I'm actually a pretty big fan of Google Scholar, which in some ways is better than our library discovery service ,but even if you aren't a fan, given it's popularity it's important for librarians to keep up with the latest developments.

In honor of this year's Open Access Week, here's a personal reflection of my engagement with open access over the 10 years of my career in academic libraries.

The concept of ORCID (Open Researcher Contributor ID) appears to be simple.

We can all agree that Google Scholar has many strengths , but no matter how complete or deep it's indexing, how much better it is at finding free articles or it's presumed better relevancy ranking , we librarians have always had one weakness of Google Scholar to point at.

So I celebrate my 10th anniversary in Academic librarianship at the end of this month - Aug 2017.

At my prior institution, I was the administrator of the discovery service - Summon and one of the features that I loved the most was the "best bets" and database recommender feature.

When you attend librarian conferences, it is common to hear speakers say that librarians are too modest about our value to our stakeholders and they advocate that we librarians should well..

In 2014, I wrote about “How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm” which attempts to forecast how academic libraries will change when “50%-80% or more of the annual output of new papers will be open access in some form”.

There seems to be something in the water. Out of the blue, interest in helping users find free/open access articles seems to have blossomed since earlier this year when Unpaywall was unveiled.

With the current interest in browser extensions like Unpaywall to help access open access material, it may be easy to forget that the majority of scholarly content is still locked behind paywalls and there is a need to provide seamless access to them for our users.

I haven't done a "tools" post in a while, so this blog post will just be a whirlwind introductory tour of tools and applications I have explored recently and my thoughts on them.