4 years ago in 2014, I wrote about the coming disruption to academic libraries due to Open Access. In How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm , I wrote " The trend I am increasingly convinced that is going to have a great impact on how academic libraries will function is the rise of Open Access.

I've been reading up lately about the idea of making research reproducible and replicable. That's one of the motivations of course to encourage researchers to deposit data, scripts and code into data repositories and to make them open (or at least available on request). But what if one could make not just the methods and results reproducible but also making the literature review reproducible?

2018 appears to be the year of the voice assistants and smart speakers. There are many reasons for this, but I suspect the entry of Google home mini in 2017 (following the Amazon's Echo Dot) at price points USD50 and below made it hard to resist for many people to buy it to give it a try , leading to smart speakers with voice assistants becoming one of the hottest Christmas presents of 2017.

Update 2023: Since I wrote this, Knowtro was discontinued. The closest tool I know of that is similar is System Pro, though as of time of writing (May 2023) it extracts only from PubMed. Another tool that can create a research matrix of papers with preset and even custom variables is Elict.org.

This is a roundup post of some new services , tools and odds and ends that I could not fit into other posts. DeliverOA , EmbedOA, OAsheet, GetPDF  , InstantILL etc - new services from OAbutton ZoteroBib - A web-based citation generator from Zotero

Recently, someone reached out to me and asked me if I had a list of academic libraries that chose not to go with their own branded discovery services. I think for most reasonably sized and resourced university libraries the answer is not many. Utrecht is a well known exception, but the question remains could you chose not to follow the crowd and have your own discovery service of content?

When I first came to my current institution, I remember meeting a faculty who kindly explained to me how he worked and what struck me was how unimportant journal articles and how important relatively speaking datasets were to him . He said and I paraphrase "I don't really need that many articles (I usually only read and cite a few top journals), and those I can easily find using Google Scholar, but if I don't have the data , I can't do my

The "inside-out library" was a concept coined by Lorcan Dempsey as an interesting way to capture the change in the function of libraries today. Instead of merely bringing in content from the outside into the community (i.e the traditional role of buying of books and journals), academic libraries are now taking on roles of promoting the content created by their community to the outside world.

Life and libraries is always changing and evolving. A lot of our standard practices date back decades, but as the environment changes, we librarians should always consider if our tools or practices are in the need of a change or if they can be reused to tackle the same problem in a different form.

2009 to 2013 was a exciting time for library discovery as University Libraries starting rolling out so called Web Scale Discovery services. Much of my blog was focused on the area in those years, but eventually this technology began to mature and things started to settle down. Still if you think there is nothing new or interesting in the field of academic search and discovery these days you may be in for a surprise.

This post has been revised substantially 26th May 2018  with valued advice from David Shotton, Director, OpenCitations, though responsibility for any misstatements that may still exist are solely mine. I would like to thank him for his patience in clarifying misconceptions I had, and