To be clear, I am broadly on the side of people dunking on people for using LLMs and not checking citation, but I think some nuance is being lost around co-authorship - where there are multiple authors it’s entirely plausible some cited material will have been read by some but not all.

personal lifelong side quest to fix these every time I see it. the red cord needs to hang all the way to the ground so people can reach it if they fall.

The collapse of the UK HE sector will destroy what remains of the profession of librarianship here. (Swathes of academic staff and others are having their careers destroyed too.) Academic librarianship was the last viable bit remaining. Shame the professional body's always been politically impotent.

Cambridge University support staff - on strike today - many departments, libraries and museums affected.

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

You would think having less than a week left into my job would mean I could stop caring about people Doing Things Wrong, but no, absolutely not

Dear academic colleagues. Please sign and share this open letter expressing your support for Physics & Astronomy at Nottingham, as the university plans unnecessary and devastating cuts. One in three academics staff expected to lose their jobs nottinghamphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/...

University workers in Cambridge are on strike today. Demands are a Cambridge weighting to help with living costs.

AaaRgh migraine

I think people who haven’t been through this often underestimate how stressful this is - not just for the individuals but for their entire family. Being in limbo where you can’t make basic life decisions for weeks or months is exhausting and mentally harmful. And how can anyone do their job well?

Universities are now the largest employers in many areas. If a University shuts it will decimate the local area as thousands of people lose their jobs and all the businesses that rely on students close. The University sector needs more money (and not through higher fees)

Even though I'm leaving the organisation anyway this is deeply upsetting - because I care about my colleagues, I care about higher education, and I care about Nottingham as a place. Awful for everyone.

For further context: almost everyone in the Faculty of Arts is at risk of redundancy. Music, Modern Languages & American & Canadian Studies courses to close completely. History will not close but staff numbers will be significantly reduced. This is what 'right-sizing' looks like, apparently.

On strike today! Cambridge University Unite members are escalating strike action after receiving no further offer from the University. We will be on strike May 13-15, May 20-22, and May 26-29.

Support staff at Cambridge University start three more days of strike action tomorrow

2,700 staff at the University of Nottingham have received 'at risk' letters from the management. The same management which refused to cut their own pay, and the same management which refused to resign after losing £60 million on a disastrous attempt to build a new campus. #JoinAUnion

Photo by @tregenza.bsky.social

And there are going to be so many redundancies - even if the govt don't care about university staff (they really don’t seem to), they should care about 1000s more unemployed folks…

Solidarity to all my University of Nottingham colleagues today, I hope you’re as OK as possible considering the circumstance.

If you need citations on the biases, as a starting point I've been collating Zotero libraries on knowledge equity and metrics - www.zotero.org/groups/54546... www.zotero.org/groups/51444...

I've heard through the grapevine about a few UK universities using research metrics to make redundancy or performance management decisions, and it's really troubling, but I think there is scope to push back and hold institutions to account. #AcademicSky

👏 That's also why contributor affiliation metadata and PIDs play a key role in our proposed two-tiered metadata framework for books and chapters - which also provides publishers with clear pathways to adopting good #metadata practice in their day-to-day workflows doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

With additional details about the (wholly unnecessary) course closures and redundancies coming out today, we share these wonderful photos of our rally taken by @tregenza.bsky.social to remind you all that there is clear and significantly more humanitarian alternative to the path we are currently on.

Update! I have not finished writing this blog post but I have quit my job and will no longer be a librarian from next month. The academic librarian existential crisis is part of the reason, along with some significant personal and professional stresses that mean I just really need a break.

The context to my periodic existential crisis about my job: to what extent is it possible to do responsible research assessment when these are the conditions under which research is produced and assessed?

If you’re a Public Library Worker in a Reform council then join a union now and be prepared to oppose book bans etc. it’s going to be a very bumpy ride 😬

Special collections and archives folks, do you have searches set up in any databases to find mentions of your collections in published research? E.g. in references and acknowledgements. Currently using Dimensions to help out a colleague with this but wondering if there are better ways.

