Last week, I had the amazing opportunity to visit Xi'an China from 9 May to 11 May 2013 to attend the Greater China SerialsSolutions' User Group meeting. Regular readers of my blog will know since 2011, I have been reading (see list of articles I am curating) , thinking and blogging about discovery systems, leading up to the implementation of SerialsSolutions' Summon in 2012 in my institution.

Like many academic libraries, we recently launched our discovery service Summon. Having worked intensively on this project since 2011 during the evaluation followed in 2012 by the implementation phase, I had an opportunity to delve into the topic perhaps deeper than many of my colleagues not on the team.

Some of my most popular blog posts in 2010 include 12 good library videos that spoofs movies or tv and Funniest library related movies made using Xtranormal. It has been almost 3 years since then, and libraries have been hard at working creating more interesting yet professional videos. These are some of my favourites including some I missed the last time around.

Surveys of both phd students in the UK as well as researchers in US not to mention ordinary users has shown that increasingly, the academic library site is declining in importance as a starting point for searching. Besides Google, the main site they go to is Wikipedia, either by going there direct or via google because it ranks highly in Google for most topics. There is even a name for it called GWR or Google > Wikipedia >

Time for some navel-gazing! Sarah Kennedy asks What does it mean to be a librarian? You know what? Not sure what it says about me that after 5 years in this profession and writing hundreds of blog posts, I have not once come around close to even this topic.

In a recent LibraryThing blog post entitled Pew study: Library patrons want personalized recommendations, they noted that in the Pew study , 64% of patrons interested in a library service which suggested books, audiobooks and DVDs to them based on their own preferences. Though I believe this report is about public library users, I suspect this applies also to academic library users to some extent.

I recently finished reading two introductory volumes on Open Access, namely Open Access - What you need to know by Walt Crawford and Open Access by Peter Suber. As far as I remember, I have never done a book review on this blog before, so here is my review of both. But first a little context of where I am coming from.

I was talking to a couple of students from my university in a online chatroom* and one mentioned that he was doing his literature review for his final year thesis**. Of course, I asked out of professional curiosity how he was doing it, and he mentioned he just used Google Scholar.

I am sure most of you have heard of Google Now available on Android Jellybean it is not just a intelligent personal agent like Siri that answers voice queries but more impressively there is a "predictive" component that can intelligently display content that Google thinks you will need before asking for it. Here's the promise "Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time.

It's the end of the year, and perhaps it's time to take stock of what went right and what to work on the next year.

I have been studying, thinking and posting about web scale discovery since 2011 and my institution is currently days away from pushing it out as a default search. In many ways, this has been one of the most technically challenging library projects I have been involved so far due to its far reaching effects, affecting everything from IT, cataloguing, e-resource management and information literacy.