At my prior institution, I was the administrator of the discovery service - Summon and one of the features that I loved the most was the "best bets" and database recommender feature. If you are unfamiliar with what that does, it essentially allows you as a librarian to setup special notes/links/images to appear when they are triggered by specific search terms - called tags in Primo.

When you attend librarian conferences, it is common to hear speakers say that librarians are too modest about our value to our stakeholders and they advocate that we librarians should well.. advocate for ourselves more. Yet I think things are not that simple. There is always a tension between advocacy (which is by it's nature not fully objective) and analysis/assessment which is mostly objective.

In 2014, I wrote about “How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm” which attempts to forecast how academic libraries will change when “50%-80% or more of the annual output of new papers will be open access in some form”. I’ve come to realize a more interesting and critical question for libraries would be on what to do during the transition period, when open access becomes a significant but not yet majority pool of

There seems to be something in the water. Out of the blue, interest in helping users find free/open access articles seems to have blossomed since earlier this year when Unpaywall was unveiled.

With the current interest in browser extensions like Unpaywall to help access open access material, it may be easy to forget that the majority of scholarly content is still locked behind paywalls and there is a need to provide seamless access to them for our users. One interesting solution to this is Lean Library's browser extension.

I haven't done a "tools" post in a while, so this blog post will just be a whirlwind introductory tour of tools and applications I have explored recently and my thoughts on them. The interesting trend that links many (but not all) of these apps and services below together is that a lot of them are starting to embed machine learning into their feature sets.

As every librarian knows, there are three main sources of citation data. The three citation indexes (in increasing order of size) are Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. However, they are not the only sources, and recently, I noticed studies showing that two other sources, ResearchGate and Microsoft Academic search are getting large enough to be worth considering.

Last month I wrote 4 different ways of measuring library eresource usage  and argued one can obtain usage statistics by obtaining them from publishers or rely on one's own analysis of ezproxy logs.  You can also analyse them by studying downloads or sessions, leading to a 2 by 2 matrix of measures. However, there are in fact other ways that can provide alternative dimensions to measure usage or even help predict use.

More than 2 years ago , I wrote about how academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm which summarized how I expected the rise of open access would diminish and eventually obsolete some current library functions like fulfillment and possibly even discovery. I still stand by what I wrote though on hindsight it was a bit defensive and a bit light on details in terms of what libraries could do instead.

8 years ago in March 2009, I started blogging about librarianship on a WordPress system powered by Edublogs Campus. But very quickly, I moved to a personal Blogger site with the clunky tagline "k eeping track of interesting and cool ideas that might be used by libraries for benefit of users " (I was really into playing with RSS and other similar tools at the time) and remained blogging there to this day.

Update :14th April 2017 - Unpaywall button now appears to be using Google Scholar and can "see fulltext from ResearchGate, Academia.edu, researcher homepages, and some IRs." You can turn off the option in the extension but it claims to lose 20% of content if you do that. As open access takes hold, the ability to quickly find free versions of articles becomes more and more useful and important.