Good reminder that librarians and archivists have been thinking about the preservation of digital information longer than most professions. files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED3...

The Zombie Dressed Up as an Ordinary Tuesday “The forced choreography of everyday life continues, even as the stage is dismantled beneath our feet.”

My latest. "The only place I know how to begin is here: We are at war, and I want it to stop."

Has anyone written a review of the restructuring going on across UK HE? Trying to understand what is common across institutions: large, team-taught courses, centralised workload models, limited to no research time, promotion directly tied to grant income. How many consultancy firms are pushing this?

🚨 NEW PUBLICATION ALERT: "Ways of knowing: Historians and the social construction of evidence" out now in the Journal of Documentation -- which builds on my dissertation work and subsequent areas of research. www.emerald.com/jd/article-a...

Having to ILL your own research article #andotherscholcommfailures

When I give talks about the exploitation of GLAM by the AI industry I’m always asked “how can we defend ourselves from bots scraping our metadata?” I have no idea. That’s a question for an engineer. What I can and do say is that we shouldn’t be supporting this industry in the first place.

Sounds like a great future study…

If you want a historical perspective for one group of scholars (mainly, info behavior of academic historians using archives), I have covered the literature in my dissertation and some articles. cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/diss... Happy to chat!

Same. The Tillis support raised my eyebrows early on

Alums, time to organize LOUDLY on behalf of your educators.

And alums with any access to donor cash— all the more so.

Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus by @ashleyblewer.com
Incredible!

For your consideration

FHI, Short Residency | Christopher Newfield, "The University System in the Knowledge Crisis" | John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute FHI, Short Residency | Christopher Newfield, "The University System in the Knowledge Crisis"

several excellent events in store for Durham as Chris Newfield takes up a residency at Duke

literary knowledge as anti-fascism, building the new cultural order Stuart Hall wanted 30 years ago, parallel universities,+defeating the empire of AI.

fhi.duke.edu/event/fhi-sh...

We have lots of fellowship / travel money to give and not a lot of applications yet. Applications are due January 30. Apply! Spread the word!

David Lynch’s house is still for sale.
www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

Context Widows or, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement

this, from @kevinbaker.bsky.social, is a better analysis of the intersection between LLMs and academic science than 98% of what's out there.

Discover the new version of the datasheets for cultural heritage datasets | Europeana PRO The Working Group on Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage Datasets is delighted to introduce Version 2 of their datasheet template. It helps describe dig…

On the occasion of Fantastic Futures 2025 #FF2025, we share the progress made by the Working Group on Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage to better support data providers in describing their data. Learn more and check out their Datasheet template - Version 2! bit.ly/3Kgd84n

hey the handbasket is 90 paid subscribers away from a huge goal—think we could get there today??

thehandbasket.co/upgrade

🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

Big tech’s selective disclosure masks AI’s real climate impact Google claims to have disclosed new information proving its own efficiency. But it has hidden the bigger picture. Guess what: I’ve got the bigger picture for you right here in this big old po…

I found this really helpful on that topic! ketanjoshi.co/2025/08/23/b...

My go to is echinacea tea, one packet of emergen-c and a big clove of garlic

For true sporting excellence, BREAD is the (1935) diet of champions. For a varied athletic diet, include cheese biscuits and tea.

(from mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/CTC/... )

How about we shut down the government for this very popular and specific goal and then, hear me out, we hold out for like a month and a half and then, ok this part is important, after a watershed election where we ran the table, ONLY THEN, fold and don't get the one thing we said we wanted.

AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge "Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."

“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you?

students: no AI

I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

A meme of 'Is this an archive?' showing a grid with various classifications of things that might be archives based on their content and structure.

Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry

#iPRES2025
How many formats are there?
@anjacks0n.bsky.social presents a paper on seeing if we can answer the question.

Some detective work gets him to the number 12k (I think)

How OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise Here are seven unusual financial agreements helping to drive the ambitions of the poster child of the A.I. revolution.

"Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Trick or treat 🎃