Recently some of my coworkers have started to purchase Iphones and Itouches, and have asked me for help on how to setup their devices.

By now many corporations including libraries routinely scan for mentions of themselves on the internet. The number one free tool used is of course Google alerts, but with the rise of real time searches and microblogging, attention has turned towards scanning for Tweets. In this post, I will share with you some of my experiences doing so called "environmental scanning"  using free tools.

QR code stands for "quick response", it's basically a 2D barcode that can be used to store urls, text etc. QRcodes can be used to quickly pull data from the physical world into  mobile phones which are equipped with free QR code readers (many free ones exist,but Beetagg supports quite a few phones) automatically. Simply scan the QRcode with your phone's camera, and the QRcode reader will pull the information into your phone.

Due to the popularity of this post, I have created a separate page , which I will keep updated with new entries. This post will remain unaltered for the record -- Aaron 20/3/2010 Got your IPhone recently and want a quick overview of what innovative librarians , library or library vendors have done with IPhone apps?

Introduction There are two "movements" in librarianship that I'm quite interested in, one is of course "library 2.0" , the other which doesn't show as much because it's hard to blog about is "evidence based librarianship". I always liked figures and statistics (I enjoyed analyzing the heck out of LibQual+ data last year) and being able to "prove" that some initiative is worthwhile always makes me happy.

I'm pretty bad with dates and appointments, so I rely heavily on my online Calender to keep track of my meetings. My main calender is Google Calender (for the sms updates) synced to Outlook Calender (because we are on Exchange server) to keep track of my appointments using Google Calender Sync . I know many librarians embed their Google Calender into webpages or even LibGuides, to show times they are not busy and available for an appointment.

Curious about in academic librarianship in Singapore as a career? Try So you want to be a academic librarian in Singapore? Okay, I foolishly agreed to do this  Library Day in the Life Project which is basically a project where librarians agree to blog or Tweet about their work for a day or a week. Why do this?

Location based apps and services are getting a lot of buzz these days. Users can create webpages for each location, and usually they can check in to indicate to friends their location,earn points to gain "Mayorship" and/or post reviews and tips. In many cases, these services provide legitimate owners of these locations to "claim" the location.

This post has being superceded by this updated list I was listening to @griffey and other top North American Librarians at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting, via Ustream and Jason mentioned he knew about 3 library IPhone apps and wondered if anyone knew of more. A month ago, I happened to be curious about this, so while on a long bus ride, I did a search on IPhone appstore for keywords library, libraries, university.

While doing research for another blog post, I stumbled upon this amazing Iphone application (they promise support for other mobile platform soon) called CardStar via Oak Park Library. I tweeted about it, and it seems to have gotten a bit of a reaction from the librarain community.

In one of the earliest posts of this blog I observed that libraries faced a uphill battle getting users to come to our web portals to use our databases to search. Libraries tried to work around this problem by using toolbars, opensearch plugins, bookmarklets, smart keyword searches to enable users to search immediately from their browser without the need to visit our webpages.