Roy Tennant, Mike Rylander and Stevan Harnad finished off the day at Access 2009
Roy started the first session with an overview of cloud computing and then examples of some of the emerging cloud-based ILS projects, such as the OLE Project (the goal being to design a new ILS) and Rochester's XC. He also indicated that OCLC's first Cloud SaaS product will be Circulation and it will be available in 4th quarter 2010, wtih full functionality to come in 2011.
Mike provided a quick summary of some of the key OS advantages and then talked about cloud computing and SaaS and suggested that the big disadvantage of SaaS is the inability to be flexible and run the software you want. A more promising option is PaaS, or Platform as a Service, although it also has a big disadvantage in that you may not be able to always get the apps you need from a specific vendor. The big advantage to Evergreen is that it's architecture facilitates SOA, SaaS and PaaS, given the more recent and appropriate architecture.
Stevan Harnad joined the Access conference over video connection using a special pre-recorded presentation (thanks for that Stevan!) and then answered questions from his office in Montreal. I don't know about anyone else at Access, but for the first time I have a clear sense of how to proceed with making Open Access a success at UPEI. An awesome summary by the dean of Open Access. The explanation of the ID/OA option with the "Request a Copy"pulled it all together for me.
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