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. One interesting solution to this is Lean Library's browser extension.

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. The interesting trend that links many (but not all) of these apps and services below together is that a lot of them are starting to embed machine learning into their feature sets.

As every librarian knows, there are three main sources of citation data. The three citation indexes (in increasing order of size) are Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. However, they are not the only sources, and recently, I noticed studies showing that two other sources, ResearchGate and Microsoft Academic search are getting large enough to be worth considering.

Last month I wrote 4 different ways of measuring library eresource usage  and argued one can obtain usage statistics by obtaining them from publishers or rely on one's own analysis of ezproxy logs.  You can also analyse them by studying downloads or sessions, leading to a 2 by 2 matrix of measures. However, there are in fact other ways that can provide alternative dimensions to measure usage or even help predict use.

More than 2 years ago , I wrote about how academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm which summarized how I expected the rise of open access would diminish and eventually obsolete some current library functions like fulfillment and possibly even discovery. I still stand by what I wrote though on hindsight it was a bit defensive and a bit light on details in terms of what libraries could do instead.

8 years ago in March 2009, I started blogging about librarianship on a WordPress system powered by Edublogs Campus. But very quickly, I moved to a personal Blogger site with the clunky tagline "k eeping track of interesting and cool ideas that might be used by libraries for benefit of users " (I was really into playing with RSS and other similar tools at the time) and remained blogging there to this day.

Update :14th April 2017 - Unpaywall button now appears to be using Google Scholar and can "see fulltext from ResearchGate, Academia.edu, researcher homepages, and some IRs." You can turn off the option in the extension but it claims to lose 20% of content if you do that. As open access takes hold, the ability to quickly find free versions of articles becomes more and more useful and important.

I've come to believe that learning how to search for and manipulate data will become the next "must-have" skill sets for academic librarians. As such, I've been trying to learn myself. One of the obvious tools to gain competency in is OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) for cleaning of data.

The recent rise in interest in fake news has given us librarians a reason to once again trumpet loudly the value of what we do in teaching information or media literacy. Librarians were quick to establish our turf by calling out articles that mention information literacy without mentioning librarians. Besides the expected library sources, pieces began to appear in mainstream sources such as the Salon, U.S. News &

How does one measure library eresources usage? This is a question I've bumped into numerous times recently in the course of my work whether it be trying to do correlation studies between student success and electronic usage , choosing the right metric for the library dashboard or even more mundanely just evaluating a database for subscription. My way of looking at it is two fold.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany is probably one of the largest and most advanced aggregator of open access articles (hitting over 100 million records), others on roughly the same level are CORE (around 60 million records) and OAIster (owned by OCLC). One way of seeing this class of open access aggregators is to see them as similar to web scale discovery search engines like