In a world of niche Clouds, how do you define a useful niche?
There are a couple of interesting posts on the blog of the UK’s FLESSR project, detailing their efforts to work out how feasible it might be to offer a new Cloud service to universities. More on that in a moment. I don’t think I’ve ever really been convinced by the argument that everything will end [...]
Do we need a Registry… to register technologists’ numerous contradictory uses of the term?
The act of registration seems ingrained in all of us, especially where dealing with ‘authority.’ That seemingly random agglomeration of letters and numbers on the back and front of our cars? A registration number. We visit the Registry Office in order to make births, marriages and deaths official. Indeed, in the dark days before it [...]
Repositories in the Cloud? Why on earth not?!
To be honest, I’ve never fully understood Higher Education’s penchant for building ‘institutional repositories.’ These frequently under-populated aggregations of academic papers produced by ‘research active’ employees of a particular university appear aligned almost exclusively to vaguely expressed institutional imperatives, and seem largely unrelated to either the selfish aspirations of the contributing authors or the tangible [...]
