A Lesson from 'A Dozen Ways ...'

I found the links to Google Docs and SoHo enlightening in lesson number 3’s “Computing in the Cloud” of A Dozen Ways to Two-Step. What a boon for folks with ready access to the Web. Fancy word-processing programs are usually packaged in costly “suites” that include programs the user does not need or want. This “cloud” approach is refreshing and no doubt exponentially helpful to Internet users.

However, I found the article “How can libraries use the cloud?” and its message to promote greater and greater access to Internet technologies with little or no restrictions to be disquieting in the extreme. How do libraries define “security restrictions”?  For example, external storage devices can easily infect public access computers with any number of nasty computer viruses as well as other forms of corruption that could perhaps encroach on privacy issues.

Again, how do libraries define “security restrictions”? Could such unlimited access to burgeoning digital breakthroughs permit easy viewing to pornographic Web sites and the like and is this a responsible use of technologies funded by taxpayer dollars? Might a child be inadvertently exposed to sensitive materials in such a smorgasbord of free-and-easy-cloud services? After all, libraries are a place for adults AND children.

Cloud computing is exciting in many ways, scary in many others. Is the potential to take services past library walls a future mandate to take libraries out of the physical and into the virtual? What happens to your hometown library then?