Originally posted on The mongoose librarian:
Here’s a short piece I wrote for the UKSG Newsletter recently, reproduced here with permission. There’s a downloadable version over here if you prefer. At a recent ARLG event on ‘Librarians as Teachers’ I invited the audience to consider the idea of a spectrum or continuum of library service…
What Librarians Can Learn from (and, yes, I’m serious) Accountants
An article I love and seem to refer to again and again, even though my first real career move was to run away from accountancy screaming …
Discovery vendors and pre-indexed data – what can be done?
So Ebsco and Ex Libris used to be friends. Ebsco used to allow their content to appear in Ex Libris’ pretty awesome index of academic stuff (aka Primo Central a webscale Discovery service). Then Ebsco decided they wanted to create an equally awesome index and took their data out of there, as well as out … Continue reading
The CILIP rebrand and me
I quit CILIP some time ago, mainly due to personal financial reasons. I had gone through chartership and was loath to surrender the qualification, but found annual membership expensive and not delivering on its value as a service to me. I felt I was not benefiting from its offerings in advocacy, sharing of best practice, … Continue reading
Random musing on the ‘headless library’ and other search trends …
This year I’ve spent a lot of time considering the perceived value of library search services against their actual use. Running and improving library search services has been the core of my job for the past few years, but recently I’ve been involved in discussions on search with colleagues from a non-library background. I’ve spent … Continue reading
New article in UKSG Insights
I’ve just had an article published in UKSG Insights, based in part on a presentation I gave at the RLUK conference last year. Like that presentation (and in fact most of my presentations) its a loose collection of possibly great, possibly silly ideas strung together by a vague common thread: The United Kingdom boasts union … Continue reading
Three reasons why the WorldCat Open Linked Data release is great
Late last week OCLC pulled an absolute blinder and released millions of records in WorldCat under an open license as linked data! Its a great step in the evolution of library data publishing, building upon past efforts. Here are three reasons why this is much more just another release of bib data. 1) – The … Continue reading
Academic libraries in ‘mainstream’ media …
Many librarians have felt pretty bitter towards the mainstream media of late. We’ve had a spate of poorly researched articles focusing on public library closures. These have not exactly done the situation justice and barely focused on librarians themselves. Its refreshing then to see two articles in a mainstream tech blog like Ars Technica, (more … Continue reading
What I’ve been up to
A quick overview of recent activity: Publications Investigating Faster Techniques for Digitization and Print-on-Demand I’ve had my first ever article published in the New Review of Academic Librarianship (Vol. 18, Iss. 1, 2012). Its a targeted write up of some of the findings from my 2010 Arcadia Fellowship. Despite some doubts about the true value of LIS research journals, I’m really pleased … Continue reading
National Level Resource Discovery services?
I’ve spent a large portion of the past couple of years working with a local discovery layer (Aquabrowser) and am currently investigating equivalent ‘webscale’ discovery index solutions such as Summon, Primo Central or EBSCO Discovery that may supplement or replace it. I’ve occasionally found myself explaining the two solutions to non-library techy or developer colleagues. … Continue reading
Ed's blog (now better encoded) 