Dale Askey
Associate University Librarian
McMaster University
Sian Meikle
Director, Information Technology Services
University of Toronto
Michael Vandenburg
Associate University Librarian
Queen’s University
The Ontario Library Research Cloud (OLRC) is a geographically distributed storage and computing network being jointly developed by 11 of Ontario’s university libraries. Initially scaled at 1.25 petabytes, the OLRC is being built with robust open source technologies and commodity hardware. It leverages and develops the technical expertise of the partner libraries and that of Scholars Portal, a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), to provide the readily expandable, secure, and low-cost storage needed to sustain the partners’ rapidly growing digital collections and provide for their long-term preservation. Development work is underway to integrate the OLRC’s OpenStack Swift object store with repository applications in wide use at partner institutions, and to make OLRC storage directly available to researchers as web-addressable space. The OLRC will bring significant sources of digital content such as the text corpus of the planned Canadian Text Archive Centre together with tools to support research using methods such as text mining, entity recognition, topic modeling, and visualization. Currently, the OLRC’s hardware nodes are being installed, after which the project will move into a testing phase in Q2 2015 with further development continuing over the next two years. The rationale for building a local cloud rather than using existing cloud services will be presented for discussion. Many facets of the OLRC (hardware choice, governance model, site selection parameters, etc.) would be directly applicable for other projects looking to achieve similar goals with a reasonable budget. The OLRC received significant funding from the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities.
https://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/ODLRC/About+the+OLRC