 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host as always, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show, whatever you want to call us. There is some disagreement in the world about what you call these things or what people want to call these things, but whatever you want to call us, we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. Call us whatever you want, but join us. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record all of our shows and post them on to our website. They get put up on our YouTube channel for the Library Commission so you can go ahead and watch anything that you couldn't attend live there. Both the show, the live show on Wednesdays and the recording recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So go ahead and share it with anyone you want to out there to check up on what we're doing. And we do a whole mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, book review sessions, mini-training sessions. Basically anything is library related. We will have it on the show. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do sessions. And we also bring in guest speakers. That's what we have this morning on the line with us today from just south of us, down in Kansas, is Robin Hastings. Hello, Robin. Hello, Christa. Hello. And she is there, as you can see her picture there, she is the Director of Technology Services at our Northeast Kansas Library System, just over the border, kind of, from Nebraska. Yep, we go all the way up to the Nebraska border. Cool. And she's on the line with us remotely from down there. She's going to tell us everything you ever wanted to know about the cloud. That's a little too, not too intimidating, I hope. Yeah, not too intimidating. Or just the things you might want to know about the cloud that are library related, hopefully, the ways and things you can do with it to help do some things, maybe say it a little differently, more efficiently, whatever, in your library. So I'm just going to hand over to you, Robin, to go ahead and take it away. All right. Thank you very much. I will tell you right now, I'm recovering from a cold. So if I drop out for a moment, it means that I have muted myself, so I'm not coughing in your ear. I'll try to do that. And also, on the slide that you've got there now is my email address. If you have questions or comments that you want to make, that's the easiest way to get a hold of me. I'm almost always connected to my email and always willing to talk libraries and technology. So happy to take questions or comments or just hear what you guys are doing, especially if something I have said has spurred you on to try something new. So we can't really start with a discussion of the cloud without defining it, of course. I usually use two different definitions for cloud. There's a very basic simple definition that I use for most folks, which is cloud is server and computing resources somewhere that isn't in your building. It's a way somewhere. And so you're using the resources through the network, and you're using them as they are hosted by someone else, which is a really basic definition, but it kind of gets at the point. One of the things that I have heard from folks when I give this definition is that they don't realize a lot of cloud stuff is exactly the same kind of thing that you have in your building. It's just that it's elsewhere. There is, however, another definition that's a little techier, and it is software and resources that require specific elements to be considered cloud-based. It requires specific software and architecture that allows the data to be scalable, so one day you may only have five visitors, the next you have, you know, 3,005 and your cloud architecture can handle that. It can span servers, so if you want to add more resources, you can just plug in a new server and it will automatically come up. It has to be multi-platform, which means because it's on the network, any kind of device should be able to access the service for it to be a cloud service. So whether you're accessing it from your desktop computer or from your iPhone or from your connected refrigerator, whatever kind of device you have, you should be able to access your cloud services through that. One of the things that a lot of cloud services have, and not all of them do, but is on-demand self-service, that means for Gmail, you can go and create your own account. You don't ever have to talk to anybody, you don't have to make a call, and you don't have to wait for someone to approve you or do something in the background. It's on-demand self-service. I'm not sure that's a necessary definition of the cloud, but it's becoming a really common element of cloud-based stuff. And then finally, measured service. In the past, when I would rent or lease a space in a server farm, I would pay for the machine, the number of gigabytes of transfer, the amount of storage space. All of that was included in what I paid. Cloud services generally don't charge for hardware-based stuff. They will charge for the amount that you use. So they measure your service, whether that's bandwidth or storage or computer cycles, processing cycles, however that happens to be measured. You're being charged for what you use, not the hardware resources involved in that usage. And that's kind of why cloud computing tends to be so much more cost-effective than buying a server and sticking it somewhere, because most servers, and I forget exactly where I read this statistic, the most servers are only used to about 10% of their capabilities. So you have to buy a server that will handle the highest load that you'll throw on it, but actually that kind of load is fairly rare. And so most of the time you're paying for server resources that are not being used. With cloud services, as you move stuff into the cloud, you're only paying for what you use. So that can really save some money when you are looking at server resources and that kind of thing. With all that definition being said, I'm