The presentation

My slides are embedded below and available on Slideshare here.

elevating-voices-ux-as-a-tool-for-equityfrom Ned Potter

The abstract

Higher Education is facing financial crisis. When budgets tighten, services often shrink to fit the needs of the majority, and ‘maintaining core services’ can easily become a proxy for exclusion. By designing for the ‘typical’ user – those with the fewest barriers and the most flexibility – we inadvertently sideline marginalised groups with complex needs.

This keynote positions UX work as an essential tool for equity, with a five point manifesto. We will explore how libraries can represent the under-recognised, elevate diverse perspectives and ensure our institutions remain inclusive, authentic spaces for everyone.

Recruiting for diversity

An absolutely essential part of my UX manifesto is to recruit as diverse a group of fieldwork participants as possible, rather than taking a first-come, first-served approach, or trying to achieve a representative sample. Your service will be more inclusive if you design it to meet the most needs, rather than for the most people. I cover this and several other aspects of communication around UX in ‘Communicating the benefits of UX to everyone who needs to hear it’ in the User Experience in Libraries: Yearbook 2024 edited by Andy Priestner and Marisa Martin (2024) - the Open access version available via White Rose Research Online here.

Three rounds of five, and getting UX done

A really effective structure for UX projects is to interview 15 participants, split over three rounds of five people each. The first round is generative, the second round is for prototyping, and the third round is evaluative. This process is covered in more detail, along with some advice on how to advocate for UX and get it done at your institution, in ‘Ask not what your organisation can do for UX; ask what UX can do for your organisation,’ in User Experience in Libraries: Yearbook 2023, edited by Andy Priestner (2023). The Open access version of that is available via White Rose Research Online.

The Inclusivity and Belonging Report

Throughout my talk I referred to a recent UX project at the University of York, entitled Inclusivity and Belonging. The report was written for use within the University and it wouldn’t be appropriate to share all of it - however, below are some highlights, with the quotes from participants removed.

Executive Summary

Our spaces help shape the daily experiences of our users, and should reflect the communities that use them as far as possible. This project originated from the need for better data on the library experiences of students from smaller, under-recognised demographics. We have consistently prioritised diversity in participant recruitment for previous User Experience (UX) projects, but rarely have we made that diversity the focus of the project itself; while we have made good strides in specific areas relating to inclusivity, there are many groups outside the ‘typical’ York student, who face barriers to service use which we could potentially remove. In particular we wanted to focus on the experiences of first-in-family students and ethnically minoritised students, and to make the library a more trauma-informed service, as part of this project. There was intersectionality here among our participants, both in terms of class and race, and in terms of neurodiversity.

Key findings and observations

The Library is widely regarded as an inclusive environment, but this perception is carried by the interpersonal skills of our staff, our communication online, and specific initiatives (such as the Sensory Rooms or Family Study Room) - rather than the building itself.

• Staff are a key part of inclusion. Students frequently praised the approachable and welcoming nature of library staff, especially in the Customer Services Team. In general, the library's approach to inclusion and belonging is actively noticed, and appreciated.

• Elements of the physical environment - often beyond the library's control - actively work against inclusion. Several safety features required by the University - such as the turnstiles, high-intensity lighting, and glass-fronted study rooms - act as signals of exclusion for marginalised groups. In contrast, spaces like the Spring Lane Building are perceived as more inclusive despite being unstaffed: this is attributed to the absence of turnstiles, more thoughtful lighting, and flexible furniture configurations. However, those spaces do not foster a sense of belonging in the same way the library does.

• Louder study spaces are important. Students from marginalised groups often feel exposed or scrutinised as they move through University spaces. Silent or very quiet study areas heighten this feeling of hyper-vigilance, whilst louder, Studious Buzz areas help to reduce the exposure, helping students feel more at ease. (This is a key reason one of the outcomes of this project, the Ethnically Minoritised Author Showcase Space, is located in the Fairhurst rather than the Morrell.)

• Students from marginalised groups experience information gaps. We know from the 'York Risks' work from the No Gaps Project that 'Without a sense of belonging, students may feel isolated, excluded and marginalised, leading to lower engagement in learning, support and university life.' Students from working-class or ethnically minoritised backgrounds often operate under a constant state of "decoding" the university environment. This cognitive overload leads to missed opportunities within the library - such as students unnecessarily purchasing books, failing to seek help, or overlooking available services.

Outcomes and recommendations

This report details findings across 8 key themes and offers 19 recommendations. Rather than waiting for the publication of this report to take action, we adopted an iterative approach. As a result, over half of the recommendations are already complete or well under way.

Methodology: a UX-led approach

User Experience

As with all major projects, we based our approach around User-Experience (UX) methodologies. The best way to hear from students is not through focus-groups or surveys but through one-to-one conversations. The data we get from a semi-structured interview is so rich that only a small sample size can yield incredibly useful - and actionable - insights.

Project Overview

The project began in September 2024. Phase 1 focused on existing data: we met with around 10 staff from around the University to assemble perspectives and documentation from related studies. Phase 2 was the UX fieldwork, beginning in May 2025 and running until January 2026; we spoke to 13 students recruited directly, via channels such as Step Ahead or recommendations from relevant staff. Phase 3 - thematic analysis and reporting - began in January and ended in April 2026.

The project group consisted primarily of Ned Potter, Clare Ackerley, Martin Philip and Olivia Else, all from the Faculty Librarian Team, and we benefited from three later additions to the group. Raj Mann (who was at the time Project Manager for the Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education) joined us for two months of the project, bringing invaluable expertise on many pertinent areas including providing a safe environment for interviewing students on potentially traumatic subjects, and introducing us to the term Trespasser Syndrome (more on which below).

Sarah Lapacz and Emanuela Buizza from the Customer Services Team joined up after most of the fieldwork was conducted, to help with thematic analysis and recommendations. Having their perspective and fresh eyes on the data was really valuable, and I'd recommend this approach of involving new people at the analysis stage for future UX projects going forwards.

A note on terminology

We use the term under-recognised groups rather than under-represented groups, which is the phrase we typically see used in the University. Even though it is almost always not intended this way, there is an implication with the latter term that the onus is on the marginalised person to represent themselves better, whereas of course the reasons for under-representation are systemic and institutional.

We use the term ethnically minoritised students rather than BAME or Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students, based on advice from specialists in Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Belonging. This framing highlights the fact that Black and Asian students' minority status at the University is an active, systemic process, rather than a static identity. Talking about 'BAME students' also risks implying a homogonisation of very diverse experiences.

We use the term Trespasser Syndrome where the University often used the term Imposter Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome individualises suffering: it’s not something being done to you; it’s something you ‘have’, a personal flaw that comes from within. But students from marginalised groups are made to feel like outsiders by the University - that comes from without. To quote Dr Arin N Reeves: "People from under-represented groups are not afraid that they are imposters; they are afraid that the majority groups won’t see them for who they are and won’t welcome them if they do see them. These fears are not the fears of imposters; they are the fears of trespassers."

Findings

1) Standard library environments can be exclusionary to marginalised students.

Large, bright, open study areas (such as Morrell Floor 1 or the Burton) are perceived as overwhelming and high-pressure spaces.

It was notable that this was the one area in which ethnically minoritised students, first in family students, students who have experienced trauma, and neurodivergent students all reported similar experiences and issues: the discomfort that comes from feeling observed ("it's just eyes and heads"), or 'taking up someone else's space' in an environment in which they already feel like a trespasser.

2) Bright fluorescent lighting is a source of overstimulation, especially for neurodivergent students. We know from previous UX projects that students want controllable lighting (such as desk lamps) or dimmer zones within the library - this was further confirmed in the fieldwork here. The natural light from windows is appreciated, but strong internal lighting is not.

3) There is a demand for semi-enclosed "micro-spaces". Students want the comfort and privacy of a "little house" while remaining in a public study environment rather than in an isolated area where they feel vulnerable.

Student needs are not as straightforward as wanting to study in busy areas, or quiet areas, or secluded areas. They require different combinations of good sight-lines, whilst not being overlooked; being private whilst not being isolated; feeling not just more scholarly but more inspired than they would at home.

4) The Hidden Curriculum causes financial stress in the library context. The hidden curriculum a wider issue across the University, but in the library it manifests in students not knowing that textbooks are available for free or that online copies exist, leading to unnecessary financial worries. There is also a lack of understanding around borrowing, returning and requesting books which is exacerbated for any students who feel othered or like they don't belong, as they're less likely to seek out help for their problems.

