hey maybe abolish ed tech & bring back the books

Are we doing "The ACA Sucks" Discourse again? I'm going to guess most people hating on it from the left have never received a hospital bill the size of book; I put the apple there for scale. That's the $1.3 million bill my kid incurred in his first ~94 days. Why does that make me respect the ACA?

I haven’t been able yet to write about the responses to the mental health in library work survey I did but the top concern folks have is job reduction and elimination when libraries are already operating with shoestring staff.

I only recently discovered the site Acclaimed Music and its list of the 3000 greatest albums of all time. Part of me wants to try to listen to all of them.

Anytime you see someone say something like (paraphrased only slightly) “we’re making progress finding a middle road on the transgender question” it’s just such an instant disqualifier. I know everything I need to know now. I know you would’ve talked about the Jewish question too

Crowd size at the ICE facility in S. Portland is growing. Many people came here from today's No Kings March. About 12-20 federal officers are planted on the roof, surveiling the scene. DHS agents fired off teargas at least twice this afternoon/evening. Things just feel like a chaotic parade now.

No Kings—but plenty of chickens, chipmunks, frogs and hippos in Portland this afternoon.

Turnout in Salem, OR seems much larger than the last No Kings protest.

Quetzals and macaws are OK, I guess, but the best bird in #CostaRica is the Northern Bentbill. At @tapirvalley.bsky.social this morning #birds #nature

I’m not conflicted in the least about my desire to maintain some critical services (thinking, resource sharing in this case) via a small company (even though the license is held by a much larger company). I’ve worked in academic libraries for 26 years and I’ve watched 2-3 companies evolve and buy,

The workplace despair induced by a Zebra label printer that will not be appeased, no matter how many different ways I try to install it on the mandatory-upgrade Win11 machine.

This fall, I have been to three public lectures, on three very different topics. All excellent, serious, and challenging. Highly recommend.

The first school to volunteer for this will be making an unambiguous statement: we would be the first to resegregate our university if we could. Sure would hate to see any school I’ve been affiliated with go down in history as that kind of scum

🚨ACTION ALERT: Librarians, staff, and student employees who perform duties across essential UO Libraries service areas have been cut in response to a "projected" deficit! ✍️Sign the petition to Protect Library Employees and Services at tinyurl.com/ProtectUOLibrary

Awesome. Also, it seems to be an old-school boundwith, another minor terror.

important caveat:

This. 👇 In my long by now career as a #librarian I've often had to put up with that condescending, silently disrespectful view as lesser from faculty in #academia and #HigherEd. (You can also throw in some #racism as I am Latino, but that is another story.)

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

Lately I've been thinking of this as "platform logic" bc it's pretty much always got a platform You aren't connected to a person or people. You're connected to the platform, which can facilitate specific types of interactions with people. You don't have a dr, you have a care platform

Windows 98 Plus! - Underwater

Using Choice for collection development and reading a lot of reviews — I appreciate the wry humor and sparks of personality that occasionally appear. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that reviewers *really* want illustrations/maps, when visual arts or geography are in the picture. I agree!

Who says science isn’t whimsical? 😁 www.cell.com/action/showP...

On this day where librarians consider the closing of Baker & Taylor, I would like to remind you that Sandy Berman still walks this earth and today is his birthday. www.sanfordberman.org

Members of the California National Guard touched down in Portland this morning at the direction of the Trump administration, Gov. Tina Kotek confirmed today.

Oregon leaders say California National Guard members were flown into Oregon last night in an effort to circumvent a federal court ruling.

(As you might imagine, I've never much liked that old quote. Why requires more time than I'm willing to dedicate to a BSky thread rn)

Old quote: "Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities" Same person now: "The library community must shape AI toward ethical use and as a means of greater inclusion of authentic voice into the global conversation" Reality of AI and community:

I think we’re really going to have to do a lot more of this. A massive deprogramming so that people can read more than ten words at a time without anxiety. www.thetimes.com/uk/education...?

every time one of those "look how evil ages you" posts goes viral you get a reminder that much of us have heuristics for navigating the world that aren't much different from that of a middle ages peasant

this is, predictably, some wild reading

Librarians of Bluesky, may I request your help please? In middle school (2006-09), I read a book about a teenager contemplating their sexuality, I think there's a football player who is the bully but also comes out by the end, and there's a support group iirc. The cover is colorful and striped(?)

Saw someone say, “Stop hoarding books, we don’t need paper books anyway” and I can’t express how misguided this is. Online libraries disappear, digital books can be altered, and with Big Tech seeking to destroy history and literacy, print media has never been more essential.

This. Absolutely this. "While much has been written about the vulnerabilities of contingent faculty, there has been almost no discussion of the academic freedom needs of one of higher education’s most rapidly growing workforces: third-space professionals." #HigherEd #Staff #AcademicLibraries

This would be why I am such a strident critic of digitization as a substitute for actual archival preservation. My sixteenth century documents are far sturdier and likely to survive another 500 years than the detritus on the internet. And digitization is not democratization.

One year there was an issue with the Chromebook licenses at our kid’s school, so the teachers had to start the school year NOT having the kids work on laptops, and—shocking, I know—the students learned a ton, said they preferred “hands on”/analog teaching, and asked for more laptop-free lessons.

If you need another reason to oppose corporate academic publishing, AI slop cover art might be one. Wonder what Marx would have said (or Hegel, for that matter) …

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

“Lyingly” is a good adverb. Broadly applicable, too.

I encourage all the media outlets who are about to send people to ”war ravaged” Portland to think twice. Some of the strongest extremism reporters in the country live in this region; journalists who understand the culture of the Northwest and the history of activism here. Do it right this time okay?

Troops. In an American city. Using full force. Your now-regular reminder that Republican members of Congress are letting this happen.

Ok, Aeneid discourse time because the statement below is correct, but also, I think, significantly incomplete in ways that understate how good Vergil is as an author (he is very good). Aeneas is supposed to be a self-righteous prig because Vergil is deeply ambivalent about the Augustan project.

President Donald Trump has dispatched federal agents to Portland, local elected officials said in a hastily scheduled press conference on Friday night

streaming platforms have robbed us of the randomness that used to be both an essential property of tv watching and a quality that mitigated its addictiveness somewhat. we were wholly beholden to whatever happened to be on! if we didn’t like any of it we were obligated to go do something else!

my daughter really captured my essence in this portrait of me “at work”

As the folks might say, there is an awful lot of Fall in this picture. #SquirrelHaiku Fox Squirrels in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan on September 25th, 2025 #flickr #Squirrels #SquirrelOfTheDay #SquirrelWisdom #Michigan #SquirrelDude #sqrlpix #squirrelsofbluesky flic.kr/p/2rvzTeP

Public library, 1988 picture dictionary style.

Public library, 1988 picture dictionary style.

I try not to do this in a knee-jerk way, but: I'm a sustaining member of multiple @npr.org affiliates precisely to support news that ... isn't this. The science is extremely clear on the medical value of Tylenol, and the lack of any credible link to autism, and it's not hard to say that

#BushtitoftheDay A fierce female Bushtit visited me today. #birds #nature