not a purist in any way, shape, or form. I consider things to be cloud services that are not 100% conforming to this definition. But at least they hit the high points. And so some of the stuff that I talk about may not have on-demand self-service, or it may not be something that specifically can move from one server to another very easily, but it hits the high points. Robin, I think that this is such a new-ish area that I think that's probably why the concept of what it is is changing and still being discussed, too, of what could or couldn't be considered cloud, and it's not really a set-and-stone type thing. Right, exactly. And the elements of the definition that I've come up with are basically from the NISO and ISO. I have no idea what it stands for. I can't remember right off the top of my head, but it comes from that definition. But that changes on a fairly regular basis as technology changes. Okay, so what kinds of things are cloud-like? Some of you may have run across some of these initialisms or acronyms before. And these are the most popular of the cloud services. The SAAS is Software as a Service, and that's going to encompass things like your Gmail and your Google Docs. It will encompass pretty much most of what I talk about today actually is going to be a Software as a Service. It's any software that normally in the past you would have had on your computer. You now access through your computer, but it's not actually, you know, Gmail doesn't live on your machine. So you're actually accessing the cloud-based version of email. And so that is a pretty wide range of services, and I'll talk about a lot of them this morning. The next most popular version is Infrastructure as a Service. Most of you have probably heard of Amazon Web Services. This was the first really big cloud infrastructure where you can actually rent server resources that are bare. You're not necessarily buying an operating system or a particular piece of software. You're actually buying the computing resources to run an operating system or a piece of software or something like that. And so that's what Infrastructure as a Service is. And a lot of libraries have gone from having, you know, seven or eight servers in their basement running various server applications to offloading that onto something like AWS. Microsoft has an option now called Azure. Is there cloud service? And then of course Google has cloud resources as well. And they all offer the infrastructure for your applications as a service. And that's what that AAS is. And you'll occasionally hear PAAS platform as a service. And this is kind of a combination of the first two where you're buying both the infrastructure and a particular set of software pieces that are specifically tuned and put together for developers. We don't see this as often in libraries. Maybe really big libraries that have developers on staff, but it is something that you'll occasionally see mentioned. So I thought I would bring it up. Let's see. Yeah, there we go. So that's the definition portion of our webinar today. Now we're going to talk about taking that definition and making it useful for libraries. And some of the things I'm going to talk about are cloud ILSs. And ILSs, there are very few really cloud-based services that match all of those definitions I gave you, but they are becoming more and more externally managed and hosted ILSs that are pretty close to cloud-based. So we'll talk about some of those. Web hosting is kind of a traditional cloud-based service, but that's something that is also available for libraries to use. Backups, those are moving to the cloud. Computer management, and by this I mean both managing a computer for maintenance and doing kind of computer desktop stuff, moving that to the cloud, but also managing computers in a lab situation like in a computer center. I'll talk about a little bit of both of those in that slide. Email and document creation storage. I'm going to mention Google a lot, I have a feeling. But that is kind of, that's your office and email and the cloud. And that is moving ever more into the cloud. Even Microsoft is starting to push people into using more cloud-based word and Excel as opposed to the downloadable stuff. And for libraries, sometimes that can be, again, that can be a really handy thing to do because it offloads a lot of the updating and that kind of thing off there. So we'll talk about that when we get to that slide. Social media, your social media is generally in the cloud. Social media really does fit the definition of cloud-based to a T. So if your social media is in the cloud, the way you manage it should be in the cloud as well, right? So we'll talk about that a little bit there. And then finally, we'll talk about some of the graphical editors that are in the cloud, kind of as we're talking about different software that is up there as well, but focusing on graphical editors because we're all familiar with the 800-pound, at least $800 gorilla in the graphical world Photoshop. There are options if you can't afford Photoshop. There are options to that. So graphical editors and all kinds of other types of software project management stuff, those are all moving to the cloud as well. This is my choice of image for leading into the ILS on the cloud. This is about as far from cloud-based as I could find on Flickr. So with that in mind, what the past has been, we'll look at the future. WorldCat web management was one of the first commercial cloud services ILSs to the market. It was perhaps not the absolute first, but it was the first biggest one. It was from OCLC, and so it was put up as a completely cloud-based way to manage your library through WorldCat and OCLC services. Jason Griffey led the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, in using it before he left to become a world-hopping library consultant. He was the IT manager there at the University of Tennessee, and he really led that project and was a definite innovator in getting that going for the University