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.

One of the very first library conferences I attended, a very distinguished speaker (not a librarian), stated that he detected a sense of doom and gloom among librarians (or something to that effect, sorry it was 2 years ago). Every librarian knows why, among various reasons, the internet and search engines are threatening to displace the role of libraries and librarians in the minds of the public, the rise of ebook readers threaten to cause the

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I was busy playing with my brand new IPhone 3GS. As this is my very first smartphone you can understand how excited I was with it. But of all the things you could do with a smartphone, perhaps the feature I was most interested in was in location based services and location based games.

This may ultimately prove to be yet another cool but useless idea (but what else is new from me?), but I've being playing with a service called ExitReality.

Crowd sourcing is defined as "for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group crowd of people or community in the form of an open call." The key here is that the work has to be done by non-employees so a group of librarians from your institution working on a subject guide wiki would not be crowd sourcing, unless you opened the wiki for your users to add resources.

Introduction In this long rambling post (too bad the name Rambling librarian is taken) , I  write about filtering RSS feeds (in particular table of contents from online journals), using 3 services , SuxOr, FeedZero and FeedScrub. I ramble on about social filtering versus Bayesian filters, Spam filtering versus filtering of RSS feeds , some very brief initial thoughts etc.

In this blog post, I describe 3 different ways to zoom in and out of presentations to increase visibility, and to create a bit of action. The three tools are Zoomit, Prezi and pptPlex. I describe my experiences with them in detail and their pros and cons as presentation tools.

It has being a crazy week, I was stressing out having to give my first ever presentation at the Libraries of the future seminar (with the new presentation tool Prezi !). Google decided to make things more complicated by sending me an Invite to Google Wave! I promptly gave it out to librarians I knew on Twitter and settled down to play with it. First off , it's supposed to work in Firefox and Google Chrome.

Reference desk duty is probably the most interesting part of my day, as I get to interact with users. One thing that interests me greatly is how different librarians setup their systems to respond to users. As I see it, there are two main competiting interests. On one hand, you want to be able to work on your own library assignments during idle periods.

How do you share links, resources with your library patrons? In the past, the default option would certainly be through email. There is nothing wrong with sharing links through emails, though it seems to me a more structured and organized way would be better.

A couple of months back , I wrote a post entitled Creating custom search boxes for library use. This is one of my top 10 most popular blog posts and also one of the posts which I'm most proud of because it is one of my few posts that I feel is pretty original. In that post, I figured out a way to create search widgets/boxes for practically any database, which can be embedded in many places including subject guides.