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Pic by Raj Mann Exactly a decade ago I attended my first User Experience in Libraries Conference. It changed everything for me: I’ve said before that I think UX is the most exciting thing to happen to UK librarianship in the twenty years I’ve been involved with it. I now have UX in my email signature (Faculty Engagement Manager: Community + UX) and my favourite projects at work have all been…
Today I am honoured to give a keynote at UXLibs 10, the User Experience in Libraries Conference . Below is a version of my slides, and then I’ve linked to several relevant articles and reports covering things I discussed in the talk, finishing with highlights from my report on the Inclusivity and Belonging UX project at the University of York. The presentation My slides are embedded below and…
I love prepping a talk, which is what I've spent the last few days doing ahead of my keynote at #UXLibs 10 s today. Here are some things I've found helpful in the process. 1) Get your ideas down first; sort the visuals later . Think of it like building a house - you lay the foundations and see the walls are going before you pick furniture and colours... Sometimes the content can dictate the style,…
If you’re reading this I salute you: I know no one really cares about website redesigns except the owner of the website, so I appreciate you casting your eyes over this! I’ve had a website since 2010 and have re-done or updated it several times over this period. At the same time I’ve done a lot of UX work around updating the website of the Library I work at - and I realised I’d failed to apply…
You may have seen the extraordinary statistic that around two-thirds of ebooks released onto Amazon are now GenAI-written . Similarly, a report from Deezer last year showed that over 50,000 GenAI tracks are uploaded every day to the music streaming platform. 50k! Every single day! We’re literally drowning in culture, eh? People use AI to generate entire bands for Spotify , then use bot farms to…
There is an unending stream of reports, think-pieces, puff-pieces and hit-pieces on GenAI. You’d need a lifetime to get through it all even if they stopped being written tomorrow. The trouble is so much of it is speculative. GenAI shills talk uncritically about what it may be able to do, and fudge the lines about what it is really achievable. Equally I read pieces by GenAI skeptics that…
You are about to read a blog-post devoid of nonchalance or professional cool… Because this summer I am delivering a keynote speech at my favourite conference of all time, User Experience in Libraries, on its 10th anniversary, in my home City of York. I am completely thrilled about this! UX as a tool for equity My talk is entitled Elevating Voices . Here’s the summary: Higher Education is facing…
What is a Carousel on Instagram? First things first: in Instagram terms a carousel is a single post containing multiple images or videos . They appear on the Grid, and you view the different images by swiping right. Since mid-2023 you can add music to your carousel natively in Instagram, and doing so is absolutely crucial to success - it pushes the post into a different algorithm, ensuring it will…
Back in 2014 I wrote on this blog that Imposter Syndrome ran through librarianship like a vein. Writing now in 2025, I consider that a misdiagnosis. Imposter Syndrome is defined as a psychological condition, characterised, as Miriam-Webster has it , by ‘persistent doubt concerning one's abilities or accomplishments accompanied by the fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of one's…
Earlier this year I spoke about the social media landscape for public libraries in particular, at the Edge Conference in Edinburgh. It was a great room full of interesting and passionate people, and one of those slightly intimidating setups where you’ve got no laptop in front of you, just a TED-talk style presenter screen facing you from the floor below the stage… The talk was filmed by…
I just ran a social media workshop in which one of the brilliant attendees posed this age old question: “ We’ve been having a huge debate about using hashtags. Are they still a thing? Should we be using them? ” — Catarina As I answered I realised I have a pretty definitive idea about not just whether we should be using them - yes - but also how many we should be using, which varies wildly by…
I had an amazing experience at the end of last month. I was invited to Dublin to keynote the LIR annual seminar on mine and my wife’s 20th wedding anniversary! We took the tip together, the weather was beautiful, and the conference was great. I learned so much from the other speakers, and everyone who asked questions and shared their own experiences. It was a hybrid event, with around 100 staff…
The library landscape is incredibly bleak at the moment with events in the US, so I wanted to flag up a couple of brilliant examples of library innovation that might give information professionals reason to smile. In March I presented at the Edge Public Library Conference in Edinburgh - hence the header pic of that beautiful city - on Social Media for Public Libraries in a Post-Twitter world. (The…
This is just a preview - download the PDF below to read A couple of months or so before the current Museum and Library cuts in the US kicked in, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my friend and former collaborator Justin Hoenke for Information Today. I enjoyed the questions and the extremely kind write-up - thank you Justin! You can download the interview here [PDF] . We talk about my job,…
I found out yesterday that the Special Libraries Association is dissolving , citing "shifting industry dynamics, changing professional needs, and financial realities." I've always found the SLA to be an engaged, supporting, uplifting organisation and I'll be really sad to see it go. I was involved in the SLA Leadership & Management division, and SLA Europe , for several years in the 2010s, serving…
I had one of my favourite professional conversations ever the other day, and as it happens it was recorded! I was honoured to be a guest on the Keeper & Curator podcast, run by my colleagues at York Helena Cox and Gary Brannan, which despite being new has already been fantastically successful (number 1 in the Visual Arts UK podcast chart, wooop). I’ve loved long-form conversation podcasts for so…
When we’re presenting we can easily get caught up in worrying about what we shouldn’t be doing. That white noise of ‘I’m doing X too much’ or ‘I’m pretty sure I read that Y is bad’ gets in the way of our ability to relax, find our words and communicate. And in fact a quick Google tells us there are loads of posts from presentation skills / public speaking experts, warning us how important it is…
I organised a video creating / editing workshop for my team this week, delivered by my excellent colleagues Sam Hazeldine and Siobhan Dunlop who run sessions in our Creativity Lab . One of the standout pieces of advice they shared was this: if your subject is moving, keep the camera still. If your subject is stationary, move the camera . I realise while I tend to follow this principle…
In my Strategic Marketing training , we conduct an exercise around the library brand. It begins with a key question: what do you want your library's brand to be ? What would the ideal sum-total of everyone’s perceptions of your organisation amount to? Or to put it more simply: what do you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room? From there we explore how to assess your library’s…
Last month I went to Kilkenny to present at the Library Association of Ireland’s Public Libraries Conference . The short version of this post is, it was a fantastic conference; libraries in Ireland get a lot more support from their government than British ones and it SHOWS in their confidence and morale and general fabulousness; and I uploaded my presentation to Slideshare if you’d like to see it:…
