Wikipedia was on strike for 24 hours on 18 Jan 2012. Many libraries attempted to take advantage of this backout to turn it into a "teachable moment" . Libraries Tweeted (Topsy finds about 500 mentions of Library and wikipedia during the period), blogged, posted on Facebook, created libguides to help students survive the blackout and otherwise advertised the importance of libraries.

First a recep of the story so far. Libraries first came online with webopacs and it was good. Then came the wave of next generation library catalogues (including Encore, Aquabrowser, Primo) and they were suppose to be better. How much better? They were supposed to be more "google like" (no more field searches and boolean!), they had faceted browsing, relevancy ranking, autocorrect and "did you mean" features?

2011 has been an amazing year for me professionally, I got to attend my first overseas conference (ALA annual 2011), spoke overseas, contributed a few articles and a book chapter or two.

Compared to a couple of years ago where most people had to manage files/information on at most two devices - Home + Work PC, today we have multiple devices.

My blog has existed for almost 3 years, and I have blogged over 130 blog posts, some of them I look back and laugh at how naive I was (subject of a future post), others I was proven completely wrong by subsequent events and yet a few that seem to have stood the test of time and makes me proud to have blogged them.

Roughly a year ago in Unfinished blog posts - which ones would you like to see? , I solicited feedback on which of my unfinished drafts that you would like to see.

I wrote about different ways to add the ezproxy stem to url almost 2 years ago but the bookmarklet method has always being the most popular method used by libraries to allow members access to articles via the library's subscription even when off campus.

Like many academic librarians, I do various types of presentations, orientations and classes to students.

I was reading Bohyun Kim's guest blog at ACRLOG which talked about how users generally don't want to come for library instruction classes but want to learn tools like LibX that speed up searches, and she asked me what I thought of it.

Librarianship is a difficult road. I find myself often torn between idealism and cynicism, caught between passion and frustration. Talking to other librarians, I see the same in them. Libraries really have so much potential to make a difference and yet it seems obstacles in our path often seem insurmountable. When things are difficult, when frustrations mount,

As mentioned in my last post, I recently presented at the online Library 2.011 conference.