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.

2016 seems to the year Sci-hub has broken out into popular consciousness. The service that provides access to academic papers for free , often dubbed "The Napster" of academic papers by media is having it's moment in the sun. To me though the most interesting bit was finding out how much usage of Sci-Hub seems to by people (either researchers or academics) who have access to academic library services.

It's probably a coincidence but I have been recently getting queries about pursuing a career as a academic librarian in Singapore, so I decided to write "So you want to be a academic librarian in Singapore?" This is my way of giving back a little to the profession. I hope it will be useful to people curious or interested in potentially joining us in academic libraries in Singapore.

In Aug 2014, I wrote the speculative "How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm". I argue that the eventual triumph of open access will have far reaching impacts on academic libraries with practically no domain of librarianship escaping unscathed. The article predicts that in a mostly open access environment, the library's traditional role in fulfillment and to some extent discovery will diminish (arguably

When I was back in school, I dreaded art class as I was simply horrible at it. I was never a visual type of person and even today I favor words and numbers and avoid most "artistic" endeavors. So you can understand why when I decided to try creating a infographic for the library I expected it to be a big disaster. Fortunately many tools have appeared that help even the artistic impaired people like me to not fail too badly.

UPDATE : Years after I wrote this OCLC now offers Ezproxy analytics which uses Ezpaarse and Elastic's Kibana for dashboards. I've been recently trying to analyse ezproxy logs for various reasons (eg. supplement vendor usage reports, cost allocation, studying library impacts etc) , and for those of you who have done so before, you will know it can be a pretty tricky task given the size of files involved.

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend VALA16 in Melbourne and I capped off my visit down under by seizing the opportunity to attend ANZREG  (Australia New Zealand Regional Ex Libris Group for users) seminar. I had the opportunity to present and the following is part one of what I presented.

I always been fortunate to be associated with a institute with a good academic library so I haven't really kept up with illegal or semi-illegal ways of getting access to scholarly material. Still I've been recently thinking about the amount of free scholarly material available online and the amount of it that is legally or otherwise available and how they stack up against library document delivery.

It's the beginning of 2016, and nostalgia once again makes me look back at my past posts to see how they have stood the test of time. The last time I did this was in  December 2011's Top 12 library blog posts I am proudest of and covered the first 3 years of this blog, so this post will cover the period from 2012-2015. Of the 80 odd posts since these are the ones I am happiest with.

Devices and workflow - A mini review of Moto 360 In the early years of my blog, I used to post about my use of my new devices like iPhone (2010), iPad (2011) and web services that I use. I've now switched over to the android world, current setup is Android Note 4 + Nexus 7 (2013). A few months back in Oct I got a Moto 360 v1 at a fairly cheap price to try out the Android wear smartwatch.

One of the more interesting issues around the rise of web scale discovery service systems like Summon, Primo, Ebsco Discovery Service and Worldcat Local is the place of abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases like Scopus, Web of Science or more disciplinary specific databases like Psycinfo.