Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

Print dictionaries: the original large language models 11/18/25

The People Want to Read: on the massive budget cuts proposed for Chicago Public Library. What's at stake and what you can do, whether or not you live in Chicago. buttondown.com/wellsourced/...

Boolean thought of the day: Tuesday OR ("screaming into the void" N5 "library database*") Boolean answer: OMG yes, both Gemini: The specific proximity search you constructed is highly specialized and is unlikely to yield direct, factual results in a library database search.

An Amazon Web Services outage on Monday disrupted many online platforms, affecting banking services, chat apps, and more. What, if anything, can you do to prepare for disruptions? Here are a few tips.

Dive back into #theelflands this #spookyseason! @pennyvixen.bsky.social /Katherine Addison completed her CEMETERIES OF AMALO trilogy following Thara Celehar earlier this year with THE TOMB OF DRAGONS. Now is the perfect time to return to this well loved universe and meet friends old and new!

Save the date for the EBSCOhost Idea Exchange, an open forum for questions, solutions, and all things new-UI-related on Nov. 19, 12-1:30pm Central! Invite is making the rounds on the usual channels, so keep an eye out (or DM for an ics). Sponsored by the MLA UX Caucus but all are welcome! #medlibs

This is a fantastic list of non-HP recommendations for young (and also not young!) readers who love magic and despise hate. I see a lot of my personal favorites on it: open.substack.com/pub/twobossy...

Hot girl summer is out, Edgar Allan Poe summer is in (asking a friend to wall me up in a quiet corner of their basement with a bottle of wine)

Why, yes, I did buy Legos today so I could get the special Jane Austen gift with purchase set. Why do you ask? (How I anticipate loving it: ardently.)

Why, it contains no king.

Web of Science has confirmed for me that the SAME proximity operator functions only within the Address (AD) field, "where it ensures that the specified terms appear within the same sentence." (Otherwise it just works like an AND, so there's no reason to use it.) #medlibs

I can't explain it, but I feel an unreasonable level of irritation when LibGuides WYSIWYG interface inserts   instead of an ordinary space when I copy and paste. No one asked for this, LibGuides. No one.

Waking up every morning with a sense of relief that I deleted Facebook and Instagram. I missed them the first week. Now I feel like my quality of life has improved dramatically.

This essay is so disturbing, as is the whole thread. People pushing AI as some magical solution to everything and an easy replacement for, even improvement over, actual human thinking processes are liars, fools, or both.

So far I've spent about 6 hours disassembling a giant Lego kit. It originally took me approximately one LOTR extended edition Thanksgiving rewatch to build. Now I have no fingernails, but I can look forward a future LOTR Lego event this holiday season.

Hello! The ACLU fundraiser featuring story collections from @genevavand.bsky.social, @klnoone.bsky.social, and me is officially open until late tomorrow night or until we sell out. Whichever comes first! First come, first serve! All proceeds go to the ACLU! app.galabid.com/doingsomegoo...

I have a send-no-substantive-emails-after-noon policy on Fridays, so I'm frantically typing on my keyboard like Kermit The Frog to get a bunch out before the 12pm buzzer.

Thank you for your email! I will get back to you as soon as the mandatory five day “if the world actually ends I’d never forgive myself for wasting time on this email” waiting period has elapsed. Best.

In a truly remarkable confluence of errors, a vendor WHOSE NAME IS ALSO HILLARY [sic] sent me an unsolicited email that didn't simply misspell my name but instead called me LORI. Mind-boggling. 0/10

Is this good (no citation rewards for retracted papers) or bad (journals will be even less motivated to retract a paper if it affects their impact factor)?

What’s up with PubMed’s indexing algorithm? Between 1st March and today, the number of results associated with the MeSH term “Ethnic and Racial minorities” has gone down by 40 (1251 to 1211). [1/6] #pubmed #medlibs

Is it an album cover, or just two turkeys side-eyeing me as I run by on the bike trail?

Authors are free to choose the point of view and tense that works best for them and their books, but it’s still a relief and a pleasure to not be reading something written in present tense for a change.

Incredible review, 11/10.

Tip #58: Exporting a Random Set of Citations from Ovid Databases to Avoid Bias #MLAUXCaucus #medlibs #ExpertSearching #SystematicReviews "Bite-size tips for expert searchers." uxcaucustips.blogspot.com/2025/04/tip-...

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” - A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

The word 'clue' was originally a variant spelling of 'clew,' meaning “ball of thread or yarn.” Our modern sense of clue, “guide to the solution of a mystery,” grows out of a motif in myth and folklore, the ball of thread that helps in finding one’s way out of a maze.

Another tiny, obscure corner of the Education Department is scheduled to lose funding this week. hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

Our campus is experiencing a "Widespread Zoom Problem," which sounds less like a tech issue and more like all of us are just really struggling to keep moving at a brisk pace at the moment. Which, accurate.

FYI www.cambridge.org/core/journal.... #medlibs #evidencesynthesis

Get me to God's country

Zoom captions are ... not great. Currently editing a 1 hour+ video and I am kind of appalled. I'm also learning a lot for my own future presentations: speak clearly, not too fast, and take breath breaks between clauses. It seems to make a big difference in automated CC accuracy.

Once again I have made a Terrible Decision and looked at the news before starting my day.

Has anyone found a feed that contains all the important holidays and observances Google eliminated from the default Holidays calendar?

Against the backdrop of :waves hands wildly: this is a very tiny thing, but I miss having access to SPORTDiscus.

I'm a long-time member of Forward Libraries' League of Awesome Librarians. Forward Libraries' Spring Forward 2025 virtual conference, "Launching Libraries Into New Frontiers," is coming up next month! Register and see the the program info here: www.forwardlibraries.org/initiatives/...

FANTASTIC ICPSR at U Mich is coordinating the archiving of at-risk federal data (all of it?) You can upload data you have & search for data you don’t have www.datalumos.org/datalumos/

#Medlibs www.instagram.com/busph/reel/D...

#medlibs we added a paper (Hanneke et al, 2024) which reports on the #search terms used in 64 evidence syntheses of #social determinants of #health sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk...

Fