Well, that’s 2022 mostly wrapped, huh?
It’s been a heck of a year.
Friendly tech and bird nerd, highly caffeinated.
Category: usability
Librarian colleagues, sometimes I find I have been wrong, and when that happens, I feel like I owe it to the profession to confess and recant. Some statements I have made about (primarily academic) libraries, that I will take back, or at least modify heavily, here: “If you own the…
I have a whole series of posts coming up, where I talk about hospitality in a particular context (spoiler: the context is interviewing and hiring). But some recent threads on the Code4Lib listserv make me want to write about it in a different context, maybe a little more broadly. Also,…
I’ve been rolling this post around in my head for a couple of days, in between attending conference and binge-(re)watching Firefly. It turns out, I have put a lot of time and effort—and, more importantly, thought—into creating and running a WiT group, so I have a lot to say…
Honestly, at the beginning of November, I wasn’t feeling that thankful. I was (unbeknownst to myself at the time, and knock on wood in the hopes that it’s really true) at the end of a very, very bad year, which started with an unexplained pain in my left foot beginning last fall and went through a series of stages, from hip pain starting sometime before ALA Midwinter, through [what should have been] a minor thumb injury that ended up costing me a lot of the use of my dominant hand for several months. There was some other pain in other places in there, too. There was a significant period where, between the hand and the hip (and maybe the shoulder?), even getting dressed was a challenge for me.
I’m working on a post about professional association involvement, but honestly I got sidetracked by some other projects, including the LITA Forum. And the post is taking forever, because, seriously, it turns out that people had a lot to say. I think it’s going to be several posts, over the…
I have a theory: user experience (UX) thinking (which I’ll also call user-centricity) is an attitude that follows you into daily life. An organization that’s doing a great job of UX thinking is visibly better than one that isn’t, and you see the differences not just in the seamless ease…
I have a confession to make: until last week, I hadn’t ever done any formal usability testing.* In many ways, we’re still working our way through the findings of a usability test done several years before I got here.** So when the Joint Library Catalog (JLC) Online Public Access Catalog…
Anyone I talked to at ALA Midwinter (and probably anyone who reads my social media accounts closely—which I suspect is no one :)) has caught on that I’m thinking about next steps in my career. I’ve passed the magical “three years of experience,” after which many more jobs seem to…
I’m combining my obligatory “lessons learned” post (past ones: here… and the others all got left in draft format) with my “how’d conference go?” post. I didn’t learn that many lessons—not enough for a full blog post—and, spoiler, I had a great conference. Quickly, my lessons: Get a prescription for…