I don't have much artistic or design skills so I like playing with tools that help mask this lack of skill. The following are some tools that allows even someone like me to create more flashy presentations/visualizations/mashups without much skill or effort. Some of the tools below could be used at presentations, others could be a unusual visualization that you show on LCD monitors and other digital signages.

Warning : Self indulgent personal post follows So I celebrated 4 years in librarianship on Aug 27 2011, big whoop right? Typically such posts would wax lyrical about how with 4 years under my belt, I am too experienced to call myself a newbie but not too experienced to become a veteran (most associations use 5 years as a cut-off to determine whether one is a "new professional"). I will then go on to muse about how

Just as mobile friendly library sites (including library catalogues) are becoming common (see my survey on library mobile sites and survey on library native apps), library vendors providing databases are keep pacing with mobile friendly databases either as a native app or more commonly as a mobile web version. The main issue of course is do users actually want or desperately need the ability to search library databases on the go?

I wrote about Helene Blower's new digital divide here It's one of those slides where you look at it, and you are instantly struck by the brilliance of it. One criticism I've read about this idea is that it's not nuanced enough, and too simplistic. I think It's not quite fair a criticism since the word "divide" , implies only two possible sides?

I had the opportunity recently to populate the "Contact us" option in our new library page which led me to realize how diverse library communication channels are. Typically most libraries would offer Phone Email (mailing lists?) Instant Message/Chat (e.g. MSN, meebo chat rooms or paid options like Libraryh3lp) SMS

In 2009, I wrote Aggregating sources for academic research in a web 2.0 world . In it, I wrote "about the different sources one could add to stay on top of one's research area.

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.