Aaron Tay's thoughts about academic librarianship

Singapore Management University

RISK WARNING NOTICE: my understanding of such matters are incomplete, read at your own risk!

I haven't been looking closely at Seamless Access and GetFTR for a while, but given it is nearly two years since GetFTR was announced, I decided to see how it has changed and was pleasantly surprised by some of the changes.

A relook at GetFTR , Libkey, Exlibris Quicklinks, and other linking and authentication technologies

While I have been adjusting to the latest change in my personal life, the world has been grappling with the impact of COVID-19.

 Updated : 30th April 2020

Here are my list of interesting resources that caught my eye.

Libraries and research in a COVID-19 world - resource list and some thoughts

With the rise of open access journals and in particularly the business model involving APCs (Article Processing Charges) where authors pay a fee upfront to make their papersopen access, we are now understandably worried about authors publishing in "potentially predatory journals", where publishers have the incentive to charge a fee and not do proper vetting before publishing the paper.

Estimating the amount of papers published in potentially predatory journals by your institution, country - an attempt

As a generalist and dilettante in the field of academic librarianship, I highly appreciate works that

Some readings I read in 2021 that made me feel like I levelled up

We’ve traded keyword constraints for infinite potential, and created a massive usability crisis in the process.

The Blank Box Problem: Why It's Harder Than Ever to Know What to Type Into an AI Search Bar

National University of Singapore

Like most librarians, I give a fair number of presentations, so I did a bit of research on how to use my iPhone as a slide-changer remote. This seems to be an example of a solution looking for a problem since I could just use the slide changer available in my library, but it isn't really. I'll explain later. I'm not a mac user, so I can't use Keynote, but there are about half a dozen options for windows users, none of which are free.

Presenting using iPhone apps - My experience with MyPoint

I recently had the privilege to attend &amp; present a paper at the satellite Meeting of IFLA World Library and Information Congress Information Literacy Section and Reference &amp;

Information literacy &amp; improving user experience - is there a conflict?

I recently compared three academic AI search tools: Primo Research Assistant, Web of Science Research Assistant, and Scopus AI for a review article.

The reproducibility and interpretability of academic Ai search engines like Primo Research Assistant, Web of Science Research Assistant, Scopus Ai and more

My blog focuses on the two primary ways "AI"—or more accurately, transformer-based models—are impacting academic search. The first, and flashier application is in generating synthesized answers with citations from retrieved articles, a technique known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). The second, which is the focus of this post, involves the rise of non-lexical or keyword search methods.

A Deep Dive into EBSCOhost's Natural Language Search and Web of Science Smart Search - Two bundled "Ai-powered"search (I)

Can Semantic Search be more interpretable?

Can Semantic Search be more interpretable? COLBERT, SPLADE might be the answer but is it enough?

As academic search engines and databases incorporate the use of generative AI into their systems, an important concept that all librarian should grasp is that of retrieval augmented generation (RAG).   You see it in use in all sorts of "AI products" today from chatbots like Bing Copilot, to Adobe's Acrobat Ai assistant that allow you to chat with your PDF.

Retrieval Augmented Generation and academic search engines - some suggestions for system builders

Let's be clear here,

 Google Scholar is ill designed for use for systematic reviews

. I am not trying to argue otherwise. (Obligatory warning, I am not a real systematic review librarian) But why exactly?

Why EXACTLY is Google Scholar bad for evidence synthesis, systematic reviews?

I've watched with interest, as academic search engines use AI to improve searching.  Elicit is probably currently the leading example of this, using transformer based language models to  improve search relevancy ranking  use RAG (retrieval augmented generation) across multiple documents to generate a paragraph of text to answer the query with citations extract information to create a research matrix table of papers

A conceptual view of information retrieval - can we do better with AI?

One of the tricks about using the newer "AI powered" search systems like Elicit, SciSpace and even JSTOR experiment search is that they recommend that you type in your query or what you want in full natural language and not keyword search style (where you drop the stop words) for better results. So for example do

Why entering your query in natural question leads to better result than keyword searching with the latest AI powered (Dense retrieval/embedding models) search

Earlier related pieces - How Q&amp;A systems based on large language models (eg GPT4) will change things if they become the dominant search paradigm - 9 implications for libraries

In the ever-evolving landscape of information retrieval and library science, the emergence of large language models, particularly those based on the transformer architecture like GPT-4, has opened up a Pandora's box of possibilities and challenges.

