What Research Libraries And Web Archives Could Learn From The Commercial Cloud

In 2014 I optimistically wrote for the Knight Foundation blog that libraries could reinvent themselves in the digital era, tracing my own collaborations with the Internet Archive over the prior year and drawing from my opening keynote address to the 2012 IIPC General Assembly at the Library of Congress. Yet, reflecting back three years later, looking at just how adrift and leaderless so many research libraries have become in the digital era, unsure of how to reinvent themselves and often too arrogant and insular to reach out beyond the communities they have worked with for centuries, I am no longer so certain that research libraries and the academic communities that work most closely with them can genuinely reimagine themselves on their own. Community libraries have found great success reinventing themselves to better fit into modern lifestyles, from collaborative spaces to free wifi to ebooks to and even 3D printers and virtual reality systems, but research libraries as a whole seem to be struggling to find their footing in the digital era. What might they learn from the world of the commercial cloud and indeed the broader technological future of Silicon Valley? The commercial cloud has truly transformed how we think about computing in the modern era, from the shift from hardware to services and experts, the rise of seamless security and unimaginable deep learning systems accessible by a single API call.