Some of my most popular blog posts in 2010 include 12 good library videos that spoofs movies or tv and Funniest library related movies made using Xtranormal. It has been almost 3 years since then, and libraries have been hard at working creating more interesting yet professional videos. These are some of my favourites including some I missed the last time around.

Surveys of both phd students in the UK as well as researchers in US not to mention ordinary users has shown that increasingly, the academic library site is declining in importance as a starting point for searching. Besides Google, the main site they go to is Wikipedia, either by going there direct or via google because it ranks highly in Google for most topics. There is even a name for it called GWR or Google > Wikipedia >

Time for some navel-gazing! Sarah Kennedy asks What does it mean to be a librarian? You know what? Not sure what it says about me that after 5 years in this profession and writing hundreds of blog posts, I have not once come around close to even this topic.

In a recent LibraryThing blog post entitled Pew study: Library patrons want personalized recommendations, they noted that in the Pew study , 64% of patrons interested in a library service which suggested books, audiobooks and DVDs to them based on their own preferences. Though I believe this report is about public library users, I suspect this applies also to academic library users to some extent.

I recently finished reading two introductory volumes on Open Access, namely Open Access - What you need to know by Walt Crawford and Open Access by Peter Suber. As far as I remember, I have never done a book review on this blog before, so here is my review of both. But first a little context of where I am coming from.

I was talking to a couple of students from my university in a online chatroom* and one mentioned that he was doing his literature review for his final year thesis**. Of course, I asked out of professional curiosity how he was doing it, and he mentioned he just used Google Scholar.

I am sure most of you have heard of Google Now available on Android Jellybean it is not just a intelligent personal agent like Siri that answers voice queries but more impressively there is a "predictive" component that can intelligently display content that Google thinks you will need before asking for it. Here's the promise "Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time.

It's the end of the year, and perhaps it's time to take stock of what went right and what to work on the next year.

I have been studying, thinking and posting about web scale discovery since 2011 and my institution is currently days away from pushing it out as a default search. In many ways, this has been one of the most technically challenging library projects I have been involved so far due to its far reaching effects, affecting everything from IT, cataloguing, e-resource management and information literacy.

There's a fascinating discussion going on now (Nov 2012) at the NGC4LIB (Next generation catalogs for libraries) Listserv about the value of cataloguing, RDF, Linked data etc. First the thread, "Authority in an Age of Open Access" links to a talk given by Clay Shirkey  and there is a brief interesting discussion about how the Smithsonian Institution crowdsourced tags for photos on flickr on the list.

Hi all, this is yet another conference report from me, my 3rd and last international conference for 2012. This time around, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at Internet Librarian International 2012 in London. I was very excited to attend because I knew from looking at the tweets and slides coming out from the past editions, this was my type of conference & I wasn't disappointed.