In my recent posts comparing Twitter accounts of libraries, I found that when listing by follower counts, only 4 out of the top 20 accounts belonged to Academic libraries. In fact, when I looked at the top 50 accounts the situation looks even worse. I found that only 7 accounts belonged to the Academic libraries.

Recently, I was pondering about the need to set targets or KPI (key performance indicators) for Libraries carrying out Social media activities. Take Libraries with Twitter accounts for example, what would be a suitable target? The first thing that comes to mind is number of followers, which would be a measure of how many people you are reaching, but what would be a creditable target?

Introduction In this post, I will talk about a little known service called Google Profiles, why it is becoming important, and I will describe how libraries have being using it, the web 2.0 accounts they are listing on it, and compare it to the accounts listed by libraries on Friendfeed.

In the past few years, libraries have become increasingly innovative in the different ways they display their subject guide. Practically everything under the sun has being tried. Libraries have tried wikis (here), paid for Libguides (here), used Delicious linkrolls ( here) and Squidoo (here). I haven't heard of a library using Google Knol, but I won't be surprised.

In my last post, I showed you three different ways you can create a portable web search widget for almost any arbitrary database you want. My preferred method used only simple Javascript with no other requirements and allowed you to generate a basic search box that you can put on any webpage. In most cases you can just copy and paste the code to any webpage that accepts html and it will usually work.

Many libraries in the world provide remote access to electronic resources via EZproxy . As Andrew Perry explains here "Essentially, Ezproxy uses some URL mangling, rewriting all hyperlinks, to pass traffic via the proxy (rather than using a conventional browser proxy setting). If the user is not logged in to the proxy (ie has no fresh &

After struggling with the limitations of Wordpress, I decided to move my blog from http://blog.nus.edu.sg/aarontay/ which was kindly hosted by CIT of National University of Singapore (where I work) to http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/ on Blogspot (this blog!) . For subscribers reading this via RSS, please change your subscriptions to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MusingsAboutLibrarianship . For now I will continue to

This post will discuss how to use RSS feeds from library databases. It's surprisingly tricky to do it compared to subscribing to normal RSS feeds from most blogs. This is due to the fact libraries generally provide access via a proxy - ezproxy to provide remote access to databases off campus.

As of 2009, the 3 hottest darlings of social media right now are Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed (in order of size). My tenative thesis is that of the three, Facebook is probably the hardest for libraries to use as a tool for engaging users compared to Twitter or Friendfeed. First some background.

In my last post , I talked about libraries using Lifestreaming to aggregate all their social media/web 2.0 accounts. In particular, I talked about Friendfeed. Friendfeed is typical of most lifestreaming services in which updates from different sources will be listed one by one in a list, one on top of another.

We recently started a small scale experimental presence on Friendfeed (official announcement) . Friendfeed is one of the most popular life-streaming services out there.