Recently the front page of our library portal was down, and predictably, our members began asking for help via email & chat. One thing I noticed is that I could easily satisfy most of their needs by sending them directly to the resources they need.

Recently, I wrote 12 User points of need - where to place your services online , but we do not expect people to be glued to their computers , they operate in the real world too. The interesting question of course is where such points are both in the library and outside the library.

I had a recent online conversation on Twitter with someone and she mentioned that she was very excited to have the opportunity to meet someone who was (and still is) her library hero from young (being a librarian was her childhood dream). This set me thinking, do I have any library heroes?

Earlier in January I wrote Location based services/pages your library should claim or monitor , where I suggested libraries should register, claim or otherwise own various place pages on Yelp, LibraryThing local and Google places.

Say you want to find out where libraries are placing their social media buttons on the portal. Is it at the bottom of the page? Top right? Elsewhere? How do you find out besides polling users? Can Google help?

I'm trying a little social experiment with the new FaceBook group feature. I've setup a FaceBook group for library related people (Librarians, "Shambrarian", whatever). Things to note. 1. I'm the admin, but in effect it only means I can change the Facebook group name & set it up to be opened, closed or secret . The current setting is closed, which means non-members can see who are in the group, but not any content.

Xtranormal has the tag line "If you can type, you can make movies" and it's really that simple! Just select a background, select 1 or 2 characters, type in dialogue, select a couple of camera angle and special animations using point and click and you get a  cartoon animated movie with no programming required.

Every library has problems that everyone knows about and are common user complaints but are ignored because the problem seems to be too huge, too large , too costly, too impossible, too everything to fix.

Say you have a new service or page you want to advertise, what possible places could you put it? As libraries expand their reach online, it's no longer as simple as putting a link on your webpage.

Recently, I started to realize that our page on the proxy bookmarklet (a bookmark that allows quick access to full text articles via the library's subscription even when the user doesn't use the library portal as a starting point) is extremely popular, despite being burred deep in our current portal design.

My recent blog post on "heretical thoughts" where I played devil's advocate and expressed doubts and how libraries weren't yet successful in getting users to use mobile services. Comments were pretty favorable, it seems I was saying something that many were thinking privately as well.