5) The lack of a quiet, segregated prayer space within the library is a functional barrier to long-term study for Muslim students. We know there are many reasons why a prayer room is not currently possible in the Library - however it continues to be raised in the research, every time we speak to students, even if we don't ask about it. Any student needing to pray during their study faces a stark choice - the discomfort of public, overlooked prayer in the library, or losing time (and potentially their study space within the building) by needing to travel to a prayer room elsewhere on campus.

6) Inclusion and belonging can come from exhibitions and events in the library. When we asked what could make the library more inclusive, several students talked about events or exhibitions as being key to seeing themselves (and those of other cultures) in the space.

7) The library is considered a diverse space. The majority (though not all) of ethnically minoritised students we spoke to considered the student body who use the library to be relatively ethnically diverse.

However it was notable that working class students are keenly aware of how many private school educated people are in the wider University. Several mentioned feeling othered by this.

8) Library staff are considered open, helpful and approachable. Many students report positive interactions with library staff, including ethnically minoritised students who have not had positive experiences elsewhere on campus. This is a real strength in the library which we should continue to build on.

For many of our participants, asking for help at all is significant. We need to continue to encourage and reward help-seeking behaviour at all times, and to foster non-direct forms of communication - students told us they'd prefer to DM on Instagram than speak to a member of staff face-to-face when seeking help, for example.

As mentioned in the executive summary, it is my belief that the staff of the library go a long way towards mitigating the more exclusionary aspects of our buildings and services, and are a key part of why we are widely considered to be a very inclusive space within the University.

Recommendations

There were 19 recommendations, many of which are complete. A selection are mentioned below.

1. Ethnically Minoritised Author Showcase Space (completed): This collection was suggested by Raj Mann as a way to celebrate ethnically minoritised authors and make the library a more inclusive environment. It began with the purchase of around 500 books, and rather than selection being driven by the library each item was a recommendation from students or staff at the University. To ensure these books remain accessible throughout the library, we purchased dedicated copies specifically for this room rather than moving existing stock. There is a QR code in the room where students and staff can suggest additional purchases for the collection: these are reviewed twice a year in Collections Community.

2. Add tags to study spaces in LibCal to aid students affected by trauma in choosing where to work (completed): The LibCal booking system now has additional checkable boxes when searching for study spaces. These allow you to filter the spaces and, for example, show only spaces with good sightlines, or spaces where you're seated with your back to the wall.

3. Add blinds to study rooms to allow privacy for prayer (completed): we have had bespoke blinds fitted to two Morrell bookable study rooms (on Floors 1 and 2) to allow students privacy to pray

4. Offer bespoke Library Tours for relevant Student Communities particularly First in Family groups

5. Introduce more cultural event programming within the Library buildings. We will also explore offering LFA/144 as a safe, warm, well-lit event space for EDI+B related events at evenings and weekends, for student groups and societies.

6. Better promotion of money-saving and no-cost services in the Library ideally in collaboration with Central Comms channels where possible

7. Expand the glossary of library terms (in progress): our current glossary is focused on library terminology: we want to expand this to cover more colloquial and idiomatic territory, to help those adapting from other countries. Will include English and Yorkshire based expressions, as well as the usual definitions of library jargon such as 'quartos'.

Conclusions and future work

This project has taken a year and half to explore the experiences of several communities, and this has been extremely successful. However, in the future we aim to undertake smaller UX projects with specific communities to understand their needs better. This more agile approach would see us undertake three projects (interviewing 5 participants each rather than 15) each year, focusing on one group at a time.

The Library must continue to be an exemplar across campus in investing in, and genuinely believing in, inclusivity. The user voice is key to this, and this project has shown how valuable it is to continually undertake research directly with the student (and staff) population to inform our decisions.

We need to work to mitigate some of the systemic issues beyond our control. We can't solve all the problems we identified, but our experience from previous UX projects has shown people really appreciate any efforts to reduce the impact of the issues - see for example providing blankets because we don't have the ability to make our buildings warmer. What are the blanket equivalents for the issues identified in this project?

We need to ensure that designing for the typical York user doesn't become a proxy for exclusion. When budgets tighten, services often shrink to fit the needs of the majority: when we design for those with the fewest barriers and the most flexibility we can inadvertently sideline marginalised groups with complex needs. UX projects like this one are an essential tool for equity, elevating diverse perspectives and ensure our library remains an inclusive, authentic spaces for everyone.

Ned Potter, April 2026

7) Don't put questions right at the end. I think it's better to put questions 5 minutes before the end, then answer the questions and do your final summing up - end the talk on your terms.

8) Add the alt-text (assuming your slides will be shared afterwards). I use a lot of boxes as part of my slide design, and it takes a while to mark them all as decorative, describe my graphs etc.

9) Make a sharing version. The slideshare edition of my slides may have slightly more text on, and I'll have hidden slides which don't make sense without any context, before saving the PDF.

10) Save it to a stick, save it to your laptop, AND upload it to the Cloud... That should cover almost any eventuality!

If there are any tips would you add, let me know in a comment! The next post on here will be my slides and relevant links from the UXLibs talk. I love running Presentation Skills training and workshops, so if you’d like to book something bespoke for your organisation, you’ll find details of what I offer and feedback from previous workshops towards the bottom of my Training page.

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 those user insights to my own site… It was built around all the things I wanted to say, rather than around the user experience or what the audience actually wanted to know. I also looked at Analytics and realised some pages just didn’t get viewed at enough to earn their keep. So I spent a quite painful day rebuilding it - and took the opportunity to tweak the visuals a bit and make the whole thing feel a little more modern, and have more teal in it, because teal is my favourite colour.

Kill your darlings

One of the main things I’ve done is take pages away. There was a Drums page linked from the About page, because I’m a drummer and I love drums, but it just isn’t really relevant so it’s gone. There were pages with detailed breakdowns for orgs about each workshop - tech requirements, reviews etc - but I provide that info via email to interested parties anyway, so those have all gone. Other minor pages have gone too: the more you prune the stuff people don’t need, the better the remaining content actually works for people.

The Home Page

With the exception of a few blogposts, the Home page is unsurprisingly the most popular page on the site - but it was really just a signposting page, meaning the user didn’t get much use out of it in and of itself. I noticed that other people who provide freelance training and consultancy really use their homepage to provide a full overview of what they offer - topics and themes, testimonials, clients etc. So I’ve reworked the homepage with this in mind.

The Blog, About and UX pages have received minor quality of life improvements.

The publications page

I used to have a separate page for the Library Marketing Toolkit and my other publications - this is needlessly granular so I’ve turned them into one page. I also realised I had links to buy the Toolkit on Amazon, set up over a decade ago before I’d realised quite what Amazon represent…

The Events page

Again I had a separate page for past and upcoming events - I’ve now hidden the events calendar and just include future talks and workshops in the same page.

The training and workshops page

In many ways this is the most important page for me - as a freelancer this is how people find out about what I offer. I’ve given the three broad areas I cover - social media, strategic marketing and presentation skills - more space, updated the descriptions, added some feedback and moved some other info off the page.

I hope you find what you need on this refreshed site, and if you have any training or speaking requests (or suggestions for website improvement…) get in touch!

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 drive up the streams to get paid. Humans have been cut out of the loop entirely! What a time to be alive.

Forgive me for going Full LinkedIn, but this really did get me thinking about my job… and communications, and social media, and marketing, and content, and the arts. In a world in which there is an abundance of almost everything arts-related (music, visual imagery, video, literature) the only things there aren’t an abundance of are authenticity and human creativity – and they become even more valuable as a result. We need to remember this, and be prepared to swim against the tide to defend it.

This also got me thinking (stay with me here…) about mortality. The Venn diagram of tech bro billionaires who are interested in ‘longevity research’ (for which read: living for an incredibly long time beyond the expected human life-span) and who are interested in GenAI output more or less replacing human output, is a circle. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I’m old fashioned in that I think the thing which gives life *meaning* is it that it’s finite. When you have an infinite supply of something – be that literature, music, or even immortality itself – the overall value of it inevitably goes down. But there is (forgive me, again) an opportunity here: to define ourselves through opposition. To take the artisanal route, rather than hanging onto the coattails of mass production.  

If we end up in this landscape where 90% of what we consume is just AI slop, that means genuine cultural experiences will become incredibly valuable. Not to everyone, but to some people – and I think those people are the ones interested in arts, and culture, and education, and progress. This is how we can stand out, this is how we can engage. Do you want to be the 6 millionth account to post some second-rate GenAI imagery? Wouldn’t you rather be the exception that only posts genuine pictures? Wouldn’t you rather be part of the group who proactively reclaim music, and literature, and videography, and even something as relatively prosaic as a social media post, as something of value - and nurture that?

The social media accounts I run for my org don’t use any GenAI music, imagery or video. We post less than we would if we did use that stuff, because it certainly speeds things up. It is incredibly quick to produce marketing materials with GenAI. But most of them are basically rubbish. The frictionlessness of GenAI somehow seeps through – and no one really cares or learns, or remembers. And of course, many people will completely write you and your content off if you use GenAI in your posts or your slides or your website or your newsletter. They feel that if you aren’t prepared to create content yourself, they shouldn’t have to consume it either. They feel – whether you intend this or not – like they you are treating them with contempt when you use GenAI.

Some people will be fine with all AI slop, all the time – but a lot of people won’t. Creativity is no longer technically required to write books or music, but it is required for OUR sake as humans. We will increasingly need to reclaim art as more than just background noise and filler. We need to reclaim the ACT of creation as valuable, not just the product. And as everything else gets watered down and diluted into meaninglessness, human experiences and connectivity become more valuable than ever. Write that music. Write that book. Write that social media post using your own brain and your own words.

Don’t give in to the idea that GenAI is an inevitable, unstoppable force: challenge all of those people who say ‘AI is here now - you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube!’. To quote my friend Simon Bowie:

“When I accidentally squeeze out too much toothpaste, I don't then shove it all in my mouth. I wash it down the plughole.”

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 confidently claim ‘GenAI cannot do X’, when in fact that was true 6 months ago but the extraordinary pace of technological development means it is not true now. There’s also a lot of ‘what-aboutism’ in AI discourse - sure there’s a huge environmental cost to using it but what about email, that uses electricity too? Etc etc.

So if we try and get a handle on where we stand, and want to move beyond the back-and-forth, what do we actually know about GenAI?

GenAI erodes cognitive functioN

A 2025 MIT Study (summarised in Time here) used EEGs to record brain activity in controlled groups. The ChatGPT-using group has the lowest brain engagement and “consistently under-performed at neural, linguistic and behavirol levels.” The study lasted months and the GenAI users got worse and worse over time.

There are several other studies that document this ‘cognitive offloading’ - when we outsource creativity and criticality, we lose the ability to do it for ourselves. That makes sense: if we got someone else to do exercise for us we’d probably lose fitness, too.

GenAI doesn’t reduce workload for regular employees

Leaders and managers love GenAI. The pantomime villain bosses love it because it offers the promise of achieving the same results with fewer staff members, thus saving money. But even the well-meaning managers in the public sector seem to love it, because it offers their staff gains in efficiencies and save them time to concentrate on the things which really matter.

But does it, though?

Harvard Business Review published an article this month confirming AI doesn’t reduce work - in fact it intensifies it. In an 8 month study, they it was discovered that employees worked faster, took on more tasks and worked longer hours (for the same pay, of course) thanks to GenAI. “Once the excitement of experimenting fades, workers can find that their workload has quietly grown and feel stretched from juggling everything that’s suddenly on their plate. That workload creep can in turn lead to cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems.”

GENAI gets things wrong a lot of the time…

The marketing genius of the word ‘hallucination’ to explain GenAI errors lies in suggesting an entity that can think for itself, and sometimes makes things up or hallucinates. In reality GenAI is a massive excercise in pattern recognition, and the process by which it gets things ‘right’ and gets them ‘wrong’ is exactly the same.

Because of this, the BBC found it misrepresents the news a massive 45% of the time. A recent report found Google Gemini is in fact returning hundreds of thousands of wrong answers each minute.

This is catastrophic.

[image or embed]

— Futurism (@futurism.com) April 9, 2026 at 12:31 AM

I don’t know a single person who has asked GenAI about something they have deep knowledge of, and still rated GenAI highly after reading the results. Not one. I don’t know a single person who has used GenAI to take minutes at a meeting, and then continued to do this after checking the minutes properly for accuracy. To use GenAI in earnest is to learn how limited it is.

…But we use it anyway

We can all talk about how ChatGPT ‘isn’t a search engine’ till we’re blue in the face, and GenAI tools can add a disclaimer saying we should ‘always verify results’ as many times as they like, but we know what humans are like - we’re not checking the results, even in incredibly important things like Police decisions, because that would take more time than just looking up the data properly in the first place.

Google Gemini is a punchline - there are countless examples of it getting things hilariously wrong in its summaries. But Google doesn’t care, because exponentially fewer people are clicking on the links in the search results - they’re staying on Google and just reading the AI.

GENAI already has a high body count

Many GenAI tools are ready to act as a ‘suicide coach’ as shown in cases already going to trial. The ‘deaths linked to Chatbots’ Wikipedia page is steadily growing. A study has been published showing how dangerous GenAI medical advice can be, with examples including bogus information about liver function tests which would mislead people with serious liver disease wrongly thinking they were healthy.

GenAI is built ENTIRELY on stolen intellectual property

The Large Language Model GenAI tools are built on data they stole - and in fact OpenAI has said it would be impossible to create tools like ChatGPT without using copyrighed material. Ah well, fair play lads - on you go, then.

GENAI doesn’t actually save most companies money

In 2025 MIT found that despite investing billions of dollars into GenAI, most major companies are not seeing any return on their investment. In fact 95% of GenAI pilots are failing.

GENAI companies themselves don’t actually make money

OpenAI make the wildly successful ChatGPT - what do you think their profit was in 2025? $1 billion? $2 billion? Not quite - they made an $8 billion loss. Their own internal documents predict a £14 billion loss this year. They’re committed to spending $1.4 trillion, with no road to profitability by 2030.

“OpenAI's losses will total $143 billion between 2024 and 2029, the "largest startup losses in history," Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a December 4 note. HSBC researchers said in a late November report that they expect OpenAI to have a $207 billion shortfall by 2030, even when modeling for significant boosts in revenue” says Business Insider.

Anyway: the world seems all-in on this tech, but it may be prudent not to become over-reliant on it, for all of the reasons above.

Not to mention all the other things (you can find a pretty exhaustive list on Sarah Winnicki’s site) like extraordinary electricity use and habitat destroying of the data centres, the fact that one data centre can use the same amount of water per day as a town of 50,000 people, the amplifying violence against women, the huge cost to the creative industries of replacing skilled human with utter slop, the fact that GenAI’s output is racist as hell (oh and sexist, and ableist, and homophobic).

Not to mention any of the horrendousness of Grok, which really belongs in a category of its own, but sadly isn’t, because the other GenAI tools now feed off Grok to inform their own responses, as GenAI eats itself, excretes itself out, and then eats its own waste, like some sort of terrible apocalyptic dog.

And not to mention that our use of (and Government investment in) GenAI pours money into the coffers of literally the world’s worst people, because that’s just my subjective opinion, and this is post is all about what we KNOW about GenAI.

Reading all that back, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about the wide-spread adoption of this technology.

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 financial crisis. When budgets tighten, services often shrink to fit the needs of the majority, and ‘maintaining core services’ can easily become a proxy for exclusion. By designing for the ‘typical’ user – those with the fewest barriers and the most flexibility – we inadvertently sideline marginalised groups with complex needs.

This keynote positions UX work as an essential tool for equity. We will explore how libraries can represent the underrepresented, elevate diverse perspectives and ensure our institutions remain inclusive, authentic spaces for everyone.

I feel really passionately about this subject, and I can’t wait to explore it and share some of the work we’ve done at York.

About the conference

The list of speakers is fantastic, and I’m delighted Raj Mann will also be delivering a keynote: I’ve been working with her on our Inclusivity + Belonging UX Project she has been inspirational. I’ve mentioned Raj on this blog before, with regards to Trespasser Syndrome, which she’ll be talking about in her own keynote.

I have bored onto anyone who will listen about how much I love UXLibs. I attended the first one ten years ago in Cambridge, and it was revolutionary for me - learning about User Experience techniques beyond the app / web usability realm I’d previously understood was game-changing, and the conference format was incredibly innovative. A decade on and I have UX in my job title (Faculty Engagement Manager: Community + UX) and it’s a key part of my role.

I have also previously been on the organising committee of the conference for two years, so I know first hand how inclusive and forward-thinking the event is. The community that attends is usually drawn from 25 or more countries, and there’s no group of people who are more interested in the sharing of ideas. To want to do UX work you need empathy above all else, and 100 empathetic people in a room makes for a fantastic event..

If you have even have an inkling that UXLibs might be for you, I cannot recommend coming highly enough. You will learn so much you can USE, and have so much fun, and meet so many great people.

You can find full details of the conference, including booking, on the UXLibs website.

About York

York is tiny as Cities go - you probably won’t need to use a bus or a taxi while you’re here as pretty much everything is walkable. It’s very beautiful. has a famously large number of pubs, and some great places to eat. For anyone who wants recommendations:

• If you want variety and you like shipping containers, Spark York has both of these in abundance. Loads of different foods in what is, by York’s standards, a very cool and happening place.

• If you want six million inventive varieties of beer in and industrial-chic setting with some banging Korean street food, Brew York is the place to go. It’s very near Spark York so why not go directly from one to the other?

• If you like cake, drop what you’re doing and head to Brew and Brownie immediately. Their pancake breakfast is famous but the trouble with it is you don’t want to eat any cake afterwards, and you need to eat their cakes.

• For fabulous sandwiches head to Mannions

• If you like cafes head to Bishy Road where there’s a lot to choose from - the Pig & Pastry and Robinsons in particular are a delight

If you’d like any more specific local tips just send me an email. It goes without saying I hope to see you there!

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 be viewed much more widely than a single-image, music-free, regular Grid post.

Why are CaRousels so important?

The short answer is: reach.

Instagram’s algorithm has always prioritised video Reels over static images. For organisations, this often meant spending hours producing video content, or risking really low engagement and poor distribution with an image post. Reels are also less accessible than images, because there’s no built in alt-text feature for video on Instagram.

Over the last couple of years, there’s been a shift in the algorithm - Carousels now provide the reach and visibility of a Reel with the simplicity and accessibility of an image post. They bridge the gap. Your key messages can now reach massive audiences with less time, less production, and frankly fewer complications.

The proof is in the analytics

I run our institutional Instagram account - @UoYLibrary - which is a really significant part of our communication with students. I have a million and one other duties as Faculty Engagement Manager so as I noticed carousels getting more views I started to prioritise them over video content because they took so much less time to produce, not least because they can often be made using existing images I already have available to me, rather than needing to shoot new content.

The impact has been remarkable, The extraordinary thing is, even the less successful posts that don’t get the Likes and engagement I’m hoping for are getting consistently high reach and views. Meanwhile the successful ones are outstripping Reels - always the most popular format, historically - in all metrics.

2025 engagement

• Saves: 3 of the top 5 most-saved posts were Carousels (including 1st)

• Shares: 4 of the top 5 most-shared posts were Carousels (including 1st)

• Likes: all 5 of the top 5 most-liked posts were Carousels

2025 reach and views

• In 2024 our top five posts had a combined Reach of 32,095 people: only 1 of these was a Carousel

• In 2025 our top five posts had a combined Reach of 40,228 people (a 25% increase) and 3 of them are Carousels

The most dramatic increase year on year is from Views - unsurprisingly, as if someone views three images as part of a Carousel, that counts as 3 views compared with just 1 for someone watching a Reel or viewing a single image post.

• 2024: Our top 10 posts achieved a combined 70,099 views

• 2025: Our top 10 posts achieved a combined 211,337 views

This represents a 201% year-on-year increase in total views. That top 10 breaks down as follows - several of these are collabs with other accounts, which is hugely important for Reach and Views too.

A tale of two posts

Our most successful post (that we originated, rather than were invited onto as a collaborator) in 2025 - by most metrics, albeit not Likes - was this Carousel to celebrate the library’s birthday. It reached over 9,000 people, was viewed over 23,000 times, and had over 750 Likes as well as large numbers of Saves, Shares, and new Follows.

For me though, a better example of the power of the Carousel is our least successful post of 2025. In fact in terms of engagement, it is, I think, the least successful post I personally have put on the library Instagram account in its entire history (full disclosure I looked back through six years’ worth of posts before giving up)… It got 17 Likes.

Despite this total failure on my part to pitch the Podcasting Studio in such a way as to get Likes (previously when I’ve done a Reel on this it’s had much more Likes, and the TikTok version did really well too - so it’s the framing, rather than the subject matter, that’s the issue with the post above), the Carousel of it all meant it has still reached nearly 900 people and had nearly 4.5k views.

To put that in context, the post reached more people (and got 106% more views) in a week than the podcasting studio webpage did in the whole of 2025 - and that includes a spike in the webpage views caused by the Instagram post… There’s nothing wrong with the webpage - it’s just that our target audience don’t really web-search, but they scroll-search social media all day. So all in all: the habits of undergraduates x the reach of the Carousel = even an unsuccessful Insta post getting key messages out really well compared with other mediums.

Get posting

I’ll write another post soon about what works and doesn’t work with Carousels but for now I hope you’re convinced that, going into 2026 if you’re running an organisational account it’s time to plan some Carousels. In fact I wouldn’t post any individual images this year - why throttle your own reach, when a Carousel would go so much further? Get your message out to the widest audience possible, and take advantage of the cheat code while it lasts!

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 ongoing success.’

The insidious thing about Imposter Syndrome is it individualises suffering. It’s not something being done to you; it’s something you ‘have’, a personal flaw that comes from within. And because the concept of Imposter Syndrome is so wide-spread, it’s easy not to question that the blame is yours.

It reminds me of the concept of ‘resilience’ as it is applied in Higher Education - the onus is on us as staff to simply become strong enough (or numb enough) to deal with any amount of stress or disruption, rather than on the institutions to try and reduce the imposition of harsher and harsher conditions.

Back in 2014, and indeed now, I was surrounded by brilliant colleagues in the profession who doubted themselves, who thought they were only ever a slip away from the big reveal that they Didn’t Belong Here, despite the evidence to the contrary. It was their ‘condition’ which meant they couldn’t see the truth of their excellence. Right?

Then in 2020, I read a brilliant article on In the Library With the Lead Pipe (consistently the most readable and through-provoking peer-reviewed journal I’ve come across), by Nicola Andrews, entitled It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal For Library Workers.

I’d recommend reading the whole thing but this is the paragraph that really stuck with me:

I feel embarrassed now, that someone needed to point this out to me. I had credited my own lack of Imposter Syndrome as basically being down to a) the sense of self instilled in my by my parents and b) the fact I’d chosen the right profession for me. But of course, it has infinitely more to do with privilege: with the fact that as a white middle-class male my profession and my industry - librarianship and higher education - didn’t treat me like an imposter.

If you’re an ethnically minoritised member of staff in a University and you feel doubt concerning your abilities and whether you truly belong, I’d wager that there’s a good chance it is not the apparently capricious ‘condition’ of Imposter Syndrome - I’d wager you’ve been made to feel like an imposter. If you’re female, or from a working class background, or disabled, or are part of any other underrepresented group, and you feel like an imposter, there’s a good chance you’ve been treated like an imposter. This comes from without, not from within. And that’s not Imposter Syndrome.

(Sidenote: if you’re a white middle class man who feels doubt concerning your abilities and whether you truly belong, it’s not impossible you’ve been promoted beyond your abilities. That’s not Imposter Syndrome either, that’s actually being an imposter…)

How many cases of Imposter Syndrome are actually misdiagnosed? This matters because the term becomes pernicious when it is widely used for groups it was never intended to describe. As Dr Raquel Martin notes, the original 1970s study ‘focused on high-achieving, middle to upper-class European American women, observing how they attributed success to luck rather than their own abilities… the concept was never designed to capture the experiences of marginalised groups like black people, who face additional systemic barriers.’

Trespasser Syndrome

I’ve been working with a brilliant colleague at York, Raj Mann, on a project centred on inclusion and belonging in the library, and I’m indebted to her for introducing me to the term ‘Trespasser Syndrome’. If you’ve read this far and you agree with most or all of what I’ve said above, you’re probably already nodding your head in recognition at how much this new framing improves upon the old framing. It’s not that Imposter Syndrome doesn’t exist - it’s that in so many cases, it is misapplied: in fact the person is made to feel like they’re trespassing in a space simply not intended for them.

I believe the term ‘Trespasser Syndrome’ was coined by Dr Arin N. Reeves, in 2022. I’d recommend reading all of her article Is It Imposter Syndrome or Is It Trespasser Syndrome? - here’s a key quote:

What we do about it?

Language and nuance matter, so let’s stop misapplying the term Imposter Syndrome to situations where individuals and groups are being treated like imposters. It’s never good perpetuate harmful language, whether intentionally or not. Reeves advises us to ‘Use “imposter syndrome” when it’s relevant. Differentiate it from “trespasser syndrome” to honor the realities of succeeding in spite of not belonging.’

More than that though, we need to interrogate examples of Imposter Syndrome. If someone you work with says they have it, or describes its symptoms, we need to do more than nod and smile and say ‘I know how you feel’ - we need to work out why they’ve been made to feel like an imposter, and whether we can do anything to change that. How can we create environments that support under underrepresented groups, and dismantle the systems which tell people they don’t belong?

I’ll leave the last word on this to someone much more qualified to talk about it than me. Raj has in fact organised the first ever Trespasser’s Conference as part of her role at YCEDE (the Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education) and during her keynote address she said this:

The talk was filmed by prettybright.co.uk (more on which below) and they kindly gave me the footage, to which I’ve added a real-time screen-record of me doing my slides.

There are two reasons I want to share this here. Firstly it gives a pretty up to date state of play on library social media (and although it is public library focused a lot of it applies to other sectors too) and encapsulates a lot of key tips and approaches I feel really passionately about. I really enjoyed the take-aways from my talk (and others) in Dr Mary-Ellen Lynn's review of the event here.

Secondly it will give people an idea of what you get if you book me for a talk, and this particular presentation is a sort of microcosm of the social media workshops I run, minus the activities. When I speak at a conference I’m actively trying to flatten the hierarchy between speaker and audience - I want it to be as much a conversation as possible. I want to focus on ideas that can lead to actions. I want people to feel included, and reassured, as well as inspired to do things differently afterwards. Anyway: if you want to me to talk at your event or run some training, get in touch!

Shownotes:

1) Prettybright really helped me out here. They’d already uploaded a version of the talk to Vimeo but it had minor formatting issues with the slides and I wanted to be able to chop the talk up into shorter chunks (e.g. for sharing a section on LinkedIn) so I asked for the original footage, without realising how much work this would entail at their end. They had to shrink down and colour-grade the original broadcast quality footage from a giant 113 gig file and I’m really grateful to Howard Elwyn-Jones and his colleague Louisa for going above and beyond to do this for me.

2) In the section about Insta I mention ‘the Paisley presentation’ as being filled with the kinds of images that would work really well on that platform: that was in reference to Stephen Slevin’s talk which you can see here

3) At the end I mention handing over to my also Yorkshire-based colleagues: those were Jen Boyle and Rachel Ingle-Teare whose brilliant talk you can view here, about Leeds Libraries

4) The other talks from Edge are all on prettybright’s Vimeo too

5) I delivered a talk in Dublin about social media from the academic library point of view - this was also filmed (albeit just via Teams for the hybrid event, rather than on high quality gear): view Rebuilding the library community here

6) While I was at Edge I also judged a library innovation competition, which I found completely inspiring - I wrote about the winning and highly-commended entries here

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 platform. So if you do social media for your organisation or otherwise create content, and you’ve ever asked yourself how many hashtags is too many hashtags, read on!

Three disclaimers before we start:

1. Hashtags are the cherry, not the cake. The content of your post is waaaay more important than the tags - but using hashtags well WILL improve your posts’ discoverability.

2. It’s more important to use the right hashtags, than the right number of hashtags. What is going to help people discover your post? What do people who need your content search for? Hint: adding a universally used hashtag (like #love for example) simply won’t do anything positive. If everyone uses the same hashtag, your post joins an almost infinitely long queue of other posts. Aim for the sweet spot between high volume hashtags that everyone uses, and low volume hashtags that no one will ever search for. For the librarians and archivist out there: hashtags are basically metadata!

3. The info below is really just my views, as of late May 2025, built on my own experience and reading others’ research, rather than the ‘right’ answer… Use this as a jumping off point and conduct your own experiments!

How many hashtags should I use on TikTok?

Use 3-5 hashtags on TikTok. Recently TikTok started limiting users to five hashtags, so this one is easy. Ignore the super-cool TikTok accounts that use no hashtags at all, or the desperate accounts that use generic like #fyp #ForYouPage and #viral. 3 to 5 hashtags on TikTok will help the algorithm push your content in relevant directions -any more and it will basically get confused… Remember, the majority of TikTok posts are seen by people who DON’T follow the accounts posting them - so use every advantage available to you to get eyes on your videos.

How many hashtags should I use on Insta?

Use 5 hashtags on Instagram. I’ve had to update this one since I originally wrote this post… I used to recommend a higher number, because of a study which looked at 38 million posts and found that 11 was the optimum number of hashtags. However Instagram has now imposed a limit of five per post, so that’s what we all have to work with. Finally - and this is really annoying but everything I’ve read confirms it’s true - don’t use the same ones for each post. You need to mix them up a little, and avoid two posts in a row with the same tags. Gah.

How many hashtags should I use on Facebook?

Use 0 - 2 hashtags on Facebook. Hashtags are less important on FB than on TikTok or Insta, but they can help your post show up in searches. Don’t crow-bar them in, but take opportunities to use them organically in your posts.

How many hashtags should I use on Bluesky / Threads?

Use 0-2 hashtags on Bluesky, and Threads. You don’t have to use any at all, of course. The way hashtags are used on these platforms is more like a form of curation - for clicking on and finding related posts, rather than particularly for search. On Bluesky using certain hashtags will also push your post into certain custom feeds - be careful not to abuse this by over-using them!

How many hashtags should I use on YouTube?

Use 3-5 hashtags on YouTube. YouTube is interesting in that it works completely differently to all other platforms listed here: for a start, it has a seperate ‘tags’ section when you upload. Here you can put all the tags you want to help with discoverability, and they won’t be readable by other people - they just help with searching. So use this freely and fill it right up. Secondly, you can put hashtags in the description - or you can put them in the title. With YouTube shorts in particular, putting a hashtag in the title - IF it’s something people will likely be searching for - can be really beneficial. Thirdly, if you use too many hashtags in the description or title, YouTube literally ignores them completely. So don’t do lots! One or two max in the title, and a couple more in the description, should do it.

How many hashtags should I use on LinkedIn?

Use 1-4 hashtags on LinkedIn. A haphazard approach doesn’t work well here: use one or two tags which are specifically relevant to your industry and your post (and avoid the generic, overused cringey ones like #productivity…).

How many hashtags should I use on X?

It doesn’t matter. Just get off it. You’ll feel so much better.

It was a hybrid event, with around 100 staff from Irish academic libraries split across in-person and online. The venue was fabulous - the picture in the header of this post is of the view of the Liffey through the window of the room I was speaking in.

I was asked to talk about rebuilding our online communities now that Twitter / X has stopped being an option for so many of us. Although the committee wanted me to touch on this from a library point of view, the main focused they asked for was actually the librarian perspective - where do we, as library staff and info pros, rebuild our networks? It’s a great topic, and here are my slides (slightly amended from the event, to work better without me talking over the top).

Below is not a transcript of my talk by any means, just a few notes on the key themes.

Part 1: The State of X

It gives me no pleasure to be spending so much time hauling Twitter over the coals, because the site has been a hugely positive influence on my my life. I joined after the New Professionals Conference way back in 2012 and suddenly I became plugged in to this network of progressive, interesting library people - I absolutely relished being able to be part of that wider conversation. It gave me incredible opportunities (the original catalyst for my keynote at the LIANZA Conference in New Zealand was a tweet from the LIANZA account about how bad the fonts were on the Library Marketing Toolkit website!), helped me get jobs, introduced me to friends, and allowed me launch a freelance career.

More importantly than any of that though, Twitter was the place that enabled me to view the world through other people’s eyes. As a cis-het white male (and you can now add middle-aged to that list) it’s vital to get an insight into how other people experience life and the world and libraries and more, or you end up in a boring, uninformed bubble with potentially damaging knock-on effects for those around you. They say you get more and more right-wing as you get older, but I’ve found the exact opposite to be true (and I was pretty left-wing to begin with): my brilliant Twitter network was vital in that.

Twitter was great because we made it great, and now it’s terrible because some terrible people have come along and set up shop there. So I get the ‘why should we have to leave?’ argument. Individuals can make up their own minds but I think from an institutional point of view, being there is a real risk, reputationally. As it says in slide 9, hate speech is up, disinformation is up, transphobia is up, misogyny is up, bots are up - and actual active (human) users are down. Even beyond the ethical arguments against X, it has ceased to function effectively as a communication tool for libraries - the algorithm rewards conflict and suppresses links, and even when you do ‘good’ tweets (like the ones in slide 8) they don’t get any reach. It’s time to go. Which leads us to the question which titles the next part.

Part 2: Where next for academic libraries?

In academic libraries we have various audiences we’re trying to reach, including not limited to undergraduate students, postgrads, researchers and academics, professional services staff, members of the public, the rest of the Higher Education industry. Of those, I firmly believe Instagram has the student side really well covered, especially if you throw in TikTok too. It’s the public and the University staff we find harder to reach now X is no longer viable.

