Mitchell (information studies, U. of Maryland, College Park) assists librarians and information technology (IT) staff in selecting and adopting cloud computing services. He draws on his experiences, a survey of library-specific uses of cloud computing, literature in IT service management, vendor interviews, platform testing, and technical and case study literature in the library IT field to define virtualization and cloud computing, examine specific solutions for these platforms, and discuss common approaches to platform adoption. He then reports on a survey of their adoption in libraries conducted in 2011 and discusses factors and issues related to IT adoption, including system evaluation and implementation planning and the role of IT service management in system design; software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and multiplatform solutions, and their technical concepts, information systems that use them, and factors that influence decision making, with examples; and models that can be used in system design and suggestions for incorporating them into the IT environment. ALA Techsource is an imprint of the American Library Association. Annotation 2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
