I am proud and honoured to receive the 2012 Salem Press Library Blog Award - Best Academic Library Blog! Time flies and more than three years have passed since I decided to first blog on a whim.

When a libraries purchases a library service whether it is a next generation catalogue system, a web scale discovery system or a link resolver , one decision that has to be made is to decide whether to "rebrand" the service.

I recently had the opportunity to attend two library conferences in June back to back, a first for me. CONSAL XV, BALI First off I was invited to CONSAL XV (CONGRESS OF SOUTH EAST ASIAN LIBRARIANS), a regional conference in Bali, Indonesia from 28 May 2012 to June 1 2012 I am still new to library conferences (you can count on one hand the number I

Librarians today are a fortunate bunch, we trade ideas and advice from librarians thousands of miles away as easily as from someone in the same city using the internet and social media. As a result, new and good ideas flow very quickly these days.

I am not by any stretch a customer service guru or expert, but one thing I noticed about libraries is that user needs tend to come in cycles and often can be easily anticipated in advance. After working in an academic library in the last 5 years and monitoring emails, tweets, chats , search logs, you see the same pattern repeat itself over and over again.

It's a truism in library circles today to say that Google and web search engines (I will use "Google" as a stand in for web search engines) have changed the way users search which in turn affects what they expect from searches in the library. Libraries have two ways to react, first is to try to change user behavior through information literacy or altering the library catalogues and databases to fit user expectations.

I must admit, local history is not much a specialty of mine but I happen to work for a University, whose history goes back a fair distance to 1905 and as a library unit we have collections that go back almost as far making us the oldest academic library in Singapore.

I recently attended a talk about Mendeley institutional version (powered by Swets) , I am fairly familiar with Mendeley , Zotero and other reference managers (though my main usage is with EndNote) but have not looked at the institutional version yet.

As a fresh graduate from library school with little practical experience, I used to think that known item searches ie finding an article or book when you already knew the title etc was relatively trivial and the difficulty was with the other type of searches subject/topical searches?

It's common for libraries to have a Facebook page now and as such we are all affected by the new Facebook Timeline for pages that will be turned on March 30 2012. Articles like this and this explain some of the changes but perhaps the biggest change will be the need to add a cover photo on top of the normal profile photo.

Okay this could be one of my craziest ideas yet. Of course you would have heard of Hitler Downfall parodies  , where a classic scene from the German movie Downfall has its subtitles changed so it seems Hitler is ranting about anything from being banned in Xbox live to disappointment with the latest Apple product. In the library context, I suppose it would be trivial to create many such parodies as there is plenty to rant about.