The public remains a really tricky issue, but I believe Bluesky is really beginning to fill the Twitter-vacuum for academics and researchers. It has a relatively low number of total users (around 35 million at the time of writing; updating count here) compared with the giant social networks, but despite that it is has now overtaken X as the place where most new scholarly research is shared. The academic community is moving over there in large numbers, which is really great news for us in libraries.

My argument in the talk is that having somewhere online to follow our academic community to is great, but leading them there is even better. I’ve really proactively tried to help catalyse a shift to the platform for researchers at my own institution, writing several guides to the platform aimed at University staff and creating a University of York Starter Pack for colleagues to easily connect with each other on the new platform, among other things.

Overall I’d advocate for using Bluesky specifically for researcher-facing messages at the moment (I’m not seeing evidence of large numbers of taught students on the platform) and letting Instagram take care of your student-facing comms. It’s working really well for us, and we now have a larger and more active network for the Uni of York library on Bluesky than we ever did on Twitter, after only a few months.

Part 3: Reconnecting as Information Professionals

No one is obliged to be in an online professional network, of course. There are people who are entirely off social media and benefiting from that choice. If you do want that connection with the wider profession though, with what do we replace Twitter?

The answer depends on what specifically we need from our network. Before we ask where shall we go, we need to ask what we want to DO when we get there. I asked the audience to talk to each other about the various options on slide 31, as well as adding their own…

I’ve been forced to revise my view that LinkedIn is basically awful, because actually it isn’t - the library and HE professionals part of it has been really helpful to me, especially since I left Twitter a year and a half ago. I’ve also noticed that the total views for posts on there is higher than it is on this website - numbers in the slides - so it’s a good way to disseminate and get feedback on ideas. (Here’s my LinkedIn profile if you’re interested.)

Bluesky has for me killed two (Twitter) bird with one stone - it has become a venue to rebuild my library’s academic network, and my own librarian / info pro network. As always, I’d recommend it: if you’ve not given it a go, check out some of the guidance and maybe dip your toe in.

The key thing is, you can choose whatever platform you like as long as you’re part of the conversations you want to be having. It was really so great to be part of this particular conversation in Dublin, so massive thanks again to LIR for inviting me!

If you’re interested there’s a video of the full talk here. It’s a recording from Teams so the audio is slightly in and out and the picture is a bit grainy! But I appreciate the LIR committee making this available, thank you.

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 organisers asked me to do this after hearing people say nice things about a similar session I'd done in Kilkenny - if you're interested the slides from that are not identical but cover the same theme.) It was a brilliant event, very uplifting, and huge thanks to Gráinne Crawford and her team for inviting me and making me feel so welcome.

As part of the same conference they have three Innovation Awards and I was honoured but somewhat daunted to be asked to judge the Digital category. Edge 2025 had lots of nominations and I was sent the four finalists - my job was to pick the winner and the highly commended, who would be invited to the Gala Dinner to receive their awards. Here is a summary of the winning entry and first runner-up - I found reading their entries good for the soul.

Highly commended: Tickets for the Afterlife

Tickets For the Afterlife is a web-app to "…help users navigate choices related to their body, memories, and legacies after death." It's not the typical thing a library would provide, but Redbridge saw a need to help their community and learned the skills required to make it happen - and they executed it so, so well. You can read a Guardian article about it here but honestly I’d recommend experiencing it for yourself at afterlifetickets.co.uk.

I loved this whole project, and it's beautifully done - here's what I wrote to be read out at the Awards:

Huge congrats to Anita Luby and Redbridge Libraries on a truly different, innovative service.

Winner: The Hive

Darlington Borough Council created The Hive, a digital hub with virtual reality gear, coding and robotics, 3D printing, animation, digital sewing and quite a lot more. (In fact you can get a good idea of what's on offer by checking the 'what's on' section at the bottom of the Darlington Libraries homepage).

I know that there are quite a few libraries creating maker spaces and so on, but the way Darlington have done this is fantastic - it's a beautiful space, and full of creativity. The reason I chose it as the winner is the extraordinary impact it has had - as Suzy Hill said in her award application, footfall was down, book issues were decreasing and the perception of the digital offering was that it was poor, and The Hive has completely changed that to an amazing degree. Visitors are up by so much, and so is everything else - I feel like they've changed what a library MEANS to the people of their community, and gone from struggle to real triumph.

Here's the comments I wrote which were read out at the Gala Dinner, to announce the winner:

I love this project: I found The Hive's work to be uplifting, hopeful and genuinely inspiring.

Edge2025 was brilliant - I missed some talks I really wanted to see on Day 2 as I was hot-footing it to Dublin for another talk, but I can wholeheartedly recommend the conference if you’re able to go next year.

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, writing a book, running training and workshops, and amazing library experiences that stay with you.

I was involved in the SLA Leadership & Management division, and SLA Europe, for several years in the 2010s, serving on a couple of committees and attending / presenting at events. It started with winning one of the 2011 Early Career Conference Awards - I know a whole cluster of people who won an ECCA in that era and we all talk about in the same tones of mild wonder...

The prize is an all expenses paid trip to the SLA Annual Conference in North America - to attend any event as a new professional is great, but for those of us in the UK the scale of US library conferences is just epic, which added another layer of excitement.

There were 3,500 people at SLA2011 in Philadelphia, and there were so many highlights for me. The conference venue was bigger than most airports I've been in. There were usually 5 or 6 sessions of interest running simultaneously. Being in a gang with the other three ECCA winners (Samuel Wiggins, Natalia Madjarevic + Chris Cooper) who were affiliated with different divisions was such a lot of fun: the pic in the header of this blogpost is taken from a visit to the ‘Rocky montage steps’ with them all. I saw a Mary Ellen Bates presentation I still cite a line from in my marketing workshops to this day...

The thing that really struck me though was how welcoming everyone was, and how they treated us all as equals. I was in the Leadership & Management Division, but I was 5 years into librarianship and was neither a leader nor a manager. All these high-powered boss level librarians simply treated me like one of their own, and my mentor Dee Magnoni was just so, so encouraging. It's such a big deal when you're young and new to the profession to have senior people believe in you.

The whole conference, and the SLA and SLA-Europe in general, were incredibly energising and felt like a real privilege to be a part of. I had to pull out of doing a TED-talk style presentation as part of the closing session at SLA2014 in Vancouver because my daughter was ill, and I wish I'd been able to take that opportunity, not least just to get to another SLA conference!

Sincere thanks to all the SLAers I've met along the way (loads of whom I'm glad to say I'm still in touch with), and I hope the community can continue or be reinvented elsewhere.

I know it’s a big swing to expect anyone reading this to want to listen to me on a podcast about Art, so I thought I’d provide some shownotes with time-codes that tell you what we talk about and when, in case any of it is of interest or relevance to you. A large portion of the chat is relevant to anyone interested in using social media to engage audiences, across libraries, HE, and the Arts more generally.

Here’s the podcast:

First things first, you can find the episode Social Media and Unfinished Business here on Spotify, or you can find it on Apple Podcasts if you prefer, and probably a bunch of other places besides. Here’s the Apple version embedded:

0:00 - 2:17 Preamble

The welcomes and hellos happen in this bit.

We recorded in the Library’s Podcast Studio - it’s one of our most popular services and I’ve spent some time marketing it, but never used it before. It was pretty nice, extremely high quality mics where you feel like you can hear the blood in your veins they’re so sensitive… Here we all are, in a post-record selfie.

2:18 - 13:49 social media and the arts

In this section we talk a little about the personality-driven social media that Helena does via the Art@York profiles, which I think is absolutely brilliant. You can find Art@York on Facebook here (the former Library account, as you’ll hear if you listen to this bit!), or Art@York on Insta here, or Art@York on Bluesky here.

We talk a lot about why art collections work on Instagram etc, and I found it really interesting to explore this. I do think the overwhelming availability of everything means curation of any kind is more important than ever, and I do think we’ve all become so good at using imagery in our social media that it just becomes white noise - so meaningful imagery on social media really makes a difference.

13:50 - 18:37 can social media be taught or is it intuitive?

An interesting question from Gary prompts a discussion about whether social media can be taught. It absolutely can be (please get in touch and book a workshop!) but certain approaches do rely on an intuitive grasp. Either way though, putting personality into your comms is what builds relationship and engagement - if it’s fully corporate, people just do not respond.

18:38 - 24:35 AI in social media

I have over time become massively against using for example AI-generated imagery on professional social media, and this section covers why. You basically alienate a large part of your potential audience if you continue to use AI slop.

