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

It's 2018 and perhaps you are looking for interesting new tools to add to your repertoire. Here are some interesting ones relating to cleaning, analysis and modelling of data that I have encountered in the last year. JASP - Open Source statistical software similar to SPSS with support of COS

In my final blog post of the year, I'm going to talk about some of the developments in librarianship and the related domains that caught my eye.

One of the major issues with institutional repositories is that it is difficult to get researchers to self-deposit their work. Assuming one could wave a magic wand and solve that, institutional repositories still have another barrier to overcome - the discovery barrier. With content scattered across thousands of sites, one would need an aggregator site to provide a one-search across all of them.

CC BY-SA 3.0 Nick Youngson When I first started in academic libraries, one of the most popular questions I got was "what database should I use to find articles on X". Today ten years later, I still get such questions but to a far lesser degree. This is due to a combination of better discovery from all in one tools like Google Scholar, various library discovery services and just more digital material out there that is much more findable.

Edit : For a fuller guide on authenication methods for electronic resources refer to "Access to Online Resources - A Guide for the Modern Librarian" by Kristina Botyriute who is at OpenAthens at the time of this post. Debates on privacy in libraries are not new though they have recently become more heated over two issues. One issue resolves around learning analytics and this has been brewing for a while.

I recently attended the Crossref Live17 event in Singapore. I discovered that these events often have a heavy publisher presence, who make up most of Crossref's membership.

As a generalist with hands in many pies, I'm prone to throw around terms I barely understand. API or Application Programming Interface might be one of them.  But learning about APIs are important as we are using it whether we know it or not. Recently, I have started to get comfortable with them , at least in terms of pulling out the data and parsing the JSON output.