One of the keys themes of my blog is how to use free tools to get alerts of news of interest.

Note :This was blogged in July 2010, since then most of the reference managers have improved substantially so the information here can be considered outdated.

As you can probably tell from the blog name "Musings about librarianship", I clearly didn't give much thought to what I would be blogging about when I first started blogging in March 09 as the title is generic enough to cover almost anything about librarianship.

Early this year, I blogged about using Zbar iPhone app as a barcode reader to search your library. You scan the barcode of a book with your phone and it would extract the ISBN and search the library catalogue. You could put a setting in the iphone app and it would work for almost any library catalogue.

I know I'm a bit late to the party but recently , I came across Helene Blower's "New digital divide" via @digicmb.

I have shared in the past techniques that allow you to be aware of what users are saying about your library online.

The rise of web 2.0 sites has led to the idea that sites should be customizable and personalized.

Introduction By now Twitter accounts for libraries are old news, I  run a Twitter League of Library accounts, and it easily topped over 600 accounts  (Note the service is quite unreliable , statistics reported there often lag, so I'm not actively maintaining it, besides adding libraries that request to be added). For more libraries on Twitter lists see Twitter lists by Lindyb for Academic libraries &

In an earlier post , I talked about using Twitter, Google and other tools to scan for mentions by users of libraries online.

Everyone knows mobile is hot now, and many libraries are scrambling to add mobile friendly pages. Currently the most complete listing of libraries with mobile sites can be found at the Library Success Wiki site , which lists over 40 such sites. I thought it would be helpful to look at these 40+ sites to see what are the common services that have being offered to mobile users.

Musings about librarianship (this blog!) has being nominated for the Salem Press Library Blog Award !