When you have been in the library industry for a while, you start noticing patterns. For example, many new developments and announcements (e.g. mergers, launch of new products and services) that are intended to have a big splash are often announced at big events like ALA annual in June. To a much smaller extent we are starting to see this as well during Open Access Week.

I've always been a big fan of Summon's Best bet feature and Primo's resource recommender. If you are unfamiliar with the idea, it allows the librarian to augment search results users get with additional custom messages or recommendations when they search in Summon or Primo.

Academic related browser extensions : Browser extensions (Scite/Scholarcy)and improvements to Zotero This is an updated version of this medium post with additional mention of Zotero DOI Manager Exciting things are afoot in the world of academia and research workflow. There has been a resurgence in browser extensions in the past few years, which looks to me like the custom toolbar invasion all over again of the mid 2000s.

For a long time, there were just two main citation sources that had data that could claim to be relatively comprehensive multi-discipline wise, namely Web of Science and Scopus. (We will come to Google Scholar later). As I noted in past posts (here, here), this has changed in the last 2 years, new citation sources both  proprietary such as Dimensions, and open such as OpenCitations Corpus have started to emerge.

Where I speculate about how the concepts of skill caps and performance caps and the views that librarians implictly hold on them in these two dimensions, affect how they engage with them. I recently started playing Hearthstones a digital collectable card game and like most games in this genre, certain combinations of cards are quickly identified as “metagame defining” and dominate the game.

In this week's blog entry, I cover three new stories of interest that have one common thread - issues affecting the measurement of journal usage. The three stories are 1. A loophole in COUNTER? Are some publisher platforms double counting downloads? 2. More granular analysis of ezproxy logs?

It has been over 2 years ago in Jun 2017, where I picked up on the growing trend of library discovery services and Abstract and indexing servicing intergrating open access content into their indexes.  How are things today?

Updated 27/8/2019 - Libkey Nomad now supports open access via Unpaywall (accepted manuscript) on top of full OA journals already in Libkey Knowledgebase. Kopernio now allows institutions which are WOS customers to setup library link resolver as a fall-back. Updated 28/8/2019 -

Back in 2016, I wrote a fairly controversial

In 2018, I started noticing an increasing number of startups that focused on applying machine learning in the Libraries and Scholarly Communication arena. There were tools such as Scholarcy, Paper Digest and Get the Research that auto summarizes articles, while companies like UNSILO were applying machine learning to publisher manuscript submission systems like ScholarOne.

In academia, the print paradigm still holds sway. For instance, I've argued that our citation practices makes no sense in our largely digital era. That said, quite a bit of the content, we read, cite and use are available only in hard copy , or failing that content in PDF that can't be easily manipulated in digital formats.