Twenty-five years working across academic libraries in the Middle East and Africa, with real time in special and public libraries too, but academic is where I've stayed.
Most library training assumes a budget, a bandwidth, and a staffing level that a lot of libraries across Africa and the Middle East simply don't have. Frameworks like IFLA's guidelines and the UN SDGs set a genuinely valuable direction, and this site aims to complement that work with the practical, day-to-day steps for getting there when you're running a library with three staff and an unreliable internet connection.
I've spent 25 years in and around libraries across this region, mostly academic, with real stretches in special and public libraries too. The work I'm proudest of: helping a handful of university libraries move from fully physical collections to genuinely digital ones their students and researchers could actually use, not a pilot project shelved once the funding ran out, but something that stuck. That's the standard everything on this site is built to.
“Specificity builds more trust than credentials alone.”