Chanting, dancing, speeches, and pantomimes, both inside and out, with participants decked out in their best pink garb. What more could you ask for?

Example of the messiness of book chapters and paratexts - for my current use case it's helpful to know specifically where my search terms appear in the book, but if it where being used for citation counts it would look like three citations where it's meaningfully only one.

Special collections and archives folks, do you have searches set up in any databases to find mentions of your collections in published research? E.g. in references and acknowledgements. Currently using Dimensions to help out a colleague with this but wondering if there are better ways.

Brilliant rally including a pantomime performance, dance break, and at least 4 good dogs in attendance. I’m feeling very grateful for the solidarity and creativity of union colleagues. 💓

Rumor has it that the council meeting has been moved to Monica Partridge, so the rally may be moving as well. We still start at the Trent building as planned, but wear some good walking shoes as we will likely be on the move! #StopTheCuts #SaveHE

Join our rally with @uonucu.bsky.social and our local Unison and Unite colleagues 10:30am-12 to make some noise outside the South side of Trent Building where UoN Council is meeting. Future Nottingham does not have to happen. There are other ways. Come and support us. Bring your voices #JoinAUnion

University of Nottingham folks! See you tomorrow!

I'm Lead Judge of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, awarded at University of Edinburgh since 1919 and due to be announced this month. But the university is currently withholding 100% of my pay for participating in a marking and assessment boycott. So, at present, there will be no prize.

Brilliant alternative strategy put together by @uonucu.bsky.social to find a sensible way forward that prioritises education & research, students, and staff. A thoughtful, well researched counter to the reckless death-spiral being unleashed by Nottingham Uni management. uonucu.org/wp-content/u...

I have purchased the Penguin Classics version which looks like the right level of annotation and is available as an ebook, but I got it via bookshop.org to avoid giving Amazon my money and the bookshop app seems very buggy when it comes to footnotes, argh.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an annotated edition of Middlemarch? Currently reading the public domain version that's just the text and it's pulling me out of the flow to check my understanding of the odd Latin phrase and Google things like "Saturday pie"

Kinda tired of the "historians will say they're close friends" meme. Babe, we've been screaming about how gay everyone is for *decades*. Funding for history keeps getting cut as a result. There are entire moral panics about it. You just haven't read any history since highschool.

Did I mention that libraries and zine fairs are two of my favourite things? No? Well, they are. I'm VERY excited to be tabling at a zine fair in a library! Here are a few of the library and zine fair themed zines I’ll be bringing to Brixton Library on 13th June. #zinefair #lamlitfest26 #zine

Labour organising is so fetch.

University of Nottingham marking boycott ‘could prevent graduations’. Staff also set to strike later this month amid reports that 600 roles could be at risk. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Friends and colleagues in Nottingham, there will be a cross-union rally NEXT Wednesday as council meets to vote on the substantial threat to jobs, units, and courses at UoN. Do come along. Do tell people and students. (More official flyers are available but I couldn't resist)

I'm looking for a concise definition of "scooping" and after reading this paper the word has not just lost all mean but become inexplicably funny pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

There is absolutely no way you thought we were going to sit by and watch the UEB cut 600+ jobs at our university, did you? Join us, Unison AND Unite on May 6th for a rally to save our university. 10:30 AM, South Side of the Trent Building. We're ready to fight. Are you? #StopTheCuts #SaveHE

Technical infrastructure does not just persist. It needs maintenance and, crucially, people to perform that maintenance. Servers need to be updated, SSL certificates need to be renewed, domains need to be paid for.

If you‘ve ever posted about how much you love libraries or been aghast at the low salary on a Cambridge post, you gotta respect the picket line at the UL and other libraries. #AcademicSky

The reality is the opposite. Librarians are essential to a successful research community on campus. Student success is improved when they can get 1:1 research help from librarians. And yet libraries are consistently underfunded and undervalued, librarians always underpaid.

Louder for the people in senior management

Friends, if you’re taking sertraline, check the batch number as there is a recall out and you may have ended up with a mislabelled lower dose of citalopram. www.gov.uk/government/n...