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Short abstract:

On the case of Swiss academic libraries, we argue that cloudification creates an infrastructural hinge between different ecologies. This yields a new mode of coordination to maintain scale, which ultimately disrupts librarianship regarding social relations, workplaces, & professional jurisdictions.

Long abstract:

Arguably, cloudification is regarded as a “boring” (Star 1999, 379) infrastructure yielding collaboration and synergism. In our contribution, we illustrate that cloudification creates an infrastructural “hinge” between different ecologies (Abbott 2005) on a global scale using testing as primary mode of coordination (Marres and Stark 2020). This leads to various disruptive re-configurations within librarianship.

To do so, we draw our ongoing research on the cloudification of Swiss academic libraries. Since 2020, a cloud-based library management system and a search portal are implemented by over 500 libraries via a national library network. The systems are licensed from and hosted by Ex Libris Group, the global market leader for library management systems and discovery tools. The cloud-based systems are characterized by three novel characteristics. Firstly, the systems are hosted by the global IT provider itself. Secondly, they are fluid (bugs are fixed and/or new features are introduced in monthly releases). Thirdly, they are hyper-scalable (Narayan 2022).

We start by characterizing the infrastructural linkage between Ex Libris and participating libraries of different national library ecologies, thus exemplifying how the operation of library infrastructures has evolved from an local endeavor to one of global scale. We then exemplify that testing is institutionalized as the primary mode of coordination between the ecologies and functions as an important practice for maintaining global scale. Finally, we illustrate how these multiscalar infrastructures disrupt and re-configure Swiss librarianship regarding social relations, workplace routines, and professional jurisdictions (including outsourcing of core missions to IT providers (Plantin and Thomer 2023).