of Tennessee, and he talks an awful lot about it, the process in his pattern recognition blog, a quick Google search of pattern recognition, and Griffey will bring that up pretty quickly. He talks a lot about what his thinking was, what the process was, what the benefits were, and I think some of the issues that he ran into as well. So if you're interested in going in that direction for your library, that's a really good firsthand account of how they managed it. Slightly less cloudy, but definitely still hitting most of the definitions, is COHA, which is an open source, not commercial, but an open source ILS that a company called Bywater from New Zealand is, well actually I think the company, I'm not sure the company isn't actually in New Zealand, most of the folks are here in the US, but it originated there, I believe, correct? It originated there, yeah, I think so. And I know the, yeah, a lot of the first people who worked there were from New Zealand, COHA has been, or New Zealand's been very big with COHA development. They are offering a cloud-based access to COHA. So here at Nichols, since 2008, we have been customers, and we don't pay for COHA, COHA is free. We pay, however, Bywater to host, manage, and kind of support our use of the COHA software. So while we use COHA here in Kansas, it's actually stored on a server in Rackspace, which is a web hosting and cloud service offering company in Texas. And I'm pretty sure that's where our server is, but I'm not 100% sure, it could have moved somewhere. That's kind of the joy of this cloud stuff, is I don't have to know all those details. All I know is that Bywater knows where it is, and they're managing it. And I don't have to worry about all of the headaches that come with servers, up to and including security issues, that's all handled by Bywater and Rackspace together. And Evergreen in Missouri is similar. I think they actually host the Evergreen service in Missouri, but it's not hosted in the individual libraries. They all connect to a central location in Missouri. So for the libraries, Evergreen is also a cloud-based service. Both of those are sort of cloud-based in that they are sort of self-serve, but not really. If you wanted to create a Ko-Ha web catalog, you can't just go to an online form and sign up and never talk to anybody and get it. So it's not 100% self-serve, but it is multi-platform. It'll work on my phone. It'll work on my tablet. It'll work on my desktop. It's scalable. If we need more services, we can get them very easily. They just kind of are very easy to add. Distributed, I think at one point, I have no idea right at the moment if that's still true, but at one point we had our catalog split amongst a couple of different servers. And the general point there is that we don't have to know. It can be distributed or not. That's not something I need to be aware of. And then we actually pay by the service model as opposed to buying a server and paying for server access. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, and there are more announced every day. We'll hear in a couple of slides. I'll talk about yet another one. But moving on to the cloud is kind of the way things are going. So even if you have a server right now in your library that is managing your ILS, for next ILS, you will definitely have options. I'm pretty sure that triple I is looking at cloud-based options for service. So some of the bigger commercial ones are heading that direction. So you could probably stay with your traditional in-building ILS for a while, but I think the trend is heading towards being cloud-based more and more. And the web hosting, like I mentioned earlier, is kind of a traditional. It's been on the cloud for probably the longest of anything we've been talking about. But there are definite library-related and library-specific cloud hosts that I wanted to mention. The first one is LIS host. And Blake Carver was just on Encompass a couple of weeks ago. If you're a regular listener, you might have heard him. He was talking about security in libraries. And he also, along with being a library security expert and having a day job at Lyrasys, he also runs library information. Actually, I'm not sure. I'm not 100% sure what LIS host stands for now that I think about it. But it is a library-specific web hosting service that he provides. He has a lot of WordPress sites, and he really does tend to stick with just libraries. So if you want someone who understands libraries, understands the needs of security and patron confidentiality and all of that, LIS host is an awesome choice. And really, Blake didn't pay me to say that. But I do think he's got an excellent service going on there. But another one, just in case you want options, the library world also offers library-specific hosting. And they have a Cloud ILS. It's not as big. It's not as well-known as WorldCat. But it is a Cloud ILS that you can get with your website. I've not heard a whole lot about library world. I don't know that I'm very familiar with their service. But it's an option. And it's something that you can definitely look at. And then there are smaller options like in Kansas here, we have the Kansas Libraries on the web service, Cloud. And we offer 212, I think is at last count, libraries in Kansas, a WordPress site. And when I started at Neckles, this was run off of a blade server, which is one of those long, thin servers in the server closet at the building here in Neckles. And I moved it to AWS because basically the blade server died and we didn't have anywhere else to go with it. I moved it to AWS. And now it's in the process of being moved to Rackspace, actually, where we will actually have a fully cloud architecture, at which point we will no longer have to create websites for folks. They can create their own accounts, do their own thing. We can do this because it is free to libraries. The Kansas system supports it. So it's not, you know, libraries don't have to pay anything for this. It is paid for by their