Agreed. It's much easier to face a preservation project of many terabytes of archival tif images that will never be used for presentation but must be maintained when you have an "endless supply" (wink wink) of storage out in the cloud rather than face everything that is associated with bringing a large storage appliance online. Not to mention growth planning for said appliance, backup planning and execution, etc...

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Esmé Cowles
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 11:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Libraries and IT Innovation

On Jul 17, 2013, at 2:01 PM, Matthew Sherman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> As for cloud computing I am rather unsure of how that can be applied 
> to the libraries.  Possibly it can be used as part of the collaborative space?
> Possibly it can be utilized for file redundancy in digital archives to 
> help with preservation of born digital records?  I simply am not sure 
> but it is an area of IT innovation so it would be neat to hear people's ideas.

I think cloud computing is very relevant to libraries because it lowers the barriers to entry for hosting servers and storage, and helps let people scale up on-demand.  

-Esme