Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us:
Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to use.
When [...]

Posted May 7, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy. Tags: compare, decision, decision making, market, market forces, process, software, suck, sucks, sucky, the pledge, training, usability, vendors. 5 Comments.

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things.
I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At [...]

Posted May 4, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: bad answers, compare, comparison, competition, crap, developers, development, failure, future libraries, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, software, startups, suck, sucks, sucky, training, vendors. 14 Comments.

Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:
One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is [...]

Posted December 14, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: Britannica, compare, comparison, Encyclopaedia Britannica, encyclopedia, head to head, journal, nature, peer review, quality, social software, thewisdom of the crowds, wikipedia, wisdom of crowds. One Comment.

So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.
Here’s the quesiton:
Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by [...]

Posted December 6, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: compare, future, google, google economy, internet, libraries, library, library 2.0, library20, oclc, oclc report, perception, perceptions, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (200, report, search engine, search engines, user behavior. 4 Comments.