Cloud computing in academic digital libraries: A systematic review

Cloud computing technology is one of the emerging technologies that is going to transform managing and using information in the web and other information basis. This technology will change information managers’ approach in sharing information in data warehouses. Through using this technology in academic libraries, especially in digital academic libraries, we can save users’ time, and also help them to access their resources in short time in anywhere and every time. In a word, academic libraries, by using this technology, can make use of other library digital materials in the remote manner and without any ownership, so this is the mean of access to the resources by everyone in every time and every place. By using this kind of useful technology in the important and high level kind of Library and Information Science center (Academic Libraries), we can reach to the new kind of Library, names "Cloud Library". Cloud library is the library that is different from other traditional libraries, in goal and also applications, and even in kind of librarians. In this regard the main purpose of this study is to identify the current status of applying cloud computing technology in digital academic library researches in order to extract research gaps, and to represent their applied research methods.

Systematic review has developed as a specific methodology for searching for, appraising and synthesizing findings of primary studies, and has rapidly become a cornerstone of the evidence-based practice and policy movement. And also systematic review methodology can be distinguished from narrative reviews of the literature through its emphasis on transparent, structured and comprehensive approaches to searching the literature and its requirement for formal synthesis of research findings. Also this method, based on the steps that introduced by Kitchenham and Charters, is used to do this study. In fact researchers in this study traversed three main steps entitled survey design, literature review, and writing survey report. Factually, 9 distinctive works had done to do this study. In this regard, researchers tried to identify related resources and deeply studied them after filtering unrelated resources. Reading titles, abstracts and in a few cases reading introduction and conclusions helped us to extract some irrelevant resources that were retrieved in the search stage. Afterwards the remained studied resources were clustered in 3 clusters entitled cloud computing technology acceptance and security, problems and challenges, application of cloud computing in academic libraries.

The findings showed that in total, 28 works, including 10 internal and 18 external works in the field of cloud computing and digital library have been published so far. Of these 28, the largest percentage of research is on the impact of cloud computing on library management and services, with 32%. Factors affecting cloud computing acceptance are at 28%, and the three areas are "Security, Problems and Challenges of Cloud Computing", "Cloud Computing in Academic Libraries", and "Cloud Libraries", with 11% each. Lower (third). Finally, the lower-level (fourth) domain of "cloud computing in digital libraries" has received 7% of research attention. Finally, the area of "cloud computing in academic digital libraries", which also represents the current research gap, is at the bottom of the list with no research (zero percent). Other findings of the study can be attributed to the research methodology which indicates that most of the research in the field of cloud computing has been done in digital and academic libraries with a quantitative approach of 25 cases and a survey method of 11 cases out of 25; Few studies have been conducted in 3 cases using a qualitative approach or a hybrid approach.

Research in the field of cloud computing in academic digital libraries has shown that the field is still young and needs to be intentioned by the researchers interested in this field. On the other hand, the research methodology showed that using quantitative approach and using survey method in the studies of the researchers showed that this research method has the most importance in research. Finally, the research gap, namely, "Cloud computing in academic digital libraries" has not been interested by researchers, so it is hoped that this project will be a good start to pursue the present research field and eliminate the barriers to using cloud computing technology in academic digital libraries.