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. Here's one.

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.  An example of a "list post" is "10 reasons why librarians are awesome" or "5 ways to promote your library workshop". Some of you who read humor sites like cracked.com (e.g. 16 Unseen Jobs That Must Exist in Movie Universes)  or tech blogs like Mashable will also recognise the style.

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. As I blog this there is a Information Literacy & Summon workshop going on at Sheffield Hallam University.

I am proud and honoured to receive the 2012 Salem Press Library Blog Award - Best Academic Library Blog! Time flies and more than three years have passed since I decided to first blog on a whim.

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. CONSAL XV, BALI First off I was invited to CONSAL XV (CONGRESS OF SOUTH EAST ASIAN LIBRARIANS), a regional conference in Bali, Indonesia from 28 May 2012 to June 1 2012 I am still new to library conferences (you can count on one hand the number I

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. As a result, new and good ideas flow very quickly these days.

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. After working in an academic library in the last 5 years and monitoring emails, tweets, chats , search logs, you see the same pattern repeat itself over and over again.