Planning cloud-based disaster recovery for digital assets: the innovative librarian's guide

摘要

Library disasters are as old as the razing of the Great Library of Alexandria, but the heterogeneous and distributed nature of electronic resources offer fresh challenges to the protection and recovery of library resources, the maintenance of access to resources, and the continuity of library operations. Hastings, who is currently the Library Technology Consultant for the Northeast Kansas Library system and who dealt with clouding computing in her book Outsourcing Technology: A Practical Guide for Librarians, outlines these challenges (some of which might not be obvious) and lays out the promise of robust and cost-effect disaster recovery that cloud based systems provide. Hastings starts by listing what sort of disasters exists. Some (fire and flood) are common to print and electronic resources, others (electrical outrages or hacking) are unique to the digital world. Some of these disasters are such that one can be unaware that they are even happening until after the damage is done.