systems. And that is kind of where we're going in libraries with web hosting. Yes, and here in Nebraska, we have almost a very similar thing here, almost exactly what you're doing on Nebraska libraries on the web. That we run here out of the library commission, same thing. We run WordPress sites for libraries. Not sure exactly how many libraries we have in the group now. Looks like it's got to be about almost 100. I don't know the exact number, but yeah, we host them here through the library commission, same thing, free to libraries. If they need a website, we will do it for them. And it's been a very popular program, definitely, yeah. Oh, sure. Well, you know, free website and technical support and all that help. It's also, I mean, I'm sure if Kansas and Nebraska are doing it, while we are generally ahead of the curve in many things here in Kansas, and I know you are as well in Nebraska, if we're doing it, then other states are probably doing it. I'm just not aware of it. Because for the most part, that's not where I have lived. So if you're in a state other than Nebraska or Kansas, that's something you can check with your state library or commission or systems and see if that's something that they can offer for you guys, too. Backups. One of the things that I appreciate so much as a 90 person is cloud backups because I distinctly remember the days of having to change the tapes in a backup system and put some tapes in a box to take to a location 20 miles down the road so that we had backups that were physically secure. Today, and actually right before I left Murrell, I had switched us. I was sick of tapes. So I had switched us to using online backups. And we use online backups here at Neckles as well. And there are several options. Dropbox gives you two gigabytes of space per account for a personal single computer kind of thing. And that's awesome for computer level backups. If you just have a few computers that you want to backup, set up each person with a Dropbox or a Box.Debt, they do generally the same thing. I'm more familiar with Dropbox myself, but I'm pretty sure that Box.Debt, sorry, I'm still stuffy. Box.Debt does about the same thing there with the files system. So you set up a Dropbox account and you point it to, say, your My Documents folder. And every time you save something in your My Documents folder, it is automatically and immediately uploaded to the Dropbox cloud server. If you are like me and work at home quite a bit, you could then install Dropbox on your home computer. And everything that you've worked on at work is, by the time you get home, updated and at the final version on your home computer. This is useful in many different ways beyond just making sure that everything is backed up. But backups are a definite plus for that. If you want to do a more organization level backup, Crash Plan or Mosey Pro are options. Again, I've used Crash Plan. I've not used Mosey Pro, but they're very similar. With Crash Plan, you can pay either by computer or by amount of space used. And what we did at Merle was we had all of our individual computers backing up to a server, and then we backed up that server to Crash Plan, which meant we were really only paying for one computer and it was under $10 a month for unlimited storage. So if you consider how much you spend on tapes and driving things back and forth, or CDs, however you guys do your backups without the cloud, then you can see that this would be probably a much cheaper option. And then for a techie level backup, you've got the AWS, like I said when we were talking about the infrastructure as a service, you can buy just space to put stuff. And that's more of a techie option because it does require using a secondary syncing software to sync your information on your computer to the AWS stuff. For those of you who are kind of interested in that sort of thing, BitTorrent has a sync client that does a really nice job of that. But a lot of the smaller backup, not necessarily the bigger ones here, but a lot of the smaller backup places using AWS or Google or Microsoft Azure kind of layer behind their backups to store your stuff. So this is just kind of cutting out the middleman on AWS. It might be a little cheaper if you buy directly from the source. The main thing that I wanted to get across here on the backups is that if you have a backup plan that requires relying on a human being to remember something, it's going to fail. And likely it's going to fail exactly when you need it the most. People forget to save things to their USB drives or their tape drives or they forget to change shape drives. They forget to move things and then a fire happens and all of a sudden the server went up in flames with the tapes that were backing up. And you've got a huge failure on your hands. So I definitely want to encourage you, if you're not already, to look into this kind of thing because these are automated. Like I said with Dropbox, the minute you hit save on a file, it immediately syncs up to your Dropbox account on the cloud and you have immediate backups, no waiting. Crash plan, Mosey Pro generally do their thing overnight. So you may lose a half a day's work if something happens but you'll never lose more than that because it's automatic. That being said, even automated things like these cloud things need to be tested occasionally because we're still humans setting them up and mistakes happen. So do keep that in mind as well. But I just wanted to stress that as much the more human activity you have involved in your backup plan, the more points of failure you have and the more likely it is that when you most need your backups, they won't be there. Okay, well that being said, we'll go on to computer management and for just general computer management, file storage, a lot of people have file servers in their networks and their organizations that do file storage, and you can outsource that to something like Dropbox or Box.net. I don't have it on the slide here, I missed it completely. But