Things I am still wondering about generative AI + Search in 2024 - impact of semantic search, generation of answers with citations and more..

I was asked to give a talk at CILIP Conference 2023 for the Data &amp; AI panel. I was given 10 minutes to send a recording which I eventually delivered.  But here's an extended 40-minute recording before I cut it down. As I was just practicing, the delivery might not be the best, and in fact the final 10-minute version might be better!

Recorded extended talk - The possible impact of AI on search and discovery​

ChatGPT by OpenAI is the most famous and most used auto regressive decoder Transformer based Large Language Model. However, it is not the only large language model, besides open ones like BLOOM, Google has developed their own versions include LaMDA, and Pathways Language Model (PaLM) both in 2022, but had never released them any of them, until now.

Google Bard - a first impression

Warning: I am not a data or information scientist; this is a new area I am trying to learn about
 

The rise of large language models, such as GPT-3, GPT-4, ChatGPT, and BERT, has dramatically improved information retrieval in recent years.

4+1 Different Ways Large Language Models like GPT4 are helping to improve information retrieval

In my last blog post, I tried to identify seminal papers using a variety of methods. These were divided into two main categories. The first category was to look at text written by other authors mentioning that certain works were seminal.  The most straightforward way was to search citation statements/context in scite.ai for keyword phrases like "Seminal works" + Topic.

Identifying Seminal papers - a better method - the rise of Q&amp;A systems that combine Search + Large Language models - Perplexity and Bing+GPT

As academic librarians helping early-stage researchers (Masters, Phds students), we are often asked to provide guidance on the literature review process in one shot classes. One thing we tend to focus on during such sessions is the keyword search technique, though many of us also cover alternative to keyword techniques like citation searching, starting off with review articles etc.

Where to search for research journal literature - some common errors I see on choice of sources (I)

As I write this, OpenAI has just unleashed ChatGPT - their GPT3.5 Large Language Model(LLMs) for about a month, and the online world is equal parts hype and confusion. In my corner of Twitter with educators &amp; librarians there is worry about how LLMs might make detecting plagiarism difficult. I've written my take about this elsewhere but it occurs to me that this isn't the first time I've seen someone worry about automated tools.

Do Automated citation recommendation tools encourage questionable citations? Some thoughts on latest tools like Large Language Models and Q&amp;A academic systems

Epistemic status
 
 : I have been reading on and off technical papers on large language models since 2020, mostly get the gist but don't understand the deepest technical details. I have written and published on academic discovery search for most of my librarianship career since 2008.

Since the 2000s the way search engines have worked has not changed.

Q&amp;A academic systems - Elicit.org, Scispace, Consensus.app, Scite.ai and Galactica

I recently came across "Automated citation recommendation tools encourage questionable citations" (which was first brought to my attention by this blog post) an exceedingly thought-provoking article about bias in discovery tools, particularly new ones that can

 suggest what to reference based on text in a paper.

Leaving aside the issues such recommenders might bring, you don't have to think extremely hard to realize such tools will

What can you actually find in a open citation index like OpenAlex? Implications for citation based tools based on it

In late 2018, I gave a talk at  OCLC Asia Pacific Regional Conference Meeting 2018 and I gave my thoughts on how I see the game changing for libraries in the years to come based on 3 fundamental trends.

Diversity of Scholarly record + Push to Open + Deep learning

Note: This is based off my contribution to the Upstream blog (plus some major additions)- Aaron Tay is Keeping Tabs on Open Research

I tend to find interesting articles via Twitter or from following references of such articles. For articles that look potentially interesting I will usually put the link in my Google Keep and tag them with “Professional Development” , which I try to clear every week.

Comparing disciplinary coverage of 56 databases, measuring ORCID adoption, measuring FAIRness in repositories and more

Note: This is adapted from an internal talk I gave at my place of work. It is written for generalists who want to have an idea about DOIs and related services and hence does not go into specific details (e.g. how to actually deposit metadata, fields used etc).


 The thesis here is that if you are an academic librarian you could probably do well to learn more about DOIs.

5 things you may not know about DOIs or why there is more to DOIs than meets the eye

If there is one academic discovery search that dominates it is Google Scholar.

