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

Earlier this year, over at medium , I blogged about the Library Discovery and the Open Access challenge and asked librarians to consider how library discovery should react to the increasing pool of free material due to the inevitable rise of open access. At the limit when nearly everything is freely available it is possible to consider whether library will have a place in the discovery business.

In recently months, I've become increasingly concerned about the competition faced by individual siloed institutional repository versus bigger more centralised repositories like subject repositories and commercial competitors like ResearchGate. In a way the answer seems simple, just get someone to aggregate all the institutional repositories on one site and start building services on top of that to compete.

Since I've joined my new institution more than a year ago, I've focused a lot on this thing called "library analytics". It's a new emerging field and books like "Library Analytics and Metrics, using data to drive decisions and services" , following by others are starting to emerge.

Recently, a researcher I was talking to remarked to me that University staff can be jumpy around copyright questions and some would immediately duck for cover the moment they heard the word "copyright". I'm not that bad, but as a academic librarian my knowledge of copyright is not as good as I want it to be. But last month, I attended a great engagement session at my library by  Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) and Ministry

Despite writing a bit more on open access and repositories in the last few years, I find the issues incredibly deep and nuanced and I am always thinking and learning about them. As this is open access week, here are 5 new thoughts that occurred to me recently. They probably seem obvious to many open access specialists but I set them out here anyway in case they are not obvious to others. 1.

Long time readers of my blog know that I'm a bit of a worrier when it comes to libraries, I've written tongue in check posts about  "The day library discovery died (for libraries)", I've been a skeptic of trends such as SMS reference, QRcodes and mobile sites (nailed the first 2), Altmetrics and 3D printers (the jury is still out on them) and generally worried about the death of libraries like any good librarian.

2016 seems to the year Sci-hub has broken out into popular consciousness. The service that provides access to academic papers for free , often dubbed "The Napster" of academic papers by media is having it's moment in the sun. To me though the most interesting bit was finding out how much usage of Sci-Hub seems to by people (either researchers or academics) who have access to academic library services.

It's probably a coincidence but I have been recently getting queries about pursuing a career as a academic librarian in Singapore, so I decided to write "So you want to be a academic librarian in Singapore?" This is my way of giving back a little to the profession. I hope it will be useful to people curious or interested in potentially joining us in academic libraries in Singapore.

In Aug 2014, I wrote the speculative "How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm". I argue that the eventual triumph of open access will have far reaching impacts on academic libraries with practically no domain of librarianship escaping unscathed. The article predicts that in a mostly open access environment, the library's traditional role in fulfillment and to some extent discovery will diminish (arguably

When I was back in school, I dreaded art class as I was simply horrible at it. I was never a visual type of person and even today I favor words and numbers and avoid most "artistic" endeavors. So you can understand why when I decided to try creating a infographic for the library I expected it to be a big disaster. Fortunately many tools have appeared that help even the artistic impaired people like me to not fail too badly.