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.

Library web scale discovery systems are great. They break down the silos between books , articles and other content types. They provide the "one-search" box experience that our users claim to want. But problems exist (See my overview - 8 things we know about web scale discovery systems in 2013  and outstanding issues ). In my experience, one of the most sticky issues is the question of getting relevant results.

I like to question why. I don't believe the status quo or the way things are is always the best that is possible. I ask why. I agitate for change. I try new things.  But after over almost 7 years of working on various projects and initiating various changes,  "the way things are" have started to slowly shift to what I had a hand in deciding or at least help guide thinking in - in some areas at least.

As part of a new goal to start reading sources outside the library world for ideas, I have been reading Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and I must say it is surprisingly insightful. For those unfamiliar with the concept, blue ocean strategy contrasts with red ocean strategy, where firms in the industry compete head-on among traditional lines.

I blogged 8 things we know about web scale discovery systems in 2013 , an attempt to summarize the current consensus after 4 years of web scale discovery service use in libraries and hundreds of research papers and presentation. (Not sure what they are?) It was a post that seemed to be pretty widely shared and read, but drew no comments, from which I conclude I didn't really say much that was controversial.

After several posts in a row about discovery services, let's have a change of pace and let me share with you some interesting ideas in the world of librarianship that I am playing with lately.

A tongue in a cheek, thought experiment or perhaps precautionary tale of the ultimate fate of library discovery services in 2035. With a sigh, Frank Murphy, head of library systems of Cambridge-Yale University made a quick gesture at his computing device and the system began to shut down the library discovery service for the last time.

I blogged  8 things we know about web scale discovery systems in 2013 , and am working on a draft of "4 issues about web scale discovery systems we are still pondering about", but I was already pretty sure that beyond a certain point, the size of the index while important is no-longer the be-all and end all for evaluating the search. The story I am going to tell pretty much nailed that point.

I recently had the privilege to attend & present a paper at the satellite Meeting of IFLA World Library and Information Congress Information Literacy Section and Reference &

Being a librarian, I often find myself obliged to try my hand using curation tools. I was looking for a tool, that displayed curated content in a "visual" magazine like format only displayed what I explicitly selected and not everything I shared on my networks was designed to be easily viewed by not just myself but others seamlessly worked with my regular content consumption workflow.

On July 1, 2013 Google reader was retired. This was high profile news that was covered heavily online. This wasn't the only blow to RSS usage, a lesser blow was struck when Twitter announced permanently retiring the Twitter API v1.0 which allowed Atom and RSS feeds output. The current Twitter API 1.1 only allows JSON format and requires authentication to access. This took effect, June 12. For most people, this did not make a difference.