As a cataloger at a smaller institution, I wish there was special acknowledgement when I enhance rare material records made by the big places. It’s against the spirit of cooperative cataloging, but I want credit. Unless I’ve screwed up. I don’t want credit then.

Happy Groundhog Day! I am a fan of the absurdity of weather prognosticating rodents and celebrate Groundhog Day with my thermochromic linocut. The shadow is visible if the ambient temperature is <30°C and disappears when >30°C (and it’s a safe bet winter is over or you are overheating your home). 🧵

Community. Metal type buildings in collaboration with a wood type foundation. #letterpress www.starshaped.com/8x10prints/c...

All this impending snow. Reminds me that now we enter into the 24th of 24 micro-seasons: “Greater Cold” #大寒 - the coldest period of the year. Yet also, a period anticipating the beginning of spring and the warmth of the coming lunar new year. [Kawase Hasui, Evening Snow at Terashima Village, 1920]

Made some tiny metal type bikes. #letterpress

Aurora Coolness xkcd.com/3196/

Manuscript volvelle with animal faces and a little bird cut into one of the dials 📚📜 search.library.yale.edu/catalog/9996...

Surely some PhD candidate out there's already written a paper about how True Crime has parallels with fairytales, right? In that a lot of ppl partake in them as cautionary tales, instructional narratives they listen to on the outside chance they wind up in similar situations, literal or metaphorical

University of Arizona Libraries is hiring for a RARE BOOK LIBRARIAN! 1st review of applications February 9, 2026. arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... We have great collections and great people here. Not on the committee, happy to chat.

🚨JOB KLAXON🚨 we're seeking a Curator of African American Experience colls here at KU! GREAT colls & colleagues, tenure track, unionized, salary $61,000-$68,000. Not on the committee, but would be a colleague! More info at link!📜 #bookhistory #booksky #libsky #rarebooks rbms.info/blog/news-ev...

When works become public domain, anyone can reimagine and reuse them. 🚂 The Little Engine That Could can be freely reinterpreted—like this video marrying pages of the 1930 book to a Librivox audio recording. 📚+🎤 Learn more ⤵️ blog.archive.org/2026/01/01/w... #PublicDomainDay

Join me @rarebookschool.bsky.social for an intensive week of Latin Paleography, June 1-5 in Charlottesville. Paleography doesn't have to be scary. Trust me...we'll have a blast! Application portal is now open. rarebookschool.org/courses/manu...

A cataloger at the Morgan on cataloging, book curses, and the need for a controlled vocabulary term so we can describe and find said curses. 📜📚

I need a weather report that tells me how icy the local sidewalks are. I know the streets will get treated. It’s slipping on black ice that I am concerned about.

don't you do it. don't you dare circle back with me

oh shit tomorrow is circle back day already

all this is both foolish and unnecessary

I haven’t been on here in a while. Today was not a good day to check in unaware …

And that digitising requires highly-skilled staff (often wildly underpaid) to do a lot of work in arranging, describing and preserving both the OG documents and digital surrogates. Nothing works without good metadata & long-term thinking.

The back stacks of Houghton Library were filled with boxes of un/barely cataloged c19th pamphlets. Many of boxes have something written on them thematically like "spirit mediums." The message here is the coolest things that wont be digitized, IME, are unknown to the archivists too!

NEW: Organ tuners have been leaving temperature and humidity records in little-known books for decades. 🎹 They reveal how temperatures inside churches have changed over time due to climate change and increased heating. A new scoop for The Reengineer! www.thereengineer.pro/p/church-org...

Happy Longest Night to all who observe

Hoping you all have a warm, light filled Longest Night from my little family to yours

Paste any IIIF manifest → model classifies every page locally → see where illustrations appear. Part of small-models-for-glam: small, efficient models for cultural heritage work. Not everything needs GPT-4! Try it: huggingface.co/spaces/small-models-for-glam/iiif-illustration-detector

I have a weird question for the #bird people on here. Do you think someone could tell that a book was pooped on specifically by a sparrowhawk (or perhaps hawks generally) just from the feces? I'm looking at a 16th c. case where witnesses claim books were pooped on specifically by sparrowhawks!

Half Drunk Dunks Instagram account candidate?

Before you get your hopes up, I am sad to report that the Red Line went out of service again not long after everything was restored. I’ve been waiting several times longer than the 20-25 minutes that the announcements claim.

This is probably not the theme I should go with for the work cookie exchange

my favorite thing about the benoit blanc movies is that they aren't really about benoit blanc. he is not grappling with demons from his past. we are not getting flashbacks to the husband whose murder he never solved. he just shows up and does his job like mary poppins for homicides

Cataloger’s intuition : new methodologies of cataloging with tarot

For MARC cataloging, are we considering tarot decks books, kits, games, or something else? I am seeing a variety of approaches.

We can’t afford a $1M trailer slot 😔 But reposts on Bluesky cost $0 - and they really help tiny teams like ours ❤️ If cozy medieval creativity is your thing, here’s our Scriptorium trailer!

Long shot, but does anyone in Switzerland have an emergency Theremin to loan tomorrow night ( Friday 12 December )? #ViaMardot is playing a show in St Gallen, and the airline lost her equipment!!! We can help pay for a courier if needed, please share to get this message out!! #theremin #switzerland

This is a huge problem for libraries. We have the problem of “bit rot,” both as the decay of the physical carriers of digital media and as the obsolescence of software & hardware to render that media for use. And then we have DRM and the problem of ownership. Going digital is very expensive. 📚

I couldn’t sleep last night, and I blame it on the lack of Amtrak sleep stories

I wanted to propose an RBMS 2026 panel on advocating for books because this is how being a book person feels lately.

Amtrak and Calm need to partner on train sleep stories

always correspond to the astronomical equinox

Bookish Holiday Fun and Games For... YOU! Now in its sixth year, for this #NewberryLibrary Advent Calendar, we'll play around with the collection! Cards, Board Games, Puzzles, Gambling... What's up first? CHESS! December 1 (1/24) Here's last year's extra-shiny offering: bsky.app/profile/drka...

The Cornell FeederWatch cam webpage is displaying the temperature as NaN°F on my computer, and that feels like the forecast for this winter. www.allaboutbirds.org/cams/cornell...

The very last book that I packed for my upcoming move was a Chris Ware book that wouldn’t fit in any of the other boxes. Of course.

To GLAM colleagues: Do you use the GETTY VOCABULARIES? We seek feedback to improve these important resources. Please answer this survey and share it in your circles! It is anonymous although email is collected for context. 10-30 mins to complete. Thank you! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Little blue house on press tonight. #letterpress

Re: typewriter repair shop, saw this today: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I want someone to make a Merlin app but it's just Mark Catesby's descriptions of birds from 1732. "This Bird, by its ungrateful brawling Noise, seems at Variance and displeased with all others" is a great field mark

Also: you probably have enough shit laying around already, buy art.

This is your friendly reminder to check the before and after prices of stuff going on sale for Black Friday and all way before November. When I worked in e-commerce I was regularly asked to hike all of the prices in a website by 20-40 % in October and then put everything on « Sale ». Be smart.

Since the decimation of the federal workforce last spring, an incredibly generous group of colleagues have been offering free career advising for former feds. I just had a session this week and I can't recommend it highly enough. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...