Location based services like FourSquare, Gowalla , Loopt enable users to check-in at different venues. For those unfamiliar with the concept, people basically "announce" online that they are currently at a certain location. They are still not quite main-stream yet, though with Facebook adding Facebook places this might change.

This is a blog devoted to covering new tech that might be used for  libraries to benefit users.

In a previous post entitled, What are mobile friendly library sites offering? A survey. I surveyed over 40 mobile friendly library pages. Since then this number has almost doubled, and I expect that the list here will top 100 by the end of the year. Of course, mobile friendly sites or library web apps are not the only option.

First off, for those reading this from a RSS feed reader, do note that there is something wrong with the RSS feed and as such my last post "12 good library videos that spoofs movies or tv"  from last week is not showing up in the feed. Anyway this week I celebrate 3 years in librarianship. I'll spare you the whole mock soul-searching with the obligatory "look back at my career" &

Are libraries really the "next Big Pop Culture Phenomenon" ? We have all read about the old spice libraries viral videos (and spoofs) of course. There's also, Librarians Go Gaga: 9 Of The Funniest Library Videos. But perhaps the easiest way to get a hit viral library movie would be to spoof a tv show or movie.

Edit : I edited quite a bit based on comments below. Clearly, there's a lot I don't know about these reference managers, and there's possibly some PBKC problems involved! So the results shouldn't be used to claim X is better than Y.  Also since I blogged, a lot of improvements has being made so the data here should be considered outdated.

I've recently began thinking about how to be more productive. GTD (Getting Things Done) Methodology looks interesting, but I haven't delved much into it. I suppose one way to be more productive would be to auto-schedule actions in advance that could be automatically done on a specific future day and time. This saves you not only time, but also frees your mind to concentrate on other tasks.

One of the keys themes of my blog is how to use free tools to get alerts of news of interest. More specifically, I have made a series of posts trying to figure out how to use tools to find and engage with library users who are online posting, tweeting etc about your library. I first mentioned the idea in Dec 2009 , and followed it up with "Scanning mentions of the library - Twitter, Google alerts &

Note :This was blogged in July 2010, since then most of the reference managers have improved substantially so the information here can be considered outdated. Interest in reference managers is increasing due to the increased competition in the area.

As you can probably tell from the blog name "Musings about librarianship", I clearly didn't give much thought to what I would be blogging about when I first started blogging in March 09 as the title is generic enough to cover almost anything about librarianship. The tagline which I added much later "Keeping track of interesting and cool ideas that might be used by libraries for benefit of users." is marginally more enlightening.

Early this year, I blogged about using Zbar iPhone app as a barcode reader to search your library. You scan the barcode of a book with your phone and it would extract the ISBN and search the library catalogue. You could put a setting in the iphone app and it would work for almost any library catalogue.