there's also a kind of cloud-based updater called Ninite, and that's N-I-N-I-T-E, and it does updates of software. So everything from your browser to your office equipment or office software to plug-ins, flash, shockwave, that kind of thing. All of that can be managed through a piece of software that lives on your computer. That part's not on the cloud, but it actually uses the cloud to have clean versions of downloads and upgrades that you might need. And I mentioned the clean because I just read an article yesterday on how there are almost no download sites anymore that don't bundle malware or extra software of some sort into the downloads. It used to be that there were a couple of clean ones, SourceForge was clean. Now they're saying that SourceForge has even started doing it. So Ninite is one of the few places where you know you can go and get clean versions, and you don't even have to do it. You set Ninite up to run monthly, and it automatically updates all of your software that you've got set up, and it does it over the network from the cloud without any hands-on stuff from you. So that is definitely something to consider as well. Switching gears to public computer center management, a lot of libraries use some kind of time management solution. There are commercial versions out there, SAM, EnvisionWare, I keep wanting to say every note, but EnvisionWare, CASI. There are also some that are cloud-based in that you don't have the server running the time management software in your library itself, but rather it's hosted elsewhere. One of the first of the time management solutions that are cloud-based is Userful. Another one that is available sort of right now is Libkey. It's still being developed. It is not 100% out there for final use, but it is coming along, and it's probably usable now. We're actually going to start demoing it here at Neckles very soon. But it is hosted, it's kind of like our Kohak. It's hosted by someone else, in this case also Biowater, and they manage and maintain it, and then individual computers in individual libraries connect to our Libkey instance in the cloud, and that manages their time based on their library's rules and regulations. That is generally how Userful, and there are probably others that are becoming cloud-based as well. For Lab Management, this is really a school product, but it works really well in public computer centers if you want to be able to remotely hit a computer either to send a message or turn it off, or in other activities that you want to do from the desk, as opposed to having to go out into the lab and manage these computers. The only option that I've found that is cloud-based is Land School. Again, it's something, you create an account, you connect your PCC computers, your computer lab computers to your account on the cloud, and then from there you can have a master computer that can manage these machines from a distance. This slide is a little repetitive, I'm well aware. Email and Document Management is a pretty mature segment of cloud services, as opposed to some of the others we've been talking about where there are beta versions and all this. Email and Document Management is mature. It is something that has been in use for many years, and there are lots of options, and they all do about the same thing, because as one gets a feature the other two jump on, and so they're all sort of in the same general boat. Your choice is on kind of price point, although they're very similar in prices. Your choice basically is what kind of user experience you want. They all have a little bit of a different dashboard, a little bit different feel to them. Google Docs is one that is frequently used in libraries and schools and workplaces, and it does email documents, calendars just like SoHo Office, and Microsoft 360, which is where Microsoft is trying to push more people to using their online cloud versions of their software, as opposed to downloading and having to maintain and manage and upgrade and update and do all that with their Word and Excel and that kind of software. Most of us are familiar with cloud-based email. Even if you're not using it at work, you'll probably have a Google or Yahoo or a Hotmail account. Those are all cloud emails, and then document management, a lot of us are familiar with Google Docs or Office 360, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so those are all your options for email and document management. Social media management. I'm curious to know how many of you, and I don't know if there's a way to raise your hand or whatever, but how many of you actually do manage your social media in any formal way? Yeah, there is a hand-raising icon that people can click on on your GoToWebinar interface. If you do use any of these or something else, maybe. Go ahead and raise your hand. Click the little hand-raising icon on your interface, and we can see if we've got people doing it. But two so far. I don't actually use anything. Well, you mentioned Hootsuite there, which you could monitor multiple. I know you could use that because I used to use that to monitor multiple Twitter accounts. There are a couple of different ways to manage social media. You can passively just kind of get alerts that let you know when your library is being mentioned. The alert that I have here on the image that's kind of off to the side here, let me... Oh, well, that's not what I intended to do. This alert that's over on the side. Okay. That is actually a Google alert that I have set up to pull any news item that has the word library or libraries in it. There we go. That's what I wanted. You'll notice this is the query term, library or libraries. Eight new results for library or libraries is what I do the search for. And so I can get an alert every day that gives me kind of a way to just quickly scan through and see what's going on in libraries that day. A social mention does much the same thing. It's just slightly... It's a little bit broader as it doesn't focus specifically on Google