5 ways Google Scholar helps you get access to what you discovered

Web of Science - Pilot- enhanced cited references

In the recent years I have been blogging quite a bit about the idea of citation contexts (or citation intent or citation sentiment or...) in journal articles. While definitions and concepts might vary a little, the idea is not to simply just count citations but also try to figure out what they mean.

Web of Science and Scholarcy adds citation context features with a twist

A belated Happy New year to all my readers! The first blog post for the year will be a mixed bag of events or changes that have caught my eye.

Google Scholar adds review articles filter, Harzing's Publish or Perish 8.0 and OpenAlex launches

UN Sustainability Goals or UN SDGs was first adopted in 2015 , and consists of 17 goals adopted by all United Nations Member States to achieve by 2030. In particular, in academia, there seems to be increasing interest in mapping literature directed at each of the 17 UN SDGs and filters showing this aspect of research is also starting to appear in various research tools in 2020 such as Scival , Dimensions and Overton.

Mapping literature to UN SDGs, issues &amp; tools that support it - Scival, Dimensions &amp; Overton.io

In the last month, there were two interesting developments that caused quite a stir in my twitter feeds (see discussions here and here). Firstly, there was an interesting announcement on the Unpaywall mailing list, that Unpaywall had detected that Semantic Scholar which was one of the biggest repository sources they were tracked had removed most of the articles it was hosting.

Why open alone is not enough - Microsoft Academic discontinued &amp; Semantic Scholar withdraws hosting of "Open access" papers

In this blog post, I will report on some major progress I believe have been made in the push for open citations Firstly, the recent announcement by Elsevier followed by ACS that they will finally support open citations is

The era of open citations and an update of tools- Citation Chaser, Wikicite addon for Zotero with citation graph support and more

In November 2019's Systematically improving the visibility of your research on social media - what would this look like? , I shared two initatives, one by a University Library and another by a  Researcher/Publisher to try to experiment to improve the visibility of their research papers posted on Social Media.

Systematically improving the visibility of your research on social media -Visual abstracts, Video abstracts , Plain language abstracts and more

Welcome to Aaron Tay's Musings about Librarianship by me, Aaron Tay. I'm librarian + blogger from Singapore Management University. Social media, bibliometrics, analytics, library tech. Here to learn from experts, not an expert. Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.Subscribe now In the meantime, tell your friends!

Synopsis : I summarise some of my favourite literature review tools that have emerged in the last 2 years or so and the use cases I see them fitting in. In particular I briefly cover tools and techniques I like that help


 to record what has been found - basically reference managers [Zotero]


 to efficently check and gain access to full text - basically browser extensions like Libkey Nomad possibly other methods of access

Navigating the literature review - metaphors for tasks and tools - How do emerging tools fit in?

So it is Open Access Week 2020, while I write quite a bit on Open Access and Open Data, I don't often post specifically for Open Acess Week.

[OA week 2020] - Creating a free and beautiful auto-updating dashboard for tracking Open Access rates for your institution using Lens.org

Do note what follows is my own personal reflections while working on I4OA and may not represent the views or opinions of I4OA as a whole.

Last month I4OA - the Initiative for Open Abstracts was launched.  The mission of I4OA is simple as stated on the home page Founding members and individuals of I4OA included representatives from

 Scholarly publishers

e.g. Sage Publishing, Royal Society

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) launches &amp; why I support it - some reflections

Two years ago in 2018 I started to realise  the importance and value of Data discovery and slowly began studying various challenges to making Datasets discoverable. Google eventually launched Google dataset search, while Crossref, DataCite began to work together to enable linking of DOIs between Journal articles with Crossref dois and datasets with DataCite dois.

Some data discovery updates - Figshare update, Querying PID graphs &amp; DataCite Commons launches

Update Nov 2021 - A relook at GetFTR , Libkey, Exlibris Quicklinks, and other linking and authentication technologies
 

While allowing users to gain access to paywalled academic content aka delivery services is often seen to be less sexy than discovery it is still an important part of the researcher workflow that is worth looking at. In particular, I will argue that in the past few years we have seen a renewed

Improving access and delivery of academic content - a survey of current &amp; emerging trends

Why GPT-3 might be the greatest disruption to libraries since Google


 tags

: tech, machine-learning, academic libraries

 Summary

: I share my early experiments with OpenAI's new language prediction model (GPT-3) beta. I explain why I think GPT-3 has potential to disrupt academic librarians

Why GPT-3 might be the greatest disruption to libraries since Google

Librarians are at best ambivalent about Google, but it's hard to deny they come up with really interesting and useful tools. From the early days of GMail, which revolutionized web email to more recent advancements where Machine learning is used in Google Photos and Lens to make life just a little bit easier, one doesn't need to be a fan of Google to recognise they can be quite innovative.

