Global Web Scale
Posted On Mar 1 2010I just got back from the first ever OCLC EMEA Regional Council meeting in The Netherlands. Much has been written and discussed regarding OCLC’s governance changes, but that is not really what I wanted to address. This meeting was the best I have ever seen for non-US participants and members for OCLC. And I’m not just saying that because OCLC’s Web-scale strategy was a central part of the discussion. OK, that is why I’m saying it. “EMEA”–Europe, Middle East, and Africa–is completely an American invention, used to simplify business dealings across an entire region. OCLC certainly didn’t invent it, but …
Getting it right
Posted On Sep 25 2009Since announcing OCLC’s web-scale management services strategy, it seems that the term “web-scale” (or “webscale” depending on your editing preferences) has been catching on a bit. At first, some users diluted the meaning that Lorcan Dempsey had labored to establish in the library space. And I will continue to argue that web-scale in the context of library automation–especially management systems–is a major sea-change. 5000 transactions per second may be no great shakes for Google, Amazon, and Twitter, but in library automation, we’ve never seen anything like this before. Then web-scale began to catch on a bit, and I thought the …
Web-scale: Portfolio Director’s Cut
Posted On Aug 18 2009As you might imagine, I’ve been doing a lot of presentations about Web-scale lately…both the general concept and how it applies to the web-scale management services that my team is building for circulation and delivery, print and licensed acquisitions, and license and rights management. Lots of people have been asking for copies of the presentation that I gave at ALA. I used to always have problems sharing slides. For one thing, the joke slides never work out of context; for another, I try very hard to avoid bulleted lists of things, also making context-less Powerpoint viewing difficult. Now I can gladly say, …