Signed up to Claude, because sometimes I do worry I'm being overly critical and maybe when people say "I use Claude for research; it's great!" that I've missed something and should test it out. It is - I cannot emphasise this enough - shit at summarising literature. Because of course it is.

“AI in libraries” should be “what can you tell us about corporate profit-driven control of search and retrieval” instead of “when are librarians going to get on board.”

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

I'll say it again, one of the worst things this rampant push to cram "generative AI" into everything has done is make people suspect bright kids of cheating when they're just nerdy or bookish or neurodivergent, sanding down their unique edges to fit into people's lowered, homogenized expectations.

"I want to talk about the way that the survival of the AI industry depends upon you, the generation coming of age right now, agreeing with them that you have essentially no say in your own future." medium.com/center-on-pr...

Actual new course being offered by wvu's new 'civic center' that was mandated by our conservative legislature, forced on us, and entirely unwanted by the majority of wvu faculty, students, and even administrators.

Some people should never have access to students. “AI requires no ramp-ups, no meetings, and absolutely no emotional support…The issue is not whether my students are valuable. In long run, they are invaluable. The issue is that their value emerges slowly, whereas AI delivers immediate returns.”

There isn't enough literacy training in the world to counter this level of social violence

The number one website currently cited in Google’s AI search mode? It’s Google. The second? That’s YouTube, which is also owned by Google. Google’s using circular hyperlinks in AI Mode to keep users locked into their platforms. My latest for @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/google...

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

University administration has been so busy convincing people over the years that “shared governance“ equals information sharing. It doesn’t! It means shared decision making.

Bless her heart. She's never checked out a book from a library, has she?

Former Institute of Museum and Library Services leaders from both political parties expressed concern that the agency’s new grant guidelines could fund projects that encourage a more constrained or distorted view of American history.

I need faculty to get on board with helping residents, post docs, phd students, masters students etc understand that you can only do a systematic review in less than 6 months if (a) there's only a tiny amount of evidence and (b) you're not doing anything else for those 6 months.

One of the best AI critiques I’ve seen read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...

i am convinced that the phrase “AI is here to stay” is a psyop

Thank you @msjennmo.bsky.social & @cathygoweeee.bsky.social for their incredible prowess in the publication of this rebuttal! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

#academicsky #librarysky #libsky #skybrarians #medlibs do u guys like persistent identifier memes?

"AI can save you time." You miserable fool. You stupid baby. Technology can't save you time. The mechanical clock and the Google Calendar have chopped your life into small pieces to be sold, and you think adding more technology will let you keep some of those pieces for yourself?

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

It was so disillusioning to me to discover that library admins in particular loved buzzwords & popular ideas (back then it was “innovation”) but weren’t actually serious about DOING librarianship the best & most ethical way. Glad I’m not trying to figure out how to teach info lit in the “AI” age.

I want library leaders who can conceive of resistance, who can imagine different futures, not who say "welp, this is the world, guess we have no choice" at every single turn of politics or technology.

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity. And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

I encourage my colleagues in higher ed to memorize the law about recording your state (e.g., is it a two-party consent state?) and to have a clear policy about recording written into your syllabus. The right knows this is an avenue of attack and has legalized video bounties in FL and TX.

Fighting against library training on using genAI for citation management is NOT how I want to spend my time “People are using it, so we should do trainings on it whether we agree or not” No we don’t, we, as a research library, can adhere to a higher standard and give them good management info

[Blogged] The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search - From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched aarontay.substack.com/p/the-ai-pow...

UPDATE: The Indiana legislature announced that, across the state's public universities, it will immediately eliminate 75 programs, suspend/teach-out 101, and force 232 to consolidate or be eliminated. Not surprisingly, these closures disproportionately affect arts, humanities, and social science.

Faster science is sloppier science. Don't we already have more than enough useless studies, retracted papers, and junk journals floating around? The last thing we need is AI enabling people to produce more. We need a slow research movement and we need it yesterday.

New blog post on ACRLog, "AI Refusal in Libraries: A Starter Guide." Got a lot of comments during a recent presentation that people hadn't heard of the concept of AI refusal, so here's some places to start. 📚 acrlog.org/2025/06/11/a...

Hollis was there for less than a hot second but ok. Also rude to use an image of the library for this weird feitishization of affluence & nostalgia trip for days of yore when SSU was the whitest public institution in CA.

Great recs from @mattseybold.bsky.social on resisting technofeudal education: prioritize print, practice ungrading, "Luddify" the classroom; de-mobilize computer infrastructure (root technology in social place!); faculty governance over SaaS subscriptions; instructor choice re: ed-tech

tl;dr — this EO co-opts the language of open science to implement a system of political control wherein presidential appointees are given broad latitude to designate any number of reasonable scientific activities and inferences as scientific misconduct, and to penalize those involved accordingly.

Love to see Dan's coverage of the fight in Davis/Thomas against data centers get national coverage. Supplying energy for voracious genAI computing is just the latest scheme for exploiting West Virginia & Appalachia.

Finally got the chance to write about West Virginia libraries in the collaborative community newsletter I contribute to: bit.ly/3YXs1wz

'If a savage beating, captured on camera, cannot produce a murder conviction, the chances of fixing the police-brutality problem are very bleak.' www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

WOO WOO 🚂 📚

🚨ASK YOUR UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN TO TURN OFF AI SUMMARIES ON PROQUEST🚨

I contribute to Morgantown Scout, a locally-focused progressive substack, here's my most recent write-up: morgantownscout.substack.com/p/the-colleg...

Don't trust anyone who follows the word 'permanent' with the word 'digital'.

The purpose of education and going to college is not to habituate students to genAI or get them locked in to an AI vendor, and it's pretty nuts how willingly academia is falling for this brand of corporate "AI literacy" being sold by big tech as "free".

BREAKING — Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) staffers who were put on admin leave on Monday just got letters letting them know they’re a part of a Reduction in Force (RIF) and that their job will be “abolished” effective May 4th in accordance with Trump’s EO, per copy reviewed by me.

Hot off the presses. It was an absolute pleasure to put this together with @liblaura.bsky.social! Takeaways: 1. Don't assign systematic/scoping reviews to your students! 2. Don't ask your university librarian to support this terrible idea! journals.indianapolis.iu.edu/index.php/hy...

As a former humanities scholar, I would just like to remind tenured and TT faculty that no US president's admin would be able to pose such a dire threat to the entirety of US higher education without the decades-long erosion of shared governance that accompanied corporatization.

AI in education is: - A political project to get even more private tech into schools and universities - Habituating children and students to industry-defined and -demanded "jobs of the future" - Often not actually "AI" ...