My book chapter, Don't Do More With Less: Sustainable Work as a Management Value, has arrived! This chapter explores my first years as a manager and how I did my best to embrace slow librarianship, push back on overcommitment and vocational awe, and make my department and its work sustainable. 📚📜

I love seeing labor recognized! Reading up on @investinopen.bsky.social's project: "We must invest in the people who do this work and who teach others, recognizing the value of human contributions in a funding and research landscape that can sometimes prioritize tool and technology development."

It's wonderful to be able to actually hold this in my hands! Thanks to @atureen.bsky.social and all our many amazing authors for making this a reality. And just in time to show off in my tenure meeting too 🙂

We’re at an inflection point in higher ed: decades of neoliberal policy weakened our ability to fight the current onslaught of eroding academic freedom, the dismantling of shared gov, the adjunctification of the professoriate+

It's here, and earlier than I expected! My first book, Making Values-Based Decisions in the Academic Library, co-edited with the fantastic @atureen.bsky.social, starts shipping next week! It's been a journey, but I'm so happy to see it come to life. 📚📜

Mic drop from @abeba.bsky.social at UNESCO Digital Learning Week

I've noticed a trend in requests for tenure reviews, asking letter writers to compare candidates to other "top" scholars at the same career stage. Can we please not do this?!? Making tenure a moving and competitive target risks ratcheting up increasingly untenable expectations for productivity.

Interestingly, one of the institutions I profile in my book is able to give faculty raises every year, and the president attributed it to two factors: 1) control of administrator salaries and 2) control of salary differences between faculty in different disciplines.

Ever since Knowledge Justice's release, I've noticed that a lot of people seem unclear that CRT analysis can impact what day-to-day library work looks/feels like. This is what it looks like when @mariayakira.bsky.social, April Hathcock, and I apply CRT to our work together. #scholcomm #critlib

"What if we saw rest as protecting our capacity; our overall ability to show up at work and in our lives? What if we saw it as being as integral to our health as the medications we take? And why are we so willing to cheat ourselves out of rest...

looking for some fun literary datasets for the upcoming semester? check these out!

The Carpentries (@carpentries.carpentries.org‬), a nonprofit that has trained over 100,000 researchers in coding and data skills, turned down a $1.5 million NSF grant after being asked to strip diversity-related content from its programming. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

It's a good thing that a significant portion of what we call "open science" isn't utterly and completely predicated on the continued existence of GitHub. haha we what?

And "resources" includes the people who should be doing jobs that have been eliminated over decades.

Fobazi is currently in the ICU and could use your support. Apologies to those I haven’t been able to reach out to yet. You can message me for more info and I will be posting updates to GoFundMe. Please share, send healing thoughts, prayers, etc. ❤️ -Elena gofund.me/c8485b58

Here's a write-up of my keynote from #DH2025, since academic publishing is slow and this was written for right now. roopikarisam.com/talks-cat/dh...

My @humetricshss.bsky.social colleagues and I have an op-ed in @lseimpactblog.bsky.social today. Take a peek: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

Open Letter to College & Research Libraries from the academic wing of #CripLib

It is very much in the self interest of academics to stand against professional services cuts because you really do not want to be doing our jobs in addition to your jobs

Recommend looking at the Academic Wheel of Privilege. I’ve seen this before - will look again #DARTS9

Afternoon, Skybrarians! 📚 What are your favourite pieces of writing (or even just some solid ones) that have focused on radically re-thinking an aspect of library work? Could be about big aspect (management, job responsibilities, collecting), more specialized (promotion, recruitment) or anything!

Between review/publication delays, cuts to grants, and broader financial insecurity and uncertainty, every institution should revise its promotion criteria (if it hasn’t recently). We’re in a new environment, and even criteria written 5 years ago are less applicable now.

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of public librarians on genAI, and I think it was one of my best ones yet. We had a lot to get through in a short amount of time, but we hit all the bases.

The value of higher ed in the U.S. has been perpetually under debate since its inception — Was it to maintain public order via Christianity? Teach people to read? Run a new country? All of the above? The debate itself is the point — the contested question of what education is for. Not a bad thing.

