This thesis focuses on an often-neglected area of computer system design: tertiary storage In the last decade, several advances in tertiary storage have made it of increasing interest, including increased tape capacities, less expensive tape drives and optical disk drives, and the proliferation of robots for loading tertiary devices automatically Concurrently, faster processor speeds have enabled a growing number of applications that would benefit from fast access to massive storage We evaluate the usefulness of current tertiary storage systems for some of these new applications
First, we describe the design and performance of tertiary storage products Next, we evaluate the technique of data striping in tape arrays We find that tape striping improves the performance of sequential workloads However, striped tape systems perform poorly for applications in which there are several non-sequential, concurrent requests active in the tape library because of contention for a small number of tape drives
We characterize two new workloads: video-on-demand servers and digital libraries For the former, we evaluate design alternatives for providing storage in a movies-on-demand system First, we study disk farms in which one movie is stored per disk This is a simple scheme, but it wastes substantial disk bandwidth, since disks holding less popular movies are under-utilized; also, good performance requires that movies be replicated to reflect the user request pattern Next, we examine disk farms in which movies are striped across disks, and find that striped video servers offer close to full utilization of the disks by achieving better load balancing Finally, we evaluate the use of storage hierarchies for video service that include a tertiary library along with a disk farm Unfortunately, we show that the performance of neither magnetic tape libraries nor optical disk jukeboxes as part of a storage hierarchy is adequate to service the predicted distribution of movie accesses
Throughout the dissertation, we identify several desirable changes in tertiary storage systems To support new applications with higher concurrencies, tertiary libraries should be redesigned with a higher ratio of drives to media, higher bandwidth per drive and faster access times

Tertiary storage: an evaluation of new applications

Strategic Planning: Politics, Leadership, and Learning

Qualitative analyses were used to launch a preliminary exploration of the dominant knowledge organization (KO) trends in the pre- and post-web eras. Data for this study was assembled by searching the Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts database for articles that have used the term `knowledge organization' or `information organization' in their titles, abstracts, or descriptors. Taken as a whole, these preliminary results suggest that the content of the KO literature has shifted since the advent of the web. Although classic KO principles remain prominent throughout both eras, the presence of new content areas, such as metadata, denotes a shift in KO trends. In the pre-web era, the literature was related in large part to indexing and abstracting. In contrast, cataloging and classification issues dominate the landscape in the post-web era. The findings from this paper will be of particular use to those interested in learning about upcoming trends in the KO literature.

Knowledge organization trends in library and information studies: a preliminary comparison of the pre- and post-web eras

Electronic reserves has existed as a library service for barely ten years, yet its history, however brief, is important as an indicator of the direction being taken by the profession of Librarianship as a whole. Recent improvements in technology and a desire to provide better service to students and faculty have resulted in the implementation of e-reserves by ever greater numbers of academic libraries. Yet a great deal of confusion still surrounds the issue of copyright compliance. Negotiation, litigation, and legislation in particular have framed the debate over the application of fair use to an e-reserves environment, and the question of whether or not permission fees should be paid to rightsholders, but as of yet no definitive answers or standards have emerged.

A Brief History of Electronic Reserves

Electronic course reserves and digital libraries: Progenitor and prognosis

Anatomy of a small step forward

Reflections of change: Emerging titles and responsibilities

The formerly virtually neutral library

EBSCO's Executive Seminar for research library directors, Digitising the reserve function: steps toward electronic document delivery, was held on 5 February in Philadelphia, PA during the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting. The Meeting was attended by more than 60 librarians from some of the most respected research libraries in North America.

Don L. Bosseau

Papers

Anatomy of a small step forward

Reflections of change: Emerging titles and responsibilities

The formerly virtually neutral library

Digitising the reserve function: steps toward electronic document delivery

Visions: Assessing the risk factor