Cloud Computing: A Digital Libraries Perspective

Provisioning and maintenance of infrastructure for Web based digital library search engines such as CiteSeer^x present several challenges. CiteSeer^x provides autonomous citation indexing, full text indexing, and extensive document metadata from document scrawled from the web across computer and information sciences and related fields. Infrastructure virtualization and cloud computing are particularly attractive choices for CiteSeer^x, which is challenged by both growth in the size of the indexed document collection, new features and most prominently usage. In this paper, we discuss constraints and choices faced by information retrieval systems like CiteSeer^x by exploring in detail aspects of placing CiteSeer^x into current cloud infrastructure offerings. We also implement an ad-hoc virtualized storage system for experimenting with adoption of cloud infrastructure services. Our results show that a cloud implementation of CiteSeer^x may be a feasible alternative for its continued operation and growth.