Last month, I had the opportunity to attend VALA16 in Melbourne and I capped off my visit down under by seizing the opportunity to attend ANZREG  (Australia New Zealand Regional Ex Libris Group for users) seminar. I had the opportunity to present and the following is part one of what I presented.

I always been fortunate to be associated with a institute with a good academic library so I haven't really kept up with illegal or semi-illegal ways of getting access to scholarly material. Still I've been recently thinking about the amount of free scholarly material available online and the amount of it that is legally or otherwise available and how they stack up against library document delivery.

It's the beginning of 2016, and nostalgia once again makes me look back at my past posts to see how they have stood the test of time. The last time I did this was in  December 2011's Top 12 library blog posts I am proudest of and covered the first 3 years of this blog, so this post will cover the period from 2012-2015. Of the 80 odd posts since these are the ones I am happiest with.

Devices and workflow - A mini review of Moto 360 In the early years of my blog, I used to post about my use of my new devices like iPhone (2010), iPad (2011) and web services that I use. I've now switched over to the android world, current setup is Android Note 4 + Nexus 7 (2013). A few months back in Oct I got a Moto 360 v1 at a fairly cheap price to try out the Android wear smartwatch.

One of the more interesting issues around the rise of web scale discovery service systems like Summon, Primo, Ebsco Discovery Service and Worldcat Local is the place of abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases like Scopus, Web of Science or more disciplinary specific databases like Psycinfo.

I am always trying out new tools to organize and improve my work and my current workflow involves the use of Google Keep , Dropbox and Google Now reminders (having moved away from Google tasks). But I haven't had much experience with project management tools, but recently I began playing again with the light weight tool Trello. Formally it is a electronic kanban tool.

As librarians we are often called upon to teach not just library databases but also Google and Google Scholar. Unlike teaching other search tools, teaching Google is often tricky because unlike library databases where we can have insider access through our friendly product support representative as librarians we have no more or no less insight into Google which  is legendary for being secretive.

As my institution recently switched to Primo, nowadays I lurk in the Primo mailing list. I am amused to note that in many ways the conversation on it is very similar to what I experienced when lurking in the Summon mailing list.

I recently signed up to a "research methods" class whose aim was to help practitioners like me produce high quality LIS papers.

I had the privilege to attend ALA annual conference 2015 in San Francisco this summer. This was my 2nd visit to this conference (see my post in 2011) and as usual I had lots of fun. Presenting at  "Library Guides in an Era of Discovery Layers" Session My ex-colleague and I were kindly invited to present on our work on a bento-style search we implemented for our LibGuides search.

I have had experience implementing Summon in my previous institution and currently have some experience with EDS and Primo (Primo Central). The main thing that struck me is that while they have differences (eg. Default Primo interface is extremely customizable though requires lots of work to get it into shape, while Summon is pretty much excellent UI wise out of the box but less customizable,  EDS is basically Summon but with tons of