Crazy, last night we quietly went over 10,000 reclaimers! It’s an honor to host so many folks in higher ed who regularly share what they do!
— Reclaim Hosting (@ReclaimHosting) December 8, 2015
Last night we recorded over 10,000 users through our customer support tool Intercom. Of those, 3000 have been reported as active in their Client Area over the last month. I’m sure there is some slippage in the 10,000 number, and not all of them are still customers. But it does point to the fact that over the last two and a half years there has been an a groundswell of interest in Reclaim Hosting services beyond our wildest dreams—well, except the one involving handcuffs and Drano.
Anyway, what Tim and I imagined as a niche interest in other schools running Domain of One’s Own pilots quickly unearthed the fact that just about everyone in educational institutions from IT to libraries to academic departments to individual courses were looking to host off-campus. And while most folks turn to the big hosts initially, it quickly becomes apparent that nobody can support students and educators using open source web applications like Reclaim Hosting. #NOBODY!!! We know what you need before you do [said while waving arms creepily, yet gracefully].
But the aggregate is just that, and numbers can quickly become a telescopic hammer that only provide vague outlines of what’s happening. So let’s get microscopic and look at just one. Yesterday I got a question from Anna E. Kijas, Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston College Libraries, regarding some thumbnails that weren’t working on her Omeka install. Turns out the path on the server to the ImageMagick library Omeka requires was off, preventing the resizing and generation of thumbnails for images. We got that fixed, and the site was back to its original glory.
Documenting Teresa
Out of curiosity I looked around Anna’s site, discovering the open access scholarly research site Documenting Teresa Carreño, dedicated to the nineteenth-century Venezuelan pianist, singer, composer, and conductor Teresa Carreño. I was learning about this world renowned pianist for the first time, and I love how each item in the collection is based on a documented performance she gave between 1862 and 1917. Here’s a random entry featuring a write-up from the The Evening World about her performance at Carnegie Hall on December 8, 1916, noting she had “maintained her power, her art, and her musicianship unimpaired.”
A perfect example of the web of sharing that I love supporting.
