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Aaron Schmidt recommends occasionally taking a break from "deep thinking about your library" and go on a Service Safari to other places that offer customer service. He recommends a series of questions to ask yourself about your experience as a customer. This in turn can help libraries with evaluating their own services. Other techniques for customer service self-evaluation in this article include: Make a Map: Block out paths created by library users to your services. Think Like a Child (a.k.a."5 Whys"): Figuring out root causes of problems by taking a single statement of a problem and asking "why" five times; an example is given.

This is a quick walkthrough meant for librarians who are not sure how to evaluate, plan, and implement technology for their libraries' use.  I'm curious as to what our implementation or IT and Web services folks think of this.

Google has a new site called Google Search Education with different lesson plans for picking the right search terms, understanding search results, narrowing a search, and evaluating credibility of sources.

What's really cool about this thing is the level of analysis that it does of the password. Most "password strength meters" are just looking at length and inclusion of things like lowercase/uppercase special characters. This thing does so much more and rather than just saying "weak", "very strong" it tells you how long it'd take to crack it. Even cooler is that you can choose 'Show Options' and change the hardware of the imaginary attacker and the type of encryption your password is stored as. This is via: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/05/25/how-long-would-it-take-to-crack-your-password/ Worth reading as it also calls into question the idea of regularly changing your passwords. Obviously it's much better to just use separate passwords for everything and only change them if you have a reason to think your password was compromised.