It's a truism in library circles today to say that Google and web search engines (I will use "Google" as a stand in for web search engines) have changed the way users search which in turn affects what they expect from searches in the library.

I must admit, local history is not much a specialty of mine but I happen to work for a University, whose history goes back a fair distance to 1905 and as a library unit we have collections that go back almost as far making us the oldest academic library in Singapore.

I recently attended a talk about Mendeley institutional version (powered by Swets) , I am fairly familiar with Mendeley , Zotero and other reference managers (though my main usage is with EndNote) but have not looked at the institutional version yet.

As a fresh graduate from library school with little practical experience, I used to think that known item searches ie finding an article or book when you already knew the title etc was relatively trivial and the difficulty was with the other type of searches subject/topical searches?

It's common for libraries to have a Facebook page now and as such we are all affected by the new Facebook Timeline for pages that will be turned on March 30 2012.

Okay this could be one of my craziest ideas yet. Of course you would have heard of Hitler Downfall parodies  , where a classic scene from the German movie Downfall has its subtitles changed so it seems Hitler is ranting about anything from being banned in Xbox live to disappointment with the latest Apple product. In the library context, I suppose it would be trivial to create many such parodies as there is plenty to rant about.

If you spend any amount of time online, you will run into memes.

Storify is a great tool to use for curation of online material.

I have written about QRcode uses and I am a little unsure about the future of QRcodes .

Wikipedia was on strike for 24 hours on 18 Jan 2012. Many libraries attempted to take advantage of this backout to turn it into a "teachable moment" . Libraries Tweeted (Topsy finds about 500 mentions of Library and wikipedia during the period), blogged, posted on Facebook, created libguides to help students survive the blackout and otherwise advertised the importance of libraries.

First a recep of the story so far. Libraries first came online with webopacs and it was good. Then came the wave of next generation library catalogues (including Encore, Aquabrowser, Primo) and they were suppose to be better. How much better? They were supposed to be more "google like" (no more field searches and boolean!), they had faceted browsing, relevancy ranking, autocorrect and "did you mean" features?