3 useful Google related tricks - linking to specific segments, copy from paper to text and search with Google lens

In this blog post, which was co-written with Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University Library) and Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University), we discuss the value of openly available abstracts. This post was originally published at Medium.

Why openly available abstracts are important - overview of the current state of affairs

It's a cliche to say that the volume of scientific literature produced is increasing at a rate beyond which researchers can keep up. With the rise of Machine learning techniques and more importantly the increasing availability of open meta-data and increased open full text , we are starting to see tools appear that try to leverage this to produce applications that can help take the load off researchers on what to read and to

More research/literature mapping tools - Connected Papers and CoCites

Microsoft Academic (first relaunched in 2016) is one of the biggest index of academic content next to Google Scholar. It consists of two major parts Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), the open dataset source generated by Microsoft by their Bing crawlers and Microsoft Academic - the web search interface  created over MAG data.  Microsoft Academic - the web search interface  created using MAG.

6 Surprising things I learnt about Microsoft Academic (I)

One thing the COVID-19 crisis has put a spotlight on is how well our scientific publishing system works. Preprints that allow more speedy dissemination of scientific results but at the cost of quality have been in the spotlight . The impact of perverse incentives that leads researchers to delay release of data to publish in top journals is yet another problem that has become more salient.

COVID-19 and Text data mining - a grand experiment around CORD-19 dataset?

Back in Oct 2018 (I know because I searched my email), I was helping some third party test a browser extension that would provide links to free full text (somewhat akin to Unpaywall) and I came across this curious Dark Grey box with the words "PDF" at the side of a journal article.

A belated look at Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) or "off-campus access links" in Google Scholar

In 2015, Marshall Breeding the guru of Library technology and discovery summarized the state of  Library Discovery in a NISO White paper entitled "The Future of Library Discovery"

The rise of the "open" discovery indexes? Lens.org, Semantic Scholar and Scinapse

Warning : This is a
 
 thinking out-loud post
 
 , where I try to elucidate my understanding of statistics and ways of showing evidence for causation.

A think out loud post - Showing causality - Randomized control trials, Difference in difference, Instrumental variables &amp; Mendelian Randomization

Earlier this year, I blogged about how new citation indexes were impacting Science mapping tools such as Citespace, VOSviewer , Citation Gecko and more. In this blog post, I will briefly talk about two more new mapping/visualization tools that caught my eye. The first of them is Open Knowledge maps which has been around for a while, but has a beta that now supports concept graphs in partnership with Know-Center.

More science mapping tools - Local citation network tool and Open Knowledge Maps with concept graphs

I've always been a big fan of Summon's Best bet feature and Primo's resource recommender. If you are unfamiliar with the idea, it allows the librarian to augment search results users get with additional custom messages or recommendations when they search in Summon or Primo.

Some ideas for Lean Library's Library Assist feature - helping users wherever they are

Updated 27/8/2019 - Libkey Nomad now supports open access via Unpaywall (accepted manuscript) on top of full OA journals already in Libkey Knowledgebase. Kopernio now allows institutions which are WOS customers to setup library link resolver as a fall-back.




 Updated 28/8/2019 -

A comparison of 6 Access Broker browser extensions Lean Library, Kopernio, Anywhere Access, Libkey Nomad &amp; more

When you have been in the library industry for a while, you start noticing patterns. For example, many new developments and announcements (e.g. mergers, launch of new products and services) that are intended to have a big splash are often announced at big events like ALA annual in June. To a much smaller extent we are starting to see this as well during Open Access Week.

Unpaywall Journals, InstantILL, expansion of Semantic Scholar - new developments announced during open access 2019 week that caught my eye.

In this week's blog entry, I cover three new stories of interest that have one common thread - issues affecting the measurement of journal usage. The three stories are  1. A loophole in COUNTER? Are some publisher platforms double counting downloads? 2. More granular analysis of ezproxy logs?

It's the journal usage stupid! Loophole in COUNTER? Ezproxy with EzPAASE &amp; Springernature syndicates with ResearchGate

In academia, the print paradigm still holds sway. For instance, I've argued that our citation practices makes no sense in our largely digital era. That said, quite a bit of the content, we read, cite and use are available only in hard copy , or failing that content in PDF that can't be easily manipulated in digital formats.

