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.
I've come to believe that learning how to search for and manipulate data will become the next "must-have" skill sets for academic librarians. As such, I've been trying to learn myself. One of the obvious tools to gain competency in is OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) for cleaning of data.
The recent rise in interest in fake news has given us librarians a reason to once again trumpet loudly the value of what we do in teaching information or media literacy. Librarians were quick to establish our turf by calling out articles that mention information literacy without mentioning librarians. Besides the expected library sources, pieces began to appear in mainstream sources such as the Salon, U.S. News &
How does one measure library eresources usage? This is a question I've bumped into numerous times recently in the course of my work whether it be trying to do correlation studies between student success and electronic usage , choosing the right metric for the library dashboard or even more mundanely just evaluating a database for subscription. My way of looking at it is two fold.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany is probably one of the largest and most advanced aggregator of open access articles (hitting over 100 million records), others on roughly the same level are CORE (around 60 million records) and OAIster (owned by OCLC). One way of seeing this class of open access aggregators is to see them as similar to web scale discovery search engines like
Earlier this year, over at medium , I blogged about the Library Discovery and the Open Access challenge and asked librarians to consider how library discovery should react to the increasing pool of free material due to the inevitable rise of open access. At the limit when nearly everything is freely available it is possible to consider whether library will have a place in the discovery business.
In recently months, I've become increasingly concerned about the competition faced by individual siloed institutional repository versus bigger more centralised repositories like subject repositories and commercial competitors like ResearchGate. In a way the answer seems simple, just get someone to aggregate all the institutional repositories on one site and start building services on top of that to compete.
Since I've joined my new institution more than a year ago, I've focused a lot on this thing called "library analytics". It's a new emerging field and books like "Library Analytics and Metrics, using data to drive decisions and services" , following by others are starting to emerge.
Recently, a researcher I was talking to remarked to me that University staff can be jumpy around copyright questions and some would immediately duck for cover the moment they heard the word "copyright". I'm not that bad, but as a academic librarian my knowledge of copyright is not as good as I want it to be. But last month, I attended a great engagement session at my library by Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) and Ministry
Despite writing a bit more on open access and repositories in the last few years, I find the issues incredibly deep and nuanced and I am always thinking and learning about them. As this is open access week, here are 5 new thoughts that occurred to me recently. They probably seem obvious to many open access specialists but I set them out here anyway in case they are not obvious to others. 1.
Long time readers of my blog know that I'm a bit of a worrier when it comes to libraries, I've written tongue in check posts about "The day library discovery died (for libraries)", I've been a skeptic of trends such as SMS reference, QRcodes and mobile sites (nailed the first 2), Altmetrics and 3D printers (the jury is still out on them) and generally worried about the death of libraries like any good librarian.