, this was tested internally on our own blogs. Then in early 2011 we added it to the WordPress plugin directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/powerhouse-museum-collection-image-grid/

One of the main advantages the API has over the data dump is the ability to track use.

It is also worth noting that since the API requests usually do not generate pages that are rendered in a browser it is not possible to embed Google Analytics tracking scripts in the API's output.

y requiring people to sign up using a valid email address before requesting an API key we are able to track API use back to individuals or organisations.

Concerns that people would use the API inappropriately were dealt with by adding a limit to the number of requests per hour each key can generate

"If libraries are to retain their role as curators of the intellectual products of society, their assets must be part of that search stream."

web entities such as DBpedia, which offers a Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia

libraries have begun to reconceptualize metadata and publish it on the web using linked data technologies, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) language and its extensions OWL, SKOS, and SPARQL.

library metadata is formatted and linked in RDF, then library content will surface more prominently in web search results

Recommendations from W3CThe report is still being finalized but the draft recommends that libraries:

— create web addresses using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as globally unique, web-compatible identifiers for the resources (any kind of object or concept) they manage and the metadata elements they use

— develop library data standards that are compatible with linked data

— use their expertise in metadata management to become full partners

— foster a discussion about open data and rights.

— explore using libraries' ethos of quality control in the curation and long-term preservation of linked data datasets and vocabularies.

"As the shared understanding expands, the benefits of publishing linked data are becoming clearer,"