From print /pdf to data - Mathpix, WebPlotDigitzer, Excel app &amp; more tools

Back in 2016, I wrote a fairly controversial

Measuring the amount of unique content in your institutional repository

I was recently invited to the Changing Landscape of Science and Technology Libraries (CLSTL) 2019 conference. This would have been my second time speaking there but unfortunately due to personal reasons I had to give it a miss. Still I contributed a recorded talk for the event .  My talk was about how compared to a decade ago,  the tons of Scholarly metadata that is now freely and openly available to be leveraged by API.

Crossref Participation reports - assessing quality of metadata provided by Publishers

It has been over a year in April 2018 since I had the opportunity to present at two panels in  conferences alongside experts such  as Lisa Hinchliffe, Johan Tilstra (Founder Lean Library), Jason Priem (Cofounder Unpaywall), Ben Kaube (Cofounder Kopernio) on the topic of browser extensions that help users gain quick access to the full text of articles while browsing the web.

Kopernio, Lean Library, Anywhere Access &amp; other "Access Broker" browser extensions - a roundup &amp; update of current state of play

The news that University of California system cancelled their deal with Elsevier seemed to have caused a bit of a stir all over the world, including here in Singapore and I was asked to do a talk to brief faculty on the latest trends in this area. The more I researched the more interested I got. What were institutions and consortiums doing to better their bargaining position with the big publishers?

Reflections on trends in library big deals, consortiums and how it might apply to Singapore?

Most people agree with Open Access is a good thing to have, but  a lot of the debate resolves over business models and the cost we should pay for it. Fundamentally, the question is how much is the output worth? While it isn't perfect, Librarians use cost per use figures in negotiations and discussions on whether to renew something but how are cost per use figures usually calculated?

Considering the implications of COUNTER release 5 (including Distributed Usage logging) &amp; COUNTER standard for Research Data Usage Metrics

There is something in the air right now around datasets. Increasingly, datasets are being made visible and shared online in data repositories. Undoubtedly getting researchers to deposit their datasets whether open or even closed to data repositories is a difficult task, but once that is achieved the next challenge lies with making the datasets discoverable.

Making your datasets discoverable - 2 aspects to look at

Note : Jan 2019 - I wrote the bulk of this in July 2018, when Scopus announced a deal with Unpaywall.

Linking to freely available articles - how various databases and citation indexes use unpaywall data

It's not big secret that Machine learning and AI is an increasingly important topic to study. But I was again reminded of this again when I recently attended a talk on Microsoft Academic , entitled "What Can We Expect from Machine Cognition "      The talk began simply enough, recapping some of the latest triumphs by AI in conquering games like Go and Video games like DOTA, Pacman.

On Microsoft academic, predatory journals, algorithmic fairness and Machine learning learning resources

I was recently invited to the OCLC Asia Pacific Regional Conference Meeting 2018 in Bangkok to speak. The conference had the theme "Game Changer" and I gave my thoughts on how I see the game changing for libraries in the years to come. For the past 2-3 years, I have been blogging on various trends and technologies like  analytics, open citations, open data, linked data,

Thinking of the future - a summary of my thoughts as of 2018

It seems like just a short time last year in May where I blogged about the new iteration of Microsoft's academic search dubbed "Microsoft Academic" which was then in beta and it eventually left beta at the end of the year. But it seems they are at it again, this time there is a Microsoft Academic Preview. On first glance this looks just like a run of mill face lift. Don't get me wrong, overall I think this is an improvement.

Microsoft academic preview - Microsoft's new rankings of journals, institutions, authors &amp; conferences

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. I think for most reasonably sized and resourced university libraries the answer is not many. Utrecht is a well known exception, but the question remains could you chose not to follow the crowd and have your own discovery service of content?

1findr, Dimensions and other free mega indexes - A review of the space and numbers comparison

Open access is a complicated business. Everytime I think I understand it (and I've blogged a lot on it, trying too get to gripes with it - in particular this post), some new nuance appears to make me realize I don't really understand  at all. In this case, my mind was blown when I learnt that there was  wall of shame for posting preprints on Bioarxiv!   But let's back up a bit and talk a bit about preprints first.

Can posting a preprint be morally wrong?

