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.

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..

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”.

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.

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.

I haven't done a "tools" post in a while, so this blog post will just be a whirlwind introductory tour of tools and applications I have explored recently and my thoughts on them.

As every librarian knows, there are three main sources of citation data.

Last month I wrote 4 different ways of measuring library eresource usage and argued one can obtain usage statistics by obtaining them from publishers or rely on one's own analysis of ezproxy logs.

More than 2 years ago , I wrote about how academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm which summarized how I expected the rise of open access would diminish and eventually obsolete some current library functions like fulfillment and possibly even discovery.

8 years ago in March 2009, I started blogging about librarianship on a WordPress system powered by Edublogs Campus.

Update :14th April 2017 - Unpaywall button now appears to be using Google Scholar and can "see fulltext from ResearchGate, Academia.edu, researcher homepages, and some IRs." You can turn off the option in the extension but it claims to lose 20% of content if you do that.