News. And that kind of thing is just kind of a passive getting information kind of alert. See what people are talking about if your library is in the news or with social mention in Twitter or Facebook or that kind of thing. Management, which you mentioned, Hootsuite is one of the options. That's more both getting those alerts and getting the information into you and allowing you to schedule posts. And one of the things I really liked about Hootsuite was you can test when the best time to post out. So you can see if I post on Twitter at 9 a.m. on Monday and I post on Twitter at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, which one gets the most retweets, mentions, that kind of thing. And so you can kind of start fine tuning when you post. And that manages Facebook and a bunch of others as well. I use Tweetdeck for that. We have multiple... I have my own Twitter account and then multiple ones that we run for the library commission. And Tweetdeck is Twitter's own, well, it used to be separate, but I believe they just bought it. Yeah, it's their version of the same thing where I have multiple accounts and I can have things that I can track, certain hashtags and whatnot all for different topics. And Tweetdeck is now available as a cloud. When I first started using Tweetdeck, it was a downloadable application. Yes. But it is now available on the cloud. So you can access it through your web browser. That's all I do now is I don't even do the downloaded one anymore. It's just easier. It's one of my tabs on my Firefox. Well, I know when I go to conferences, I fire up my Tweetdeck and it's about the only time I use it anymore. But I do fire it up. And then I start... I do searches for my Twitter handle, searches for the conference, hashtag, searches for maybe the topic of the conference. So I can catch things that people are talking about that who aren't using the hashtag. Right. And then maybe a couple of friends so I can see what they're doing and make sure and join them when they go out, that kind of thing. Of course. But it's very handy for that. And it's also handy for doing that same kind of search, having several columns, and keeping an eye on your library's Twitter handle and your library's event hashtags if you have them. And any mention of your library. And that's where what to track comes in handy. And you'll have to possibly refresh my memory on this, Krista. Can you do searching by zip codes on Tweetdeck? I don't know. I've never tried. I've just done like certain words, phrases, and hashtags. And I've got columns for different things that way. Yeah. I haven't tried it. I don't remember if that's possible or not. I know on some of these like Hootsuite and I know Sprout Social, you can limit your search to just Twitter users who are in a particular zip code. So that is kind of a handy thing for local libraries, of course. And hashtags we talked about that. People have entered have that put that information in their profile or something. Yeah. Yeah, it does. This is a quickie search. I don't see it really working, but yeah. No. Right, either. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, and I know when I've used it in the past, it is, it was a feature and I'm thinking it was on Hootsuite or Sprout Social, one of the two, that let me kind of filter out. I only wanted people who were talking about libraries in my general area. Now you're still going to miss a few. Like Krista said, that only catches people who put their location in their Twitter handle. You're going to have to experiment with what works best to catch the most. Yeah, exactly. And that brings up the final thing to track misspellings. Don't just search for the properly spelled name. If there are common misspellings, use those as well because people do tend to misspell things on occasion. And finally, the last of the software that I'll mention, I talked a little bit about the 800 pound gorilla Photoshop. A lot of us cannot afford to have a computer lab full of computers that have Photoshop on them. So one of the things that you can offer that or use for the library itself is online graphical editors and storage spaces. For editors and creators, and these are editors that are full-fledged, you could actually create new images or edit images that are already existing. Pixlr and Splashup are two options that are very powerful. The part of the 80-20 rule that many of you would probably be familiar with is that 80% of people only use 20% of the features of any particular software. And Pixlr and Splashup encompass at least 20% of the features of Photoshop, if not more. So for the vast majority of what you need to do, these are going to be helpful. If you like the filtering options that Photoshop has, Photoflexer and LudaPik specialize in taking an existing image and adding filters or editing. I know Photoflexer has really powerful red eye removal options, and so that's an option there. And then of course for storage, and not just storage, but sharing of pictures. Libraries are big on sharing, and so not only for storage, but for sharing. Pekasa, which is a Google site now I believe, part of Google Plus. And Flickr is a well-known photo sharing site that has lots of options to let libraries offer images both from their events that they have and from their collection if you've got older stuff as well. I do believe the Library of Conquerors has a really nice collection of images on Flickr. It's a good place to go. Okay, so to finish up, we've talked about a bunch of different kinds of services, software as a service generally in the cloud. And when you're looking at these kind of services, some of the things you need to take into account first and foremost is security. I've heard a bunch of people talk about how they just don't feel comfortable putting stuff on the cloud because they hear so many break-ins and issues. But my feeling is those big services, they have a whole bunch of people who do nothing but security. That's their job. And at most libraries, we have