Returning from the Bureaucratic Abyss and Reaching into the Clouds

I know, I know. I have done the thing that I hate most about blogs. I disappeared for a couple of months. I hate that when other people do it. I have no excuse really other than getting caught up in that annual bureaucratic abyss called budgets, annual evaluations and reports, and end-of-semester work. I am also preparing for retirement from my position as director of the Archives of Appalachia and preparing for a new challenge working in North Carolina, but enough about me.

Now that I have gotten caught up on all of those things, I decided to go back and finish the assignments that I missed in 23 Things for Archivists. I am starting back with week 10 on Cloud Computing. After reading through the resources listed, my first thought is that perhaps it is not surprising that there is so much disagreement on how to define or describe cloud computing. It is a cloud, after all. On many Appalachian mornings, you often find that the clouds have descended and draped themselved around the mountains or settled into the valleys. Walking through a cloud on a mountaintop, you feel cut off from the rest of the world below, but you can not grasp it in your hand or hold on to it. I think of cloud computing the same way. I do not have technical knowledge to understand how it all works, but I can sure experience the effects of it.

At the Archives of Appalachia, our main experiences with "cloud computing" have been through photosharing on Flickr and with the creation of an Archives of Appalachia Facebook page. Both cloud computing applications made what seemed impossible, before because of the lack of resources and technical support, not only possible but easy. Do we have a wonderful digital library complete with metadata and information about each image available in Flickr. No, but we have something. We also have the possibility of users adding to our knowledge with the addition of tag and comments. In fact, we did have a visitor to our Flickr site identify the individuals in one of our photos and describe the event captured in the photograph. This would not have been possible if we had waited until we had the time and the money to launch a fully described digital library site. Both of our experiences with Flickr and with Facebook were, I believe, productive and cost effective. They were worthwhile endeavors that I hope will prove useful into the future rather than something that disappears into the cloud.

I do have some doubts about cloud computing especially in the area of personal privacy. I wonder just how much information is being compiled about individuals in the cloud. I wonder if these resources will remain viable and affordable into the future. We are not trusting the cloud to store our digital images and are keeping multiple copies of our uncompressed images. I think that what bothers me most is that it just seems too good to be true that with Flickr you can pay $29.95 a year and upload unlimited numbers of photographs. I am wondering what are the hidden costs and will this continue to be possible.