Cultural Research

Butler University Scrambles With Servers After Advancing to NCAA Final Four: Time for Outsourcing?

While the situation of Butler University's website overload after advancing to the Final Four of the NCAA is relatively unique, the reality is that any website can be suddenly overloaded due to unexpected moments of national or international visibility.

It sounds like the IT department handled it ok in emergency fashion but the fact that they insist on keeping web hosting in-house when such services have become commodified in the marketplace and continue to drop in price is what led to their outage. They did not have to have an outage at all because 137,000 is just not that many visits at this point in time.

Though I would not expect a college or university to use shared hosting, Yahoo! Small Business shared webhosting is but one example of how radically pricing has dropped. For $7.46 a month Yahoo! offers:

# Unlimited disk space
# Unlimited data transfer
# Unlimited email storage (Details)
# 24-hour customer service
# Reliable and secure hosting

Honestly, "unlimited" is never really quite that but I think such a service could easily accomodate 137,000 visitors and Yahoo! is a good example of a company that knows what it takes to stay online during traffic surges. Though few such services make claims to offer "unlimited data transfer", other services offer the ability to go over your limit and be charged a fair fee after the fact. Either way, no outage.

Of course, pricing would go up for services that aren't shared, which is definitely the way to go, but my point is that academia's digital ivory tower has walled itself off from solutions that could be saving them lots of money. In Butler's case, I would be willing to bet that the labor costs related to the time spent working on this issue would have covered the hosting and quite a bit more. While I'm not trying to put anybody out of work, it's a bit difficult for me to understand why such situations exist given the incredible financial crunch institutions currently face and the inevitably worse financial realities ahead.

Update:
But don't rely on just little old Clyde for insight.  The Brooking Institution has just released a paper by Darrell M. West titled Saving Money Through Cloud Computing focused on the needs of the U.S. government.

From the Executive Summary:
"To evaluate the possible cost savings a federal agency might expect from migrating to the cloud, in this study I review past studies, undertake case studies of government agencies that have made the move, and discuss the future of cloud computing. I found that the agencies generally saw between 25 and 50 percent savings in moving to the cloud."

Update 2:
Kyle James at .eduGuru discusses what he considers a "Lost Marketing Opportunity" for Butler and I have to agree.

Mr. James feel that the Butler University homepage and overall website did not take advantage of the near win in the NCAA that consumed so much of the nation's attention and, looking at it now, on Saturday, April 17th, one gets the sense that the road to #2 is rather insignificant news though hackneyed claims like "Academic Excellence" make the current homepage slideshow.

To be perfectly frank, I had to double-check to make sure I was at the right school's website since I was unfamiliar with Butler U and have certainly heard nothing about it since people stopped talking about the Final Four.  But maybe they're just too small to need to take full advantage of the moment in time that is now forever gone.  Sounds like a nice position to be in!

Brian Mathews: Creating an Academic Library for the Whole Student

Marketing Today's Academic Library:
A Bold New Approach to Communicating with Students

Brian Mathews, author of Marketing Today's Academic Library and blogger at The Ubiquitous Librarian is featured in a Library Beat Longshots Podcast:

Longshots #222: From solitary to social:
creating an academic library for the whole student

"Sarah talks with Brian Mathews, assistant university librarian, University of California-Santa Barbara, about making academic libraries more user-sensitive. Brian's work explores the way academic libraries can adapt services to serve the whole student versus just their current projects. He discusses the seven categories that describe the spectrum of student needs: academic, social, entertainment and recreational, service, personal, travel, and rejuvenation."

Official Site: Longshots Podcast

Branding Massey University: A TV Commercial

Massey University Television Commercial 2009

Librarian and blogger Alison Wallbutton posted the above tv ad for her homebase, New Zealand's Massey University, requesting comments and feedbacks.

Though I hate to negatively criticize such a feel good ad, I do have to wonder who this ad is attempting to reach. If Massey U has conducted a survey of its students and/or potential students and has found that they are strongly motivated to go to college by a spirit of discovery and exploration then I'd like to hear more about such information gathering as it would provide a strong rationale for this commercial.

Here's what they have to say at Massey University's YouTube channel:

"The TV advertisement encapsulates the idea of Forever Discovering the underlying theme of Massey Universitys brand. It demonstrates the emotions of discovery, exploration, liberation, expression, and opportunity all of which are key components of the brand. The message in the advertisement is our lives are shaped by the discoveries we make. Massey University provides the environment to push the boundaries and make a range of both personal and professional discoveries."

I guess the effects of the recession have been so drastic in my life that I have severe difficulties relating to such a commercial. I understand the beauty of discovery but I feel like an effective campaign might better emphasize the "opportunity" aspect, as in, improving one's life by making discoveries that support one's achievements in the world. Nevertheless, if MU has evidence that such branding is beneficial and worth spending big bucks on a tv commercial for, then all power to them for finding the connection between the pleasure of learning and the institution's bottom line.

Using The Smoking Gun as Bait for Public Records Workshops

In today's social landscape, it behooves librarians to find ways to draw in an audience without becoming outright entertainers. I have to admit, I'm still torn on the library coffee house concept, especially for academic settings, but I understand how it fits a "library as community gathering place" approach.

That said, two of my core interests, reference and marketing, will probably move me more in such directions as I dig deeper into how libraries must change given the many new players in information services and the emergence of information as entertainment facilitated by the Web.

For example, I was just checking out an email from The Smoking Gun, an extremely popular site that uses public legal records to create entertaining content. Though I hope librarians will recognize that there's a downside to laughing at people who've been arrested*, TSG is an excellent example of how the Web has connected everyday folks to seemingly esoteric pursuits such as searching public records.

I'm guessing most folks don't think of TSG in those terms but it struck me that TSG could be used as bait for a very solid public records workshop .

I know some librarians may wince at the thought but I feel the Web offers us an opportunity to reinsert ourselves as core resources in people's daily lives if we're willing to make such moves rather than thinking of the Web as competition.

I'll be dropping more ideas along these lines in the Marketing category as I go. Please feel free to add your ideas by commenting, sending me email suggestions or writing a guest post!

Contact Clyde Smith: culres(at)gmail(dot)com

*Note: Sounds like a good lead-in to a discussion of relevant ethical issues!

Seth Godin on Using New Media to Create 10 Bestselling Books

Seth Godin on 10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing,
and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books

Over the last 9 years I've learned a lot about how technology has impacted many industries with strong ties to libraries and education settings including the book business and journalism.

The above video featuring Seth Godin shares some insights into book marketing with new media that offer examples of disruptive innovation in action.  He also drops some quick but interesting observations on libraries along the way.

Seth Godin's presentation from O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, New York City, NY, February 11, 2008.

Via Seth's Blog.