Smarter Libraries Through Technology: Library Management at the National Level

摘要

The advancement of technology enables ever larger groups of libraries to participate in shared systems that manage their collections and enable access to their communities. Year-by-year hardware components become faster, smaller, with ever more computing power or storage capacities. Modern services-oriented architecture and clustering technologies enable the creation and global deployment of massive platforms able to serve millions of users. At least at the infrastructure level, computer applications that scale almost infinitely can be built. This char-acteristic of large-scale computing brings important implications into the realm of libraries. What is the right level of cooperation or consolidation relative to how libraries implement their automation systems? Does it benefit libraries to share systems at the largest possible scale, or do individual or modest-scale implementations hold advantages?