This week I was interviewed for the ALA choice podcast, a podcast that the that is a weekly program featuring in-depth conversations about contemporary trends, best practices, and case studies important to academic librarians. Hosted by Bill Mickey, the Editorial Director at Choice The topic was about trends in big data and the role of the library, and it was really fun to participate in, and the panel I was on included Caroline Muglia from the University of Southern California Libraries as well as Andy Rutkowski and Eimmy Karina Solis from USC libraries. ... (more)

I just had my first hands on experience with the Microsoft surface hub. I tried out sketching a lean canvas on the surface to see how it would work. Things I liked writing was responsive pressure sensitivity worked well two people can write at the same time there is sketch to shape recognition, and it’s OK its just about big enough to work on, but bigger would be better Things I liked in principle, but was not able to check whether they work in practice being able to capture the output of the session digitally being able to remotely work on the surface with another team at the same time Things I didn’t like selecting and moving items really just was too hard to figure out under / erase was fiddly sometimes the built in grid would get in the way when I had object recognition on, it would sometimes turn my “D”s into triangles not as flexible as working with post it notes, in terms of being able to move and cluster ideas Conclusion Overall this is getting there, but for me its not quite there yet. ... (more)

Last Thursday I attended the launch event for OverLeaf. The event was composed of a set of very short talks, followed by a good chance to chat to people. It was a pretty nice evening. Dr Bibiana Campos Seijo - MRSC - magazines publisher and editor of chemistry world. Science is changing, publising is changing, a lot of this is being driven by technology. There is information overlaod. Publishers need to try to provide solutions to these issues. ... (more)