24:36 - 29:39 The different demographics for different social media platforms

One of the traps institutions often fall into when doing social media is treating all the platforms the same, and cross-posting content. I get why this happens, with time-pressures being primarily to blame, but the issue is that the platforms work completely differently, and have quite different demographics.

29:40 - 39:29 Creativity, music, and being from a line of artists but unable to produce visual art…

I hail from generations of artists, and I cannot draw a line or a circle or indeed absolutely anything at all, with any skill. My Mum is an incredible artist (our house is filled with things she’s made for us) and so was her Dad, Peter Walbourn. He once painted the Queen Mum and was struggling to get the detail of her brooch down in time for the end of the sitting. Why don’t you take it home with you, Her Maj suggested! Is it insured, my Grandpa asked? Oh, we couldn’t possibly afford to insure it, she replied… (He took it home anyway and my Gran slept with it under her pillow to keep it safe.)

My Great Grandfather was the painter Ernest Walbourn, and we discuss the many unfinished paintings of his we have in our house during this section of the podcast. Here’s the main himself at work - one of the things I like about this picture is he’s literally doing the thing we discuss in the episode: 70% of the painting is done to completion, but the sky is entirely untouched, a literal blank canvas.

The other part of Ernest lineage which did NOT reach me is sporting prowess: he was in fact invited to join the Olympic shooting team, and my parents have a letter from an Olympic committee member reassuring colleagues that Ernest was a gentleman, despite being an artist…

In particular we talk about one painting on my wall, of a tree, unfinished, which I absolutely loved Helena’s expert take on. Here’s the pic.

After listening to the podcast my Mum got in touch to say this was the very tree under which my grandparents got engaged! Lovely stuff.

39:30 - 52:17 My top tip for visiting galleries and museums

If you only take one thing… Steal my Te Papa techniques as described in this section! Some more on the New Zealand Lianza experience, including images of the museum in its glorious emptyness, here. Plus more on the Latvian children’s art / library strategy here.

We also discuss UX methodologies, and the benefits of having a curated art collection on campus.

52:18 - end My favourite art on campus

I insisted they ask me this question - what is my favourite art on campus? I talked about two pieces. First of all Beyond and Within by Joanna Mowbray.

The piece I picked as my favourite was the Singing Stone by Gordon Young. I mentioned in the podcast the Alumni post on Insta of Helena describing the piece, and the YouTube shorts version is embedded below:

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! I absolutely loved being on the podcast, so thank you Helena and Gary for having me.

Filler words - um, erm, like, sort-of, basically - are all words we use often in conversation, but we worry about using them when presenting at an event, addressing a meeting or doing any other sort of public speaking. The interesting thing (to me!) is that filler words are not all bad, and I disagree with the perceived wisdom here.

I believe that outside of the ‘corporate pitch’ world a lot of public speaking advice seems to centre on, it is actually possible to be TOO slick as a presenter. Rough edges have their merits. We don’t want to sound polished to the point of being corporate or blandly robotic, and fillers can make us sound more human - but the key thing is, some of them are more problematic than others. I divide filler words into two groups: sounds, and meanings.

Sound-based fillers

Sounds (um, ah, er, erm etc) serve two important purposes when we're presenting:

1. they give us time to gather our thoughts and construct the next part of our sentence into articulate prose

2. they signal to the listener that the current thought is still in progress and there's more to come

In conversation, these sounds prevent interruptions, and in presentations, they help keep the audience and speaker in sync - this is no small thing. If you find yourself umming and ahing don't worry too much about it! There's value to it, as long as it's not happening several times a sentence.

Meaning-based fillers

Words & phrases such as 'like', 'sort of', and 'basically' are more concerning because they convey specific concepts, which subtly weaken our message.

• 'like' and 'sort' of make statements sound uncertain

• overusing 'basically' can make everything seem overly simplified or reductive

• while 'you know what I mean' can be genuinely useful for encouraging the audience to reflect and look for more nuance in whatever you just said, 'you know' loses any value when overused.

How to reduce filler words

The best way to identify your own filler words is to record yourself public speaking. I use the voice-record feature on my phone to record my conference presentation: I give myself a complete free pass at the time (no self-critiquing during the talk!), and listen back to it on the way home from the event to find ways to improve. You quickly find out which fillers you overuse, and then can work out whether they're relatively harmless 'sounds' words, or potentially undermining 'meaning' words...

There's also some fascinating research on the role body language plays in all this, which deserves a whole future post of its own - I’ve got lost down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading up on this! So for now I'll just address a question I often get asked in Presentation Skills workshops: is it okay if I gesture a lot? And the answer is yes: gesturing is a good thing! If you need to wave your arms about, wave your arms about. It helps you form thoughts and can help the audience interpret your words correctly.

That being said, body-language isn't nearly as important as is often believed. Please be reassured that the idea that '90% of communication is non-verbal' is a complete myth, based on misinterpretations of a 1960s study.

It's your words that really matter.

I realise while I tend to follow this principle instinctively, I’d never articulated it or heard it expressed so clearly before—and it’s brilliant advice. Simple, but incredibly effective. They also shared a few other tips I often include in my own workshops on video marketing, which got me thinking: are there universal tips for shooting and editing videos, regardless of format or platform? Creating a YouTube video is vastly different from making vertical content for Instagram or TikTok, yet some principles apply across the board. Here’s a brief list of those tips—feel free to add your own in the comments.

Filming tips

You don't need incredible gear, but you do need good sound

Whatever phone you’ve got is good enough quality to shoot good video. You don’t need specialist equipment. But the most common reason videos don’t work is poor sound - in short if you don’t have an external microphone, make sure whoever is speaking is close to the phone, or the audio will simply be too quiet. As a bonus, close-shot interviews or talking heads are a good thing anyway, because you can clearly see the subject when you’re watching it on a phone - and the vast majority of your views will be on mobile devices, so do keep that in mind while shooting.

If you’re recording a voice-over in your own kitchen and it sounds echoey, put a duvet over your head. You can also add compression in Audacity (it’s free, open-source and easy to use) which helps by reducing the distance between your quietest and loudest words. If you work in a large organisation, check if your AV department has radio mics you can borrow for recording multiple speakers or capturing voices from farther away.

Record your audio first, and match the video to that 

If you’re making a video with a voice-over, trust me; it’s easier this way around. It’s not really acceptable to speak really fast to fit more in, or add superfluous narration to slow things down, to match the visuals - record the audio first (again I like to use Audacity) and then fit the video to that.

always Shoot more video than you need 

This links directly to the above. Not having enough video to fit the audio is a nightmare - you end up using slow-motion or repeating shots, which reduces the impact of the video. Recording a few extra seconds before and after each scene, and filming additional “b-roll” (background footage of the setting or activity) will allow you to fill any gaps later. Future-you will thank you during the editing process.

Leave a pause at the beginning and end of everything you say 

This is one of the best pieces of advice Sam and Siobhan shared, and yet it’s something I still forget to do. Adding a pause at the start and end of a clip prevents abrupt transitions: while a sense of urgency is good, pauses allow viewers to process what they’ve just watched. This is especially important if you (or your subject) need to retake a line—leave a pause before resuming. Without it, you’ll end up editing around moments where someone launches into their line right after laughing or apologising for a mistake. It causes such a headache. And talking of the edit…

Editing tips

It's easier to edit a landscape video to fit portrait, than the other way around 

The subject of whether to make videos horizontal (YouTube, Facebook) or vertical (Insta, TikTok) is too complicated to explore in detail in this post, but suffice to say sometimes you’ll want a multipurpose video that can be edited and posted to both old-school and new-school video platforms.

If you need a multipurpose video, always shoot landscape. Cropping landscape footage to portrait is manageable as long as the subject stays centered. However, editing a vertical video to work in landscape is next to impossible.

Here’s an example of a video I shot multipurpose: the YouTube version is the ‘official’ virtual tour we have embedded on our website:

…but of course Instagram is where the real reach is, so here’s the vertical version which has 14k more views:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

Slow that text down!

Editing video is often a long and finicky process, and you end up seeing your film so many times you become too close to it. As the editor, you’ll naturally read on-screen text faster than your audience, who are seeing it for the first time. Let text linger longer than you think is necessary. This gives viewers enough time to read and process it.

If possible, show your video to someone else before posting—they don’t need to be a video expert to provide helpful feedback on pacing, text timing, and audio clarity.

Don't use 99% of the available tools in a given video editor (or: simple is better) 

Almost every great video is simple. Video editors allow you to do all kinds of fancy stuff, and it is essential you resist temptation here… Those transitions between sections where the picture falls over backwards or rotates or folds up and flys off? They have novelty value, but NO OTHER VALUE! Your audience are not helped by these gimmicks.

