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An interesting observation by a British librarian that the new, incoming model of cataloging done and stored in the cloud by vendors will cause some shifting in practices.   Namely, vendors' records will be seen as "master records."  Also, the sheer number of different people using the same "master record" will result on an easing of standards, while at the same time a governing structure will have to be set up in order for libraries to determine which standards to loosen and which to adhere to.

Ok. I am seriously tired of the popular fiction/non-fiction side of ebooks. Basically Penguin is saying that they will grant libraries access to their ebooks in the way that will tick off your patrons the most, so that they will never want to use your service. Why does 3M say ok to this? Because Penguin dropped OverDrive earlier this year and this is a new way to entice people to their 3M Cloud Library product. Does MOBIUS really want to work with a company that will accept less?

A TED presentation from Sugata Mitra about designing a "School in the Cloud," to create a SOLE or Self Organized Learning Environment.

I'm just learning of this today. Apparently they are only offering 1GB of free storage, which puts them at half of what Dropbox offers for free. That said, Dropbox is painfully slow at upload and download and Google storage is insanely cheap. I just bought 20GB of storage for my photo archive and it costs me a WHOPPING $5/year - and the extra storage is shared by all my Google apps which I'm guessing will include Drive. 

Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational thinking and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. The cloud hosted system is now available to teachers, schools and districts

An article about a trend today to use apps that track and record behavior and wearable fitness devices, and who owns the data those devices store in the cloud. I also found it interesting there was little analysis of how the data could be severely skewed by age and demographics; that the behaviors and data stored could be from people who don't care or want it spread it to the world.

Paul Otlet was a Belgian inventor who had several visionary ideas, such as a "World City" which would be a gathering of all the leading institutions of the world that would radiate knowledge and the Universal Decimal Classification scheme which is still used in some libraries. He also had a concept in 1934 for a radiated library that was in some ways a precursor to the Internet. It was limited by the technology he knew at the time, and consisted of a center where users would call in to ask for research and information to be displayed, which would then be displayed on a television screen. Aside from the need to call in some of his concepts are similar to early community access cable television.

HP is offering a service to create magazines and other serial publications in the "cloud." What is interesting is both print and digital publishing is offered. Some of the publications listed do use an ISSN number, but it looks like it's up to the author to obtain it. Print options include worldwide shipping and direct mail, while it looks like the digital version requires a MagCloud account to read the material, although it is available as a downloadable PDF. What I find most interesting is how this service effectively replaces a traditional publisher altogether, although some of the features a publisher can offer--such as marketing and industry contacts, are missing. Digital prices to the consumer are substantially less than print, but I can't find anything about pricing to the user without signing up for an account.

This was a concept that I wasn't too sure if it wasn't ready for prime time or was simply a bad idea. Library patrons could sign up for a "Cloud" account and be given a thin client laptop that would access a Windows 7 image via Citrix which is "their" computer to install programs on or use as needed. However the initial outlay was $300,000 with $5,000 a year ongoing maintenance costs and considerable bandwidth requirements to stream an HD Windows desktop. Further it was limited to only laptops used in the library with a maximum base of 160 users. I honestly couldn't see this as a good idea because of the cost and limited use. It would be cheaper to rent out laptops and re-image when they are returned.

Interesting news from Overdrive.

Probably more enterprise oriented than we'll ever use, but an interesting website to visit to get an idea of current trends and developments.

If you don't already know what 2 factor authentication is - it's the use of a second out of band communication channel that is used in addition to your password. In the case of Google it means that when you go to log in they will send you a text message with a 6 digit numerical code that you'll type in as well. This means that would be hackers would need to not only know your password but also have physical access to your phone.  I've already enabled this feature for Google apps @mobiusconsortium.org - if you'd like to enable it for your account (it takes like 10 minutes to get set up and fix your applications) just let me know.