nobody whose entire job is securing our services. And you can get by. Security by obscurity works for a little while, but not forever. There are too many bad guys out there scanning every single node on the network looking for something soft that they can hit and try to get in. When I worked at Merle in Missouri, we had a server that, as I said before, it had lots of storage room that was not being used, and we had very good bandwidth. And so they thought, oh, hey, this is a great place to put our cracked software and movies. And we had no idea they were there until the FBI showed up and took our server. So we were obscure. We had firewalls and all kinds of stuff in place, but nobody was charged with maintaining the security of our service. If we had file server out on the web, there's somebody watching. Somebody knows when something's happening. So that is why I tend to lean towards, yes, there are issues, but the issues are better contained and more, and quite frankly less, they happen less than in the cloud than they do in our individual organizations. When you're evaluating cloud service, take a look at the training that is available. A lot of services offer excellent training. Take advantage of that. And then think about your bandwidth capabilities. If you're taking some fairly processor heavy computation like graphical imagery and taking that from your computer and moving it onto the cloud, you no longer need to have such a powerful computer in front of you, but you do have to have a pretty good pipe connecting your computer to the cloud so that you can move those big images and move those things around. So if you're evaluating services, make sure you have the bandwidth to support the service that you're looking for. As you're moving into cloud-based things, the comfort level of your staff is important. It's always a good idea to provide training on these new services so that they understand the benefits, they become comfortable with the new workflows, and that kind of thing. So that's the training is definitely a help. And finally, trade-offs are a fact of life. We all have to figure what is best for our particular organization. Thinking about features of the software, like I said, especially with the graphics software, because they are network-based, they're not as full-featured as your Photoshop or even GIMP if you're looking at the open-source software. So you want to consider that you may have people who just cannot do their work on these more limited things, and you'll need to buy a non-cloud-based software for them. And then convenience. I tend to find cloud services convenient in the extreme because I don't have to update them. I don't have to upgrade them. I'm not worried about the security. All of that is handled by someone else. All I have to do is use the software. So that's a big thing for me. And then, of course, price. Like I mentioned earlier, cloud software is generally going to be cost-effective for your organization most of the time. Not always. There are times when it will not be so cost-effective. So those are kind of things you have to work out yourself. Now, it's 11 o'clock. So I have been babbling at you for an hour. I would like to take this moment to do some shameless self-promotion and mention that the book Making the Most of the Cloud that I wrote a year or so ago is now available at Amazon. Find library distributors. You may even be able to find it at the library near you where you can read it for free. That's fine. So most of this information that I've given you today is contained in there plus a bunch more. So if I have wet your appetite for cloud services in your library, this is a good next step. And I don't just say that because I'm the author. No, I just say that because I'm the author. Well, your book was one of the main reasons I grabbed you to ask you to come on the show is because of knowing about the book that you had written. Yes. I came to you from that direction. Yes. There you go. So that's what I have to say about services making the most of the cloud. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Were there any big questions? Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Robin. No, that was great. That's exactly what I was looking forward to myself. Some of those, as I said, are services I've used. I've used Pixlr, like I said, in Hootsuite, Dropbox. I can't remember everything else. As I said, we do WordPress here. Actually, WordPress is what we use for the library commission zone. We hosted on our own actual physical servers here. So we actually make sure we have the physical piece of equipment. But then, as I said, just like the Kansas libraries on the web, we then offer it as to the libraries, a cloud service. Right. So it's kind of both. Does anybody have any questions? You can type them into your question section of your GoToWeb in our interface. Nothing came in while you were talking. Maybe just taking notes furiously or keeping track of things. But just let everyone know while we're going through this, too, all of the websites and tools and everything that Robin did mention, I am saving into our delicious account. I got halfway through, and then I got caught up in other things. But before I put up the recording, all of those will be in there. So you don't have to worry about trying to figure out what they were. We'll have links to them. And the slides that you have there, Robin, will you send them to me or would you give me a link? I will. And I can link to them anywhere, whichever works for you. I will. I would have sent them earlier, but I was still working on them at nine. Hey, that's perfect. So whenever, yeah. So you'll have reference to that as well to look at as well. So anyone does have any questions? Use your GoToWeb in our interface. Type them in. I did have one thing that came up that I was thinking about, which I know we've experienced ourselves things. These cloud services are great. Like I said, I use a lot of them myself. Flickr, anything G, Google