Rates of harassment are up, hate crimes are up, general incivility seems to be the norm these days. There's a general sense that "Things suck but we're powerless to do anything about it." Not true, babes! Let me teach you community care! Register: zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Writing is thinking. It's not some marginal boring task you can skip. It's the heart of it.

End of an era. I've enjoyed so many First Monday publications over the years. "First Monday is one of the first openly accessible peer review journals solely on the Internet, about the Internet. Indeed, First Monday was openly accessible well before formal definitions of open access appeared."

Librarians (etc.) routinely hear people say "everything's on the Internet now, isn't it." (We each have a little rebuttal spiel.) This mundane everyday ignorance is one of the things creating space for AI boosters, who capitalize on it.

The primary use case for this product is to erode consent.

If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare.

Please don't accuse people in knitted hats of only wearing their supposed politics if all you're doing is posting, which is basically just another way of wearing your politics. It's a silly thing to attack people over in any case. Using fashion to signal support for ongoing acts of rebellion is good

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

The deadline for submissions has been extended to February 7th.

I have this sort of crackpot theory that part of our problem is that popular imagination of robots continues to adhere to an expert systems model when in fact the paradigm shifted to ML some time ago. Think of Data from Star Trek. Data could reason beautifully but he struggled +

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Yes. "The things that make us happy make us wise," says John Crowley in support.

I'm so happy to share this paper. It's about the workings of trial and error in everyday food life. Examining trial and error as a generative practice helps us understand how people adapt and improvise over time, continually creating new information and knowledge. doi.org/10.1080/1446... (OA)

I opened this on a coffeebreak whim and it is such a FUN paper!!

I'm so happy to share this paper. It's about the workings of trial and error in everyday food life. Examining trial and error as a generative practice helps us understand how people adapt and improvise over time, continually creating new information and knowledge. doi.org/10.1080/1446... (OA)

Monetisation The advert said MONETISE YOUR FOLLOWERS so he thought he would respond by painting them in the changing light, like waterlilies in a pond.

New from me: More Than 100 Gazans Have Been Accepted to Canadian Universities. Canada Isn’t Letting Them In.

It's weird how after every good thing/gain (even if we don't call it a victory) people circle up to insist we shouldn't celebrate. Celebrating is not how people give up, in my experience; believing we can't win, never win, and have no power is (with a side of joylessness).

"France to ditch US platforms Microsoft Teams, Zoom for ‘sovereign platform’ amid security concerns" www.euronews.com/next/2026/01...

I hope all the AI boosters understand that they’re training their kids that only chumps do things the hard way—by working diligently and going through the discomfort and hassle of learning and acquiring skills. And also teaching them that a 30% error rate is good enough.

a book light, italy, 15th century

Every non-hype defense of LLMs starts with "you must already understand your work really well." Vibe coding isn't being done by those people. It's being done by execs who are making a prototype because it is now easy to do. This kills the systems of intention and maintenance necessary for good UX.

This thread gave me a boost of hope I really needed this week

I always feel roguish to make such a basic point, but bias is an intrinsic feature of _data_, and transitively of any system of analysis or decision-making based on data. The fact that this point has to keep being demonstrated over and over for more complex systems is crazy-making to me.

RIP the fantastic Rob Hirst of Midnight Oil. In addition to being their drummer, he was a tremendous songwriter, co-creating nearly all their hits and solo-writing many of my favorites, including "My Country," "Bedlam Bridge," and "Mountains of Burma." 🖤 www.theguardian.com/music/2026/j...

Love notes like this left in books by earlier librarians. This profession runs on the hope of ever having time to love things as they deserve, and our archives are full of the epitaphs of good intentions.

Gary Larson: In my cartoon I invented Cow Tools as a cautionary tale Cows: At long last, we have created the Cow Tools from classic newspaper comic Cow Tools

that tech bubble can’t burst soon enough

In case you missed it, here is a set of academic book proposals that I wrote and that succeeded. I do not claim them as exemplars of the genre, but offer them for any interested parties to see what form they took.

No new pictures. Where are you at mentally?

Saw a lot of headlines saying "wikipedia is embracing ai" being tossed around tabloids, and I'm pretty sure they were maliciously written to make you feel a certain way about Wikipedia. What's actually happening is that wikipedia is demanding payment for data scraping and the corpos don't like that.

Just had a paper accepted, hurrah -- including this "Generative AI Statement" that nobody actually asked me to include (I put it between the Disclosure and Funding statements). I'm curious now whether this will raise questions as the paper moves through production.

i need authors and agents to be much louder with their publishers how much they hate gen ai and make it embarrassing/financially harmful for publishers to be associated with it at every level (incl marketing, publicity, and sales)

Open to submissions throughout January 2026. Submission information: www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/submission-g... Submission form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Because we all need a little bit of joy today, I will never forget the little girl who peeked through our bookdrop and exclaimed loudly “mom, why are the librarians hiding back there? Are they NAKED???”

Call for papers: the 54th Canadian Association for Information Science conference, 22-26 June 2026, free online, hosted by UBC iSchool. Theme: "Information in Repair." Submissions due 31 January. cais2026.ca/call-for-pap... 📚📜

Interested in contributing a paper to Library Trends? We invite proposals for Library Trends 75 (4): Rethinking the Role of Libraries as Democracies Falter. Proposals are due by February 15. More information here ▶️ bit.ly/4ptBwy2

Read "Love Is a Lens: Locating Love in Library and Information Studies" by Mary Greenshields and Sarah Polkinghorne, from the Spring 2022 issue of Library Trends Find it at @projectmuse.bsky.social: muse.jhu.edu/article/879128

Yup. "Collections are for use, not reinforcing assumptions." -Scarlett Galvan, "More Than Things" www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/...

Yes. And generally IME, the pissiest people of all actually have the greatest love, combined with the least knowledge. 📚

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

slow day in the office so figured we'd start some beef with museums

A job ad worthy of the Vince McMahon meme. It's teacher-librarian role ...In Alberta? At Edmonton Public Library!? WHOSE JOB IS TO COORDINATE ***SUMMER CAMP!!!??*** edmonton.taleo.net/careersectio... 📚

This comes right as ACM has finished convincing all the research libraries (and academic departments, probably) to fund their flip to Open Access, too! Just feeding the machine.

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

we talk a lot about the weirdo techbro obsession with immortality these AI necromancy projects embody, but I'm arguably even MORE fascinated by the terror of allowing yourself to experience deep, complex emotions they so obviously reveal you cannot prevent yourself from feeling grief with an app??

“I am so bored by AI. One of the things I love about the theatre is AI can’t do it.” Ethan Hawke is a dude 👌🏻

I am in search of those who center delight as fundamental and instructional for living

For me, this (annual!) thread lives in the middle of the Venn diagram combining "hey, the kids are all right" and "ah, library school, good times." @julzbullard.bsky.social & students -- you're the best.

posting without comment bc no comment necessary