I have written a couple of times on Web Scale Discovery tools like Summon, Ebsco Discovery Service, Worldcat local and Primo Central. So say you implement one of these tools and park it as the default search box on your website, to get an all-in-one box. The problem here of course is the library site may be slowly losing it influence and pretty much nobody starts their search on the library homepage.

I am writing this in Singapore 24 hours after visiting the lovely city of New Orleans for ALA Annual 2011 . As expected, I was pretty overwhelmed given the size and scale of this event (despite attendance being 23% down from last year, there were still 26,201 people attending including 14,969 librarians!) . I was totally at sea, this being my first international conference and being the only one from my institution (which has pros and

Recently, I pulled everything I have read on the topic on Web Scale Discovery tools (e.g Summon, Ebsco Discovery Service or EDS, Worldcat local and Primo Central) together into a bibliography and posted it on the following Google Site on the topic started by Andy Ekins (Christ Church University, UK) and Lukas Koster (Library of the University of Amsterdam, NL). It has about 50 different links to various topics on discovery tools from

I'll being attending ALA Annual 2011 at New Orleans in June thanks to support from my employers. Amazing to think that I will be attending the largest library conference in the world, when my prior experience has being attending relatively small local library conferences/seminars in Singapore.

Augmented reality is one of the technologies that education and libraries industry is looking at, that might be the next big thing by complementing mobile. If you are unfamiliar with the idea, you point your device (smartphone or tablet) camera at an object and when you look at your device it not only shows the object but additional information overlaying it, typically some text, image or movie.

As we struggle with our day to day struggles at work, it is easy to get caught up in our own individual library projects (social media!

I recently attended and spoke at a library conference/seminar, Libraries for Tomorrow 2011 conducted by the Library Association of Singapore*. It was clear that like everywhere else, institution repositories was a hot topic with 5 presentations, followed by mobile with 4 presentations (5 if you include a presentation on a Facebook app). Not really a surprise since the last few times I have written on mobile

In a earlier post, I wrote about some thoughts about having a real one-search box that includes content not just from articles &books but also guides, faqs, library webpages.

I'm really in awe with the way the New York Public Library (NYPL) uses social media. Their "flagship" twitter account @nypl must be one of the most followed library twitter accounts in the world with over 100k followers.

Last year, my institution launched both LibAnswers (a Faq system) and LibGuides (a content management system that is wildly popular for libraries). One interesting thing I noticed is that a number of queries (about 5-10%) were treating the search for LibAnswers or LibGuides like a library catalogue search box. People were searching for keywords of very narrow subjects.

I suppose by now many of you have heard, I was named as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker 2011! I woke up to my phone beeping like crazy from congratulatory messages on Twitter and Facebook, went to the link and it was almost surreal to see my profile alongside names such as Bobbi Newman, Buffy Hamilton and Ned Potter etc.