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.

Knowtro and Citation Gecko - 2 tools for literature review with a twist for Phd students &amp; researchers

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.

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

The evolving librarian - reconsidering teaching of boolean, CRAAP for fake news and calculating open adjusted cost per use

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 .  He said and I paraphrase "I don't really need that many articles (I usually only read and cite a few top journals), and those I can easily find using Google Scholar, but if I don't have the data , I can't do my

Datasets as a first class entity - preliminary musings

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. Instead of merely bringing in content from the outside into the community (i.e the traditional role of buying of books and journals), academic libraries are now taking on roles of promoting the content created by their community to the outside world.

Enhancing the discovery of institutional repository contents - 6 sources to consider

2009 to 2013 was a exciting time for library discovery as University Libraries starting rolling out so called Web Scale Discovery services. Much of my blog was focused on the area in those years, but eventually this technology began to mature and things started to settle down. Still if you think there is nothing new or interesting in the field of academic search and discovery these days you may be in for a surprise.

My look at some interesting discovery ideas, trends and features for academic search

One of the major issues with institutional repositories is that it is difficult to get researchers to self-deposit their work. Assuming one could wave a magic wand and solve that, institutional repositories still have another barrier to overcome - the discovery barrier. With content scattered across thousands of sites, one would need an aggregator site to provide a one-search across all of them.

Open access and the versioning issue - do we need to solve this?

As a generalist with hands in many pies, I'm prone to throw around terms I barely understand. API or Application Programming Interface might be one of them.  But learning about APIs are important as we are using it whether we know it or not. Recently, I have started to get comfortable with them , at least in terms of pulling out the data and parsing the JSON output.

Using oaDOI &amp; Crossref event data API to calculate your institution's open access citation advantage

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. I would like to thank him for his patience in clarifying misconceptions I had, and

Understanding the implications of Open Citations - how far along are we?

It's 2018 and perhaps you are looking for interesting new tools to add to your repertoire. Here are some interesting ones relating to cleaning, analysis and modelling of data that I have encountered in the last year. JASP - Open Source statistical software similar to SPSS with support of COS

6 tools for easy data cleaning, modelling and statistical analysis - Rapidminer, Orange, Rattle, Trifacta, Talend, JASP

CC BY-SA 3.0 Nick Youngson     When I first started in academic libraries, one of the most popular questions I got was "what database should I use to find articles on X". Today ten years later, I still get such questions but to a far lesser degree. This is due to a combination of better discovery from all in one tools like Google Scholar, various library discovery services and just more digital material out there that is much more findable.

Data carpentry, "long" data from library databases &amp; other data related topics

I'm actually a pretty big fan of Google Scholar, which in some ways is better than our library discovery service ,but even if you aren't a fan, given it's popularity it's important for librarians to keep up with the latest developments. In any case, I'm happy to see that Google continues to enhance Google Scholar with new features. These are some of the new features and things I've learnt about Google Scholar lately.

 1.

4 New things about Google Scholar - UI, recommendations, and citation networks

In honor of this year's Open Access Week, here's a personal reflection of my engagement with open access over the 10 years of my career in academic libraries.

My reflection on my journey in open access or Can you be a librarian without being an open access advocate?

When you attend librarian conferences, it is common to hear speakers say that librarians are too modest about our value to our stakeholders and they advocate that we librarians should well.. advocate for ourselves more. Yet I think things are not that simple. There is always a tension between advocacy (which is by it's nature not fully objective) and analysis/assessment which is mostly objective.

Advocacy by librarians - is there a tension with assessment/analysis?

At my prior institution, I was the administrator of the discovery service - Summon and one of the features that I loved the most was the "best bets" and database recommender feature. If you are unfamiliar with what that does, it essentially allows you as a librarian to setup special notes/links/images to appear when they are triggered by specific search terms - called tags in Primo.

5 things you can do with resource recommender/best bets in Primo or Summon

In 2014, I wrote about “How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm” which attempts to forecast how academic libraries will change when “50%-80% or more of the annual output of new papers will be open access in some form”.  I’ve come to realize a more interesting and critical question for libraries would be on what to do during the transition period, when open access becomes a significant but not yet majority pool of

Academic libraries in a mixed open access &amp; paywall world — Can we substitute open access for paywalled articles?

There seems to be something in the water. Out of the blue, interest in helping users find free/open access articles seems to have blossomed since earlier this year when Unpaywall was unveiled.

