Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • CILIP’s draft Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills

    As part of their Future Skills Project, CILIP has recently invited members to feed back on the first draft of the revised Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills. I have already submitted my comments using the online form, but I thought it would be useful to spend a little longer reviewing the document. The proposed…

  • Great expectations: library search through the eyes of the user

    I recently ran a usability study for our new library discovery and delivery system. Despite being proprietary software, the system is reasonably customisable and we wanted to make sure that our implementation decisions were sound and the resulting site was as usable as possible. We invited a group of University students, academics and researchers and…

  • ‘Remember the Milk’ saves the bacon: the quest for task management zen

    There was a time when I was able to remember tasks to do without any help. No lists, no reminders, no knots in my hanky. Then I got older and life got complicated. The task list became longer and I started relying on my notepad to keep track of chores. For the last ten years…

  • Collaborating on creative work

    Last month I spent some time working on a creative project, with the aim of producing promotional materials to publicise the library at an upcoming Plymouth University event. Nothing particularly unusual there – this was within the realms of my fairly open role. What is interesting about it is that despite a really tight deadline…

  • Reflections of an analytic mind

    Some months ago I blogged about my take on reflective practice. Since then I have been doing a lot of thinking around the topic, mostly because I have started to put together my CILIP Chartership portfolio and demonstrating that I am a reflective practitioner is a key part of the process. After staring at several…

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