British Library workers withdraw their labour again! Mon 8th to Sun 14th! Improved offers (“we have no money”) are inadequate! Fair demands for fair(er) pay are reiterated! Please support the strike! Cancel / postpone! Visit the picket (in Midland Road)! If you are a Reader please join for a chat!

Is there a book or a poem that helped you explore what neurodiversity means? The Weston Library’s Space for Reading is changing themes - next up: Neurodiversity. 📚 Submit your (anonymous) suggestions here: https://forms.office.com/e/bRHBxTXBSY

This is disastrous. And the news are mostly hidden- not at all prioritised by the BBC as breaking news across their channels/platforms. I had to dig deep to find this link. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Oh joy, another helpful AI infographic via LinkedIn. Off I go to my job as a liberaian, maybe to run some critical evaligane workshops and of course use New! Boulean! Logic!

🎉 BLA summer conference announcement! 🎉 Save the date: Wednesday 1st - Friday 3rd July 2026. Place: University of Brighton. This years theme will be "Libraries as Strategic Partners: Collaboration Within and Beyond the Institution". Bookings will be open soon!

evergreen

To “my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.” www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

"People who learned about a topic through an LLM versus web search felt that they learned less, invested less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual and more generic." gizmodo.com/learning-wit...

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay, for Trans Day of Remembrance

Last night I ran my first bookclub meeting. Innitiating discussion is not as easy as it sounds; I found it difficult to not fall on Lecturing Mode or Impose My Views. Still, it was fun and people shared some interesting observations that did not occur to me. Would love to do this again!

📣 Really proud to announce the publication of Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship, an #OpenAccess collection of essays co-edited with @amsichani.bsky.social and published by @uolpress.bsky.social that examines the role of failure in #DH and research more broadly @sas-news.bsky.social

People, who should really know better, keep asking me about this new album and latest music release of that, and what do I think of this new song. Look, I've been listening to Jan Dismas Zelenka for the last two years. Unless it's fascinating baroque counterpoint I don't have much to say.

I promise you, you don't need to add a song to your instagram post. I promise you it makes no difference. Like, no one cares and please stop.

Googling for How To Not Be Poor in case it is possible to convince my browser I will never buy the things I keep seeing ads for.

Staring at goodreads choice awards and I haven't heard of most of these books.

Can't stop thinking about this quote, from @maggietokudahall.bsky.social. "Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another." (Read the full article here: www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...)

🚨 Public money is being siphoned out the care system in profits, with millions going to private equity and tax haven firms @theguardian.com's @journo-jess.bsky.social has the story of our investigation into extraction from our care system ⤵️ www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?

Sometimes I think my job is to harass my line manager and I also think that's wonderful.

I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!

“The resource over which they hold custody is of great worth to the country …Would Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi and George Orwell, all erstwhile users of the British Library, have produced their masterpieces without this resource?” Imperilled culture - it really is. Such negligence.

Is Substack basically OnlyFans but for opinions

Finally deleted TikTok and it's fascinating how I don't miss it. Surprising, considering how many hours I spent on that platform.

It’s episode 221 of Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcast and time for us to talk about Epic & High Fantasy! We talk about maps, magic, monsters, whether Pokémon counts as epic fantasy, and more! bookclub4m.libsyn.com/episode-221-...

I know about Zohran Mamdani only because he was soooo good at social media and he seemed different in so many ways. UK politicians should take note. This barrage of old men talking nonsense on the podium... I don't know most of them and I don't want to.

Preparing to run my first work bookclub meeting and it's a lot of fun! We are reading one of my favorite books "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson, so the challange will be not to completely nerd out and let others discuss the book.

Were you outraged by this salary? Now is the time to do something about it and support British Library workers #BritishLibraryOnStrike www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

That's good to know.

You probably know someone who needs to see this: stopcitingai.com 'You’ve been sent here because you cited AI as a source to try and prove something. ... Imagine someone who has read thousands of books, but doesn’t remember where they read what'.

Very honoured to be part of this and looking forward to supporting BLA members for the year ahead!

Reading about famous cookbooks and finding so many of them out of print. I would love to see these in an annotated edition, a sort of "here is the original text" with added commentary updating some terminology or adding health-related information.

📝A list of books about #Dyslexia (saw online, nothing to do with NLISN) and thought worth sharing 📚 uk.bookshop.org/shop/Dyslexi... #Neurodiverse #Neurodivergent

Reeves pledges £10m to put a library in every primary schoolsweek.co.uk/rachel-reeve... Great news 1,700 libraries will get £ for spaces & stock, the next step is access to expert librarian staff

The parliamentary register of interests shows that Farage has made nearly £400,000 from GB News since August 2024, for c190 hours’ work. This suggests he is being paid more than £2,000 an hour by the news channel. All paid to Thorn In The Side Ltd owned solely by Farage 25% tax rather than HR

Here's the ECHR polling from @yougov.co.uk. It ill behoves a generation who've had everything on a plate for two decades to yet again burn the surface off the Earth and leave the young to try to rebuild. Maybe take a pass on this one eh Boomers.

Working on a project: does anybody know any pieces of writting about being an openly queer lecturer, what are the experiences in the classroom?

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

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Elisabeth Lutyens wrote every single dissonant chord, so you don't have to.

Industry gets created. Government takes bribe from industry so it can grow unregulated, unsustainably and irresponsibly. You have to live a shittier life to mitigate damage, while the industry remains unregulated.

One of the best things about librarianship is that librarians TALK to each other. I'm slowly learning that many of my peers, working in completely different institutions, will happily share information about their work, policies and other relevant things.

What's the point of using/having internet if most of it is ads, AI slop and now you age verification, too. Oh right, to complain. Never mind.

Woman in line in front of me at the post office is not happy about the cost of shipping. She just whipped out her phone, asked ChatGPT how much it thinks the shipping should cost, and is trying to get the mailman to honor that price.

"Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do." www.thebulwark.com/p/when-moder...

I'm begging audiobook narrators to stop whispering.

Of course it is: Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations retractionwatch.com/2025/06/30/s...

I need to know why Mussorgsky is the image.

A talk about kindness - what a wonderful way to end a confetence! #bla25

Some interesting thoughts shared on the panel discussion about librarianship as a profession. I've been thinking about this a lot lately and feel like there is some sort of identity crisis going on. Not that I gained clarity, but hearing others was valuable. #foodforthought #BLA25