In fact, most of the tools and techniques available in video editors shouldn't be used in a typical video. They just get in the way, and the clutter detracts from the story and the message. If you’re going to use animations or visual effects, do so with intent - in other words because they serve the intended audience.

Finally, remember that video isn’t always the right medium! This is easy to forget because we live in the age of video content, but sometimes a piece of explanatory text on a website, or a caption on an Insta photo, can be more useful for users - as always with any kind of marketing, put yourself in your users’ shoes and ask what you’d find easiest…

If you’d like to book a video marketing course for your organisation, get in touch!

From there we explore how to assess your library’s current reputation, and then talk about all the great marketing strategies you can use to influence and shape your brand, steering it closer to that ideal vision. It’s always one of my favourite workshop activities because I love people hearing the sets of words and phrases people come up with.

Some brand aspirations are easy to work with, from a marketing perspective. If your ideal brand is ‘a place of learning and support’ you can quickly come up with a strategy for the kinds of services you’ll promote and the target audiences for those efforts. Other aspirations are more challenging (though no less valuable because of that): for example ‘innovative and exciting’ or ‘inclusive for all’ are NOT going to become your brand on their own. Achieving these requires a deliberate effort to shift perceptions and actively demonstrate in the marketing content how inclusive, welcoming, or innovative your institution truly is.

I’ve never seen such a fabulous brand to aspire to than the one public libraries already have, revealed in some new research by the New York Public Library.

Let’s start with the quote given to Book Riot, which gives this post its title, from Daphna Blatt, the NYPL’s Senior Director of Strategy & Public Impact, who says the research shows that:

Wow. WOW! It’s just such a fabulous set of terms. And what an exciting challenge to try and build that into a marketing campaign. You could take them together, or work on them one at a time over a period of months - the great thing about it is you’d be building an evidence-based piece of marketing. The research tells us how libraries make people feel, and our job as marketers is to convey that in different ways to different audiences - including, of course, potential new users.

And in fact, those terms are just five of twenty identified by NYPL, across three stages detailed in the full report which you can view here [PDF]. Here’s a screenshot of the page I was most excited about (with as much alt-text as the system allows):

It’s a very positive piece of research at a time when positivity can be pretty scarce around public libraries: I’d urge you to read the report, share it with colleagues, and then run with it as a way to inform your library marketing in 2025.

Public library social media in a post-Twitter world from Ned Potter

I was running some training online for Irish public libraries earlier in the year, and I said jokingly (or, half-jokingly…) ‘as great as this is, if anyone would like to invite me back to Ireland I’d love to come!’ and Mary Murphy from the LAI took me at my word! I’m so glad she did because the whole thing was a great experience.

It reminded me of when I ran workshops in Australia - when a nation truly values its libraries, the whole conversation around them is just different. It starts from a place of positivity, and moves forward from there into creativity and inclusivity - the capacity for those things is greater because the librarians aren’t having to be on the defensive and trying to justify their existence. Someone said to me on the coffee break ‘whichever party is in Government, we always get support’ - can you imagine that being said at a British conference? It was lovely to visit such a place and a get a sort of library-serotonin boost…

The other great this about this whole trip was that my wife Alice could come with me, and in fact - for the first time ever - she saw me talk at an event. It was odd to mix these two worlds, and I had to consciously not think about her presence while I was presenting so I didn’t get in my own head. Whenever I do conference talks I always ask the audience to speak to each other about a key part of the topic, around ten minutes in - it turns everyone in the room into active participants and raises the energy levels all round; I love it and whole-heartedly recommend it to presenters. I didn’t warn Alice about it though, so she found herself talking to the librarian in the seat next to her about things she had no context for or interest in - lovely stuff…

On the way home we diverted into the Wicklow Mountains and it was beautiful.

Thanks to Mary and everyone at the LAI who invited me, and to all the conference deletagates I chatted to and who asked great questions during my talk. I loved the whole thing - I hope someone will have me back over in 2025!

With that in mind I decided to adapt a Bluesky guide I’d written on here, to make it a guide for Researchers - the idea being to make it as easy as possible for people to make the switch. In other words, I’ve tried to help catalyse the change I needed in order to justify putting time into Bluesky, and I think overall this approach actually worked!

Because the guide was aimed at academics in particular, I sought input from academics at York who were already on the platform. Would you like to be in a York Starter Pack I asked them, and do you have any tips for your peers? They were all terrifically enthusiastic about the idea for the guide, and gave lots of useful quotes - the researcher perspective was essential, so I’m grateful to them all. I also got permission from the Central Comms Team at the University to do this in the first place, sharing a draft with them and adding some pointers around policy which they wanted included.

1: The Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky

>> Here, then, is the Researcher’s Guide To Bluesky.

It’s published on my library’s blog rather than on here because I wanted it to be seen as an ‘official’ output of the Library & Archives. I promoted it via staff newsletters, asking the Central Comms Team to add it to their Bluesky guidance, and of course going back to each and every York academic I’d spoken to about the platform to share a link with them.

I also used it to launch the library’s Bluesky account. I thought this would be good - you can’t beat being USEFUL to hit the ground running on a new social media platform - but considering we had no followers and Bluesky doesn’t have a centralised algorithm to push content towards people, I’m fairly stunned about how much engagement we got. At the time of writing it is exactly three weeks since we posted a link to the guide (as part of a larger thread outlining its key points) and we’ve had over 600 reposts and 750+ Likes - plus so, so many replies, pins, and messages of thanks.

We've written a Researcher's Guide to Bluesky! It's a bit like all those other useful guides to Bluesky, but with several useful insights from University of York academics about using the platform, and we'd love it if it was reposted far and wide... >> blogs.york.ac.uk/library/2024... 🧵 below

[image or embed]

— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 12:17 PM

The great thing about the guide doing so well is it exposed us to new followers (including York people who may not otherwise found us), established some credibility for us as an account worth listening to, and literally brought more researchers to the platform which was of course the main driver for writing it in the first place. We now have around five-and-a-half thousand followers after 21 days - on Twitter we had around 7,500 (before Musk took over and everyone left) but that took us 12 years, and engagement was way lower than it is on Bluesky.

As successful as the guide was, the fact is the York blog on which it was posted isn’t well known enough for people to just randomly stumble across it - you need to be sent there via a link in an email or a Bluesky post, realistically. I wanted to reach more researchers through an existing authority with an established network, to get more eyes on the guide - so I pitched a version to the LSE Impact Blog for Social Sciences. You’re probably familiar with this but if you’re not, the key thing to know is it has completely out-stripped the original purpose that gave it its name! The blog has become a sort of academic hub for ideas and practical guides for people across all disciplines in Higher Education.

2: How to get started on Academic bluesky

>> Here, then, is How To Get Started With Academic Bluesky.

The above is a shorter version of the first guide, due to the Impact Blog’s word-count limit - it has the York-policy-specific parts omitted, and is generally leaner. It also benefits from some helpful suggestions given to me by Michael Taser, the Managing Editor (the final paragraph in particular) and in general I prefer this edition of the guide.

This version has also had a great reception and achieved the aim of reaching more people, hopefully bringing more researchers to the platform (which will in turn make it more useful for the York academics, meaning more of THEM will come to the platform, meaning the time WE are putting into it becomes more worthwhile, and so on and so on). Certainly the greater reach of the Impact blog has helped a lot - it’s had probably around 150% of the views of the original guide.

As more and more libraries started to appear on the Bluesky as part of its November popularity surge, it was inevitable that I’d end up writing yet another iteration…

3: The Library Guide to Bluesky

>> Here, then, is the Library Guide to Bluesky.

The edition is published here on this blog because it’s written ‘as me’, rather than as the library itself. This is a culmination of what I’ve learned and applied from writing the other guides, with some advice on actual content thrown in there as well.

Again I’d like to reach a wider audience than I can get to on this blog alone, so I’ve pitched a version to Library Journal and we’ll see what they say. Speaking of pitches…

4: a bluesky guide for academic departments and professional services

>> Here, then, is the University Guide to Bluesky.

I pitched a guide to the Times Higher (for whom I’ve written a couple of pieces previously), again on the grounds that reach will be higher there than here, with my target audience. This version is organisational rather than individual, and very much HE in nature - although much of it could apply across the cultural sector.

And that will be that - no more Bluesky guides from me (almost certainly!) and all bases covered. Taking experiences and chunking them up into (hopefully useful) guidance for others has always been one of my favourite things, so I’ve actually really enjoyed this whole Bluesky business… One reply I got to a Bluesky post sums up why it’s worth the time to write these: