I am hardly a expert on usability or user experience but over time of looking at usage logs and talking to users, observing users by walking around and helping I have started to realise a couple of things.

So we librarians are failing (or are we? See Walt Crawford's analysis of public library closures in US). Amazon is eating our lunches. Google is where people go. Surely we must be doing something wrong? Below are some of the critiques about how we librarians do things that perhaps deserve our consideration.

Brian Matthew's A white paper to inspire library entrepreneurialism [pdf] is probably one of the most thought provoking pieces on academic librarianship I have read this year so far.

If you have any familiarity with blogging you will know for some unknown reason "list posts" tend to be more successful at grabbing attention.

It's finally here. FourSquare launches Local Updates from businesses . "Foursquare Local Updates let merchants send text, photos, and specials to customers who have either checked into a business several times or liked it on Foursquare" (more) Here's how it looks like.

With the rise of web scale discovery services like Summon, Ebsco Discovery Service, WorldCat Local and Primo Central, librarians have began to assess how to teach searching and Information literacy differently.

I am proud and honoured to receive the 2012 Salem Press Library Blog Award - Best Academic Library Blog!

When a libraries purchases a library service whether it is a next generation catalogue system, a web scale discovery system or a link resolver , one decision that has to be made is to decide whether to "rebrand" the service.

I recently had the opportunity to attend two library conferences in June back to back, a first for me.

Librarians today are a fortunate bunch, we trade ideas and advice from librarians thousands of miles away as easily as from someone in the same city using the internet and social media.

I am not by any stretch a customer service guru or expert, but one thing I noticed about libraries is that user needs tend to come in cycles and often can be easily anticipated in advance.