stuff. What happens, though, if these services close down and disappear? What is that? How can you be prepared for that potential? Especially for cloud services you're not paying for. That is something you should consider. One of the definitions of cloud services that I don't, I'm not 100% sure I agree with because there's a lot of discussion. But one of the things is that it's movable. You can take your data out of that cloud and move it to a different service in a different cloud with no real issues. For a lot of services like with the Google services, you can download everything in your drive to your computer. There's actually a little piece of software that Google Drive offers that syncs your cloud versions of your documents to your computer so that you can work on them offline. It also serves as if Google goes belly up tomorrow and everything goes away. You've got copies of everything on your desktop. Email is harder. You can download email from Google in archive bundles. But I don't know if too many people who actually do that. Yeah, that seems a little... Again, if you're relying on a human being to remember to do things for backup, it's just going to fail. I don't do it. I don't know of anybody who does. But the main thing that's kind of part of evaluating, one of the questions I ask when I'm looking at a new cloud service is how do I get my stuff out? That's what I was going to say. That's one of the things you'd want to put into your evaluation of it is do you want to plan for that you might need at some point and what way do they have to do that? Yeah. Absolutely. And I know this makes more work, but having stuff in multiple places to begin with. Yeah. There's a concept called LOCKS, L-O-C-K-S-S, and it stands for lots of copies keeps stuff safer. And that's a big thing. My Dropbox, I have my Dropbox on a laptop, on a desktop. It's just, it's everywhere. So if Dropbox were to go out of business tomorrow, I'd still have my data. Your stuff wouldn't disappear. Yeah. My stuff would disappear. And that's kind of, like I said, that's just something that if that is important to you and for some things it might be, for some things it might not, then that's something that you need to look at when you're evaluating. Cool. Well, it doesn't look like any other questions came in while we were talking. I think you're really comprehensive, so that's awesome. So since nothing really, nobody had any desperate questions at the moment, I think we will officially wrap up. If anybody does have questions, as Robin saw you, she did have her email on there, her Gmail at the beginning, and that will be included in this thing when we get the slides later. So definitely reach out to her for any questions or help you might need with using any of your cloud services. Awesome. Yeah. So thank you very much, Robin. I'm going to pull back screen-sharing here to my computer now. Okay. Well, thank you for inviting me. Yeah. Thanks so much. I was glad to have you on the show. Like I said, this is an important topic, lots of stuff every now and then. You see things about this coming up, so it's definitely something people need to be aware of. It's new in different ways to do, and I know a lot of libraries, I think one of the first things maybe that they encounter is either the Gmail or working into getting an ILS. That's some new way of doing it, being able to save money and do that better. But knowing that there's so many other options of things that you could do that you maybe didn't think about is great. Yeah. Awesome. So yeah, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for attending. The show is being recorded, as it always is, and will be available on our website here on the Encompass Live website afterwards. All of our recordings go right here and the link right beneath Upcoming Sessions is our archived Encompass Live sessions. And today's will be on here as well. We have all of our recordings here from all of our shows going back to the very beginning, which was in January of 2009, when we started the show. So you will have, like this one, you get a view to the link to the recording on YouTube, presentation on our SlideShare account, and then links in our delicious account. As I said, over here is where I was collecting the links as we were going through. I'll have to grab some more. I didn't catch them all during the show. And I did find Robin's book is both available, of course, to purchase on Amazon, and I found the WorldCat link in OCLC. So you can borrow it from a library up there if your library doesn't already have it. So that will wrap it up for today's show. I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is a local topic for us, Nebraska Access Expansion. Nebraska Access is our database website. We have lots of databases that are purchased by the library commission for the use of libraries across the state, and lots of changes are coming through. New lineup, new things, EBSCO changing, and so next week we will have our Nebraska Access team, I'll call them. Debra, Alana, and Susan will be on with us to explain exactly what's happening, when things are happening, and what's going on with that. So definitely do sign up for that show, or any of our other future topics that we've got listed here on our website. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, definitely do go pop over there and like our page. Once it gets loaded up here, there we go. I post reminders of when new shows are coming up. Here I do a reminder this morning saying, don't forget login right now on the fly for the show. And when our recordings are available, I do post about those to let you know when the recording's up. Here's the one from last week. So if you are big on Facebook, definitely do head over there and like Encompass Live. Other than that, that will wrap us up for this morning. Thank you, Robin. Thank you, everyone, for attending, and we will see you next week on Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Awesome. Thank you. Bye-bye.