"The challenge is that most employees don’t want another well-being workshop. They want something much harder to come by these days: principled, courageous leadership." 🎯

Hey #LibrarySky and #AcademicSky - does anyone know if there is a resource that maps the various organizations and institutions involved with research in the US? I have a feeling each of us knows about resources for our areas, but I didn't know if there is a larger resource I'm not thinking of. 📚

AI/genAI isn't designed to help librarians or educators do our jobs better. They aren't learning or efficiency tools. They're tools we are paying cos to train for them so we can ultimately be replaced by newer tools sold by those same companies. They double dip into our coffers and we get nothing.

AI/genAI is not the next great thing that will make your research and work more efficient and useful. It's environmental destruction and labor exploitation bundled into a predictive generator that is anything but "intellectual". It's a grift app that is inherently adversarial to our work.

I’m saying this in my capacity as an author and once and future library worker: Read whatever the hell you want. I cannot impress enough on you that the “important” books aren’t important if you don’t jive with them. The popular books, the canon, the whatever. Read what you want.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by this morning to see our poster at #ACRL25! We had a great time talking to folks about both our work and the amazing work others are doing in this area across the country!

Benjamin quoting @librarianmer.bsky.social about "slow librarianship". #acrl2025

Attending #ACRL2025? Join us as we present our poster "Towards a Reparations-Informed Collections Purchasing Model." We're presenting on Thursday (4/3) from 9:30am-10:15am. We'd love to show you how we are redirecting our collection dollars to small, BIPOC-owned bookstores. Full abstract below!

For anyone attending #ACRL2025, I'll be presenting *I have to pay to keep my job: Examining financial barriers to promotion and/or tenure* with @mauraseale.bsky.social and Faith Bradham on Friday afternoon at 1:40. For anyone not attending, the conference proceedings are out!

Librarians and other info professionals, what do you think is the most important career advice that MLIS students need right now?

This. Always this.

OK, every year I try to explain to my students how LLMs work, and every year I have to do a big trawl for good resources and activities. Here's this year's haul of *introductory* materials. (In-class activities + visualizations, not so much readings.)

I'm too exhausted today to provide any context, but here are a few of the main points from my defense yesterday.

NIH indirects case update: Hearing ongoing now, and I'll try to live tweet some notable exchanges. Prior to more detailed arguments, Judge Kelley starts off with a few point questions to both sides: (I'm paraphrasing here)

Our group has been hard at work to release a new tool: The Data Rescue Tracker. The tool aims to provide a consolidated overview of who is downloading which dataset from which government websites. Please share! www.datarescueproject.org/data-rescue-...

Data Curation Network just published a great blog post on curating for data rescue. Be mindful that datasets have different needs than websites or documents to retain their usefulness for the long run. datacurationnetwork.org/2025/02/05/c...

Like other forms of care work, library workers are always asked to extend care (through services, programs, collections, and so much more) to their communities without ever receiving care themselves. Material support is necessary to make this work sustainable in any way.

Hmm. I guess we need another reminder: staff *also* work at colleges and universities. We often have degrees or specialties in our areas. Some of us publish, attend conferences, and participate in other professional development activities. And, fwiw, most universities wouldn't function without us.

There is a persistent myth that if you work in entertainment - if you've done something people have absolutely heard of or enjoyed - that you must be rich. Actors, writers, producers: rich. The sad truth is most of Hollywood is working class. So when you see a Go Fund Me, there's a reason it exists

📣 #DigitalHumanities peeps -- consider nominating yourself or someone you know to join ACH's exec council and help shape the work of our awesome org in the coming years. We'll be hosting a short info session on Jan 15, and I'm also happy to answer Qs via DM

While underpaid roles are sometimes taken by people with external sources of financial support, they are also sometimes taken by people without. It is really important to remember that there are people employed in museums and libraries experiencing financial hardship and poverty because of low pay.

If you've argued about the value of your labor or had conversations about work/life balance or identity as a librarian or engaged in criticism of libraries as institutions any time in almost the last decade, you were exploring the concept of vocational awe as described by @fobettarh.bsky.social 1/2