https://medium.com/@aarontay/from-confusion-to-expertise-d04bd02d2ec6 Trying something new this time. I have started to post on Medium. Read the post "From Confusion to Expertise" there. Some brief impressions The interface is indeed as clean and well designed as I have heard, allowing writers to knock out simple yet professional looking posts. One of the selling points of Medium, where you can easily submit to "collections" is gone.

Like many academic library bloggers, I occasionally fancy myself as a "trend spotter" and am prone to attempts at predicting the future. 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.

Regular readers of my blog know that I am interested in discovery, and the role academic libraries should play in promoting discovery for our patrons. If you feel the same, here are a mix of links I came across recently on the topic that might be of interest The Number of papers in Google Scholar is estimated to be about 100 million When talking about discovery one can't avoid discussion of Google Scholar.

At library school, I was taught the concept of nested boolean. In particular, I was taught a particular search strategy which goes like this.

Google Scholar is increasingly becoming a subject that an academic librarian cannot afford to be ignorant about. Various surveys have shown usage of Google Scholar is rising among researchers, particularly beginning and intermediate level researchers.  Our own internal statistics such as link resolver statistics and views of Libguides on Google Scholar, tell a similar story.

I have been recently thinking of the types of expertise academic librarians have and how recent trends in academic librarianship have made things harder.

Every librarian worth his salt knows that despite the rise of web scale discovery services, Google and Google Scholar are often the go-to tools of researchers. In particular, while we prefer to direct our users to the official published version, we know that any free copy will often work in a pinch and Google Scholar in particular is the #1 tool out there to look for free copies floating on the web.

Almost 4 years ago in 2010, I posted A few heretical thoughts about library tech trends. I was sceptical about QRcodes, Mobile websites and SMS reference.

Is known item searching really a big issue in Web Scale discovery? Since I began looking at web scale discovery in 2009-2010, I've read many librarians comment on how known item search is harder in web scale discovery and it's not just the rank and file librarians.

In my last post, I mused about blue ocean strategies and how libraries should consider spending time focusing more on blue ocean strategies. I gave the example from the book of the declining Circus industry and how Cirque du Soleil changed the rules of the games.

Curious about academic librarianship in Singapore as a career? Try So you want to be a academic librarian in Singapore? Even though the Day in the life of a librarian project by by Bobbi Newman has ended, I have decided to continue this tradition to post about my day to day work every January. I've was told that my blog posts are useful as a snapshot of the type of work academic librarians do in Singapore.