2018 appears to be the year of the voice assistants and smart speakers.

Update 2023: Since I wrote this, Knowtro was discontinued. The closest tool I know of that is similar is System Pro, though as of time of writing (May 2023) it extracts only from PubMed. Another tool that can create a research matrix of papers with preset and even custom variables is Elict.org.

This is a roundup post of some new services , tools and odds and ends that I could not fit into other posts.

Recently, someone reached out to me and asked me if I had a list of academic libraries that chose not to go with their own branded discovery services.

When I first came to my current institution, I remember meeting a faculty who kindly explained to me how he worked and what struck me was how unimportant journal articles and how important relatively speaking datasets were to him .

The "inside-out library" was a concept coined by Lorcan Dempsey as an interesting way to capture the change in the function of libraries today.

Life and libraries is always changing and evolving. A lot of our standard practices date back decades, but as the environment changes, we librarians should always consider if our tools or practices are in the need of a change or if they can be reused to tackle the same problem in a different form. I've recently being inspired by the arguments and evidence from various blog

2009 to 2013 was a exciting time for library discovery as University Libraries starting rolling out so called Web Scale Discovery services.

This post has been revised substantially 26th May 2018 with valued advice from David Shotton, Director, OpenCitations, though responsibility for any misstatements that may still exist are solely mine.

It's 2018 and perhaps you are looking for interesting new tools to add to your repertoire.

In my final blog post of the year, I'm going to talk about some of the developments in librarianship and the related domains that caught my eye.