Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press

Citation

Trapasso, L. (2012), "Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 29 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2012.23929daa.001

Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press

Article Type: Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 29, Issue 4

This month’s column demonstrates the many challenges that libraries and librarians face with so much information, so many ways to access information, and so many devices to use with information. In the end, libraries as enterprises need to adopt their workflows to these trends that effect all library services – multiple platforms, multiple devices and bringing it all together in a secure environment.

More on librarians

Librarian’s responsibilities have expanded. They must now make sure students are able to sort, search, and evaluate information critically. Students must be able to find authoritative information, and learn the skills necessary to utilize that information. It has been found that too many students use poor references, mainly because of a reliance on Google. In the engineering field, the author teaches the use of Knovel, and Engineering Village. The author concludes with a description of various programs the library uses to teach students (Bhatt, 2012).

The author, North (2012) finds that Medine and Twitter have something in common. The tenants of modern information storage and retrieval are data models, data stores, query techniques, data mining, search engines, automated indexing and classification, and machine learning. The basis of search in Medline are the MESH subject headings. Twitter uses hashtags also to classify content. Twitter allows to search tweets from the last six to nine days. Twitter uses scalability, polyglot persistence, and restricted search and archiving capabilities. For tweets, analytics, and other data, Twitter uses multiple data storage and retrieval approaches including Casandra, Hadoop, Hive, Pig, Vertica, and MySQL (North, 2012).

Enterprise computing

Self service IT is the concept that end-users can do advanced tasks on the enterprise computer. Everyone wants better access to corporate data and services. This article outlines how Kentucky Community and Technical College Intel, and Mitre deal with this new demand. A challenge for IT is to keep tight control over the integrity of corporate data while giving end-users enough access to accomplish their goals. There are five tips for successful self service IT. The first is to keep tight control over corporate data for security purposes. Design tools for different categories of users. Ask users directly what tools they will need. Perhaps bring a business analyst to facilitate communications between end-users and IT. Lastly, test a small group of users for trouble spots (Mayor, 2012).

There are six key skills IT grads (and most library graduates) do not have. First, most do not have knowledge of common business practices. Colleges are working on bringing more business studies to their curriculum. Second, many college students do not know how to integrate systems. Students have skills to build their own systems, but they now must learn how to integrate multiple enterprise applications. Third, student courses have not kept up with evolving trends such as cloud computing and business intelligence. Fourth, there has been a decline in students with very basic skills. Businesses are looking for legacy skills such as Cobol, customer information control systems, and other mainframe skills. Lastly, colleges need to teach team building skills (Pratt, 2012).

For security, the key to encryption is better management. Centralized key management is important. Interoperability standards are now being adopted. The Open Standards Organization has developed a key management interoperability protocol as a standard with cryptographic systems. It is advised to keep key management separate and secure from encrypted data. Protect this separation with layer seven firewalls, IPS devices, and strong access control. Lastly, cloud key management is a trend for smaller companies that do not feel comfortable managing their own keys (Collett, 2012).

There is some positive news about cybersecurity. In 2011, a handful of cyber-attacks were successful. However, millions of attacks were thwarted. Half of these were stopped by intrusion prevention techniques inside of an organization’s endpoint security software. Updating these techniques is critical. New layers of protection technology are being developed. They are reputation-based security, real-time behavioral prevention, and policy-based intrusion prevention (Desai, 2012).

IT departments are facing incorporating more mobile devices in the enterprise. They are now thinking of managing access instead of devices. There are two ways companies can handle downloaded apps. The first way is for companies to build their own private clouds to exclusively handle data used by the enterprise apps. This will enable companies to segregate sensitive data. With mobile device management software, companies can block users from putting documents on a public cloud. Companies can also build their own mobile app stores. The second way for companies to protect their data access across multiple mobile devices is to make sure the data itself knows where it does and does not belong. IT departments are using Digital Rights Management to tag data so it deletes itself when sent to a wrong source (Reed, 2012).

In data storage, e-hoarders need search, archiving, and retention software. It has been found that enterprise data will grow 650 percent in the next five years and will cross the petabyte threshold. There should be data retention policies and data disposal policies. There is an explosion of unstructured data that is not stored in a relational database. Some solutions include automated backup, data mining, e-discovery, data governance tools, and data loss prevention tools. Data loss prevention tools are especially good because they classify important data, and delete the rest (Vance, 2012).

Cloud storage has evolved. Benefits to move to cloud storage include no capital expense, monthly usage-based pricing, easily expandable capacity, and the ability to offload hardware and software management. A subsequent full review of 14 cloud storage providers will be published. There are three categories of cloud-based storage: raw storage, backup and business continuity, and file synchronization and collaboration (Marko, 2012a, b).

Tablets

This is a fast moving area with many new tablets in the wings that are more powerful and will provide some competition to the new iPad.

The newly release iPad has been studied for applicability in the business world. There are seven features worth mentioning. As for display, the iPad 3 has better color rendering and saturation. It has twice the resolution of the iPad 2 (retina display). This display is a huge plus for sales catalogs. The iPad 3 offers 4G LTE wireless networking and Wi-Fi tethering. These are two great features for road warriors. The performance of the iPad 3 is much better. The A5X processors have dual instruction cores running at 1 GHZ, and double the GPU count. The RAM, now separate from the system-on-a-chip, doubles to 1 GB. The battery life is about the same. The camera on the new iPad is better as it supports image stabilization, and can take HD video. The iOS 5.1 on the new iPad has support for voice dictation. Lastly, the upgrade form the iPad 2 to the new iPad is very smooth (Marko, 2012a, b).

Many professionals feel the new iPad will not replace the laptop for processing power. However, the tablet is much better for digital media. Particularly it can exploit images, video, and high definition media, New apps include iMovie, iPhoto, and iWork (Cox, 2012).

Apple has developed several apps in the textbook arena. The iBook2 tablet app lets students view 3D images, animations, videos, and pages. High school textbooks will be the first to sell at $14.99. The iBooks author can be used to create textbooks. The iTunesU app helps deliver full courses to the student including syllabuses, videos, documents, and books (Editor, 2012).

On the e-book front, in the schools, e-Books are catching on slowly. Inkling, Kno, and CourseSmart are three major e-book textbook publishers. What students are finding is that it is more cost-effective to buy a print textbook and sell it back, than to purchase an e-book (Schaffhauser, 2012).

Tablets continue to have impact into personal and work life. Desktop and notebook PC’s are better for long duration touch-typing. However, the tablet is on it’s way because there is a strong demand for a grab-and-go portable. The market for tablets in 2015 will be 140 million sales (Finnie, 2012).

Operating systems, software, hardware

On the OS front, Apple and Microsoft are rolling out their latest operating systems. They are the Apple Mac OS X (Mountain Lion), and Microsoft Windows 8. Both have made their OS similar to mobile operating systems, allowing one to sync all of their devices. Particularly Windows 8 will make it easier for IT to deploy desktop, laptop, and mobile hardware with a single tool (Gralla, 2012).

Solid state drives deliver uncrackable encryption as well as faster read and write times. Five drives are reviewed and compared to a regular hard drive baseline. The solid state drives are OC2 SSD Deneva, Intel 320 SSD, Adlink SSD, Crucial M4 ssd, and the OWC Pro 6G SSD (Henderson, 2012).

Lois Trapasso(marlo2333@hotmail.com) is based at Independent Librarian, Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, USA.