As part of a new goal to start reading sources outside the library world for ideas, I have been reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and I must say it is surprisingly insightful. For those unfamiliar with the concept, blue ocean strategy contrasts with red ocean strategy, where firms in the industry compete head-on among traditional lines.

I blogged 8 things we know about web scale discovery systems in 2013 , an attempt to summarize the current consensus after 4 years of web scale discovery service use in libraries and hundreds of research papers and presentation. (Not sure what they are?) It was a post that seemed to be pretty widely shared and read, but drew no comments, from which I conclude I didn't really say much that was controversial.

After several posts in a row about discovery services, let's have a change of pace and let me share with you some interesting ideas in the world of librarianship that I am playing with lately.

A tongue in a cheek, thought experiment or perhaps precautionary tale of the ultimate fate of library discovery services in 2035. With a sigh, Frank Murphy, head of library systems of Cambridge-Yale University made a quick gesture at his computing device and the system began to shut down the library discovery service for the last time.

I blogged  8 things we know about web scale discovery systems in 2013 , and am working on a draft of "4 issues about web scale discovery systems we are still pondering about", but I was already pretty sure that beyond a certain point, the size of the index while important is no-longer the be-all and end all for evaluating the search. The story I am going to tell pretty much nailed that point.

I recently had the privilege to attend & present a paper at the satellite Meeting of IFLA World Library and Information Congress Information Literacy Section and Reference &

Being a librarian, I often find myself obliged to try my hand using curation tools. I was looking for a tool, that displayed curated content in a "visual" magazine like format only displayed what I explicitly selected and not everything I shared on my networks was designed to be easily viewed by not just myself but others seamlessly worked with my regular content consumption workflow.

On July 1, 2013 Google reader was retired. This was high profile news that was covered heavily online. This wasn't the only blow to RSS usage, a lesser blow was struck when Twitter announced permanently retiring the Twitter API v1.0 which allowed Atom and RSS feeds output. The current Twitter API 1.1 only allows JSON format and requires authentication to access. This took effect, June 12. For most people, this did not make a difference.

Since we implemented our discovery service, I noticed that increasingly we are asked by users if there was a way to use Summon to browse , clearly users new to a topic were overwhelmed by the number of results they were getting and besides recommender systems, browsing can be seen as a way to navigate - "knowing it when I see it". Curious I looked around to see what libraries are doing for online browsing and the main way of

Web scale discovery systems as a class of product has existed for over 4 years, and there has been rapid adoption by academic libraries around the world. We are currently way past earlier adopter phase, and probably deep into if not past early majority phase.

Organization as serious as the CDC use zombie outbreaks as a fun way to educate the public, so why not libraries? And indeed Zombies are a really popular theme for libraries particular for orientations. Libraries both academic and public libraries are using this theme to add some entertainment into traditionally boring orientations.