Getting serious about open access discovery - Is open access getting too big to ignore?

With the current interest in browser extensions like Unpaywall to help access open access material, it may be easy to forget that the majority of scholarly content is still locked behind paywalls and there is a need to provide seamless access to them for our users. One interesting solution to this is Lean Library's browser extension.

[Guest Post] Lean Library's browser extension - Seamless delivery for users

As every librarian knows, there are three main sources of citation data. The three citation indexes (in increasing order of size) are Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. However, they are not the only sources, and recently, I noticed studies showing that two other sources, ResearchGate and Microsoft Academic search are getting large enough to be worth considering.

ResearchGate and Microsoft academic search (beta) - new rising citation indexes?

8 years ago in March 2009, I started blogging about librarianship on a WordPress system powered by Edublogs Campus. But very quickly, I moved to a personal Blogger site with the clunky tagline "k

 eeping track of interesting and cool ideas that might be used by libraries for benefit of users

" (I was really into playing with RSS and other similar tools at the time) and remained blogging there to this day.

Musings about librarianship turns 8 with a refreshed layout and a quick note!

I've come to believe that learning how to search for and manipulate data will become the next "must-have" skill sets for academic librarians. As such, I've been trying to learn myself. One of the obvious tools to gain competency in is OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) for cleaning of data.

OpenRefine, &amp; reconciliation services - learning the ropes

How does one measure library eresources usage? This is a question I've bumped into numerous times recently in the course of my work whether it be trying to do correlation studies between student success and electronic usage , choosing the right metric for the library dashboard or even more mundanely just evaluating a database for subscription. My way of looking at it is two fold.

4 different ways of measuring library eresource usage

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany is probably one of the largest and most advanced aggregator of open access articles (hitting over 100 million records), others on roughly the same level are CORE (around 60 million records) and OAIster (owned by OCLC).    One way of seeing this class of open access aggregators is to see them as similar to web scale discovery search engines like

The open access aggregators challenge — how well do they identify free full text?

2016 seems to the year Sci-hub has broken out into popular consciousness. The service that provides access to academic papers for free , often dubbed "The Napster" of academic papers by media is having it's moment in the sun. To me though the most interesting bit was finding out how much usage of Sci-Hub seems to by people (either researchers or academics) who have access to academic library services.

5 Extensions to help access full text when starting outside the library homepage

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&amp;I) databases like Scopus, Web of Science or more disciplinary specific databases like Psycinfo.

Measuring the value of contributed metadata in web scale discovery services

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.

Look back at 10 top posts on librarianship I am proudest of (2012-2015)

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.

A quick review of Moto 360 v1.0

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.

Libraries and Trello - How are librarians using it?

I've recently been involved in analysing  LibQual+ Survey at my new institution and one of the things recommended nowadays when doing LIBQUAL analysis is to do a plot of performance of various items versus how important those items are to users. Above we see sample data from Library Assessment and LibQUAL+®: Data Analysis.

Making electronic resources accessible from my home or office - some improvements

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  Somehow though, I doubt successful libraries are all alike except in the most general of ways. Still, these are some of the changes or trends in librarianship in the year of 2014 that resonated with me or occupied me. A lot of it probably is highly specific to my current institution and environment so your mileage might vary.

A personal review of 2014

I was recently invited to give a talk at the Swedish Summon User Group meeting and I presented about possible scenarios for the future of web scale discovery. As Web Scale Discovery in libraries goes back to roughly 2009, most academic libraries have by now had 2-3 years of grappling with the concept.

Four possible Web Scale Discovery Future Scenarios

At library school, I was taught the concept of nested boolean. In particular, I was taught a particular search strategy which goes like this.

Why Nested Boolean search statements may not work as well as they did

Like many academic library bloggers, I occasionally fancy myself as a "trend spotter" and am prone to attempts at predicting the future. The trend I am increasingly convinced that is going to have a great impact on how academic libraries will function is the rise of Open Access.

How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm

Google Scholar is increasingly becoming a subject that an academic librarian cannot afford to be ignorant about. Various surveys have shown usage of Google Scholar is rising among researchers, particularly beginning and intermediate level researchers.  Our own internal statistics such as link resolver statistics and views of Libguides on Google Scholar, tell a similar story.

Aaron Tay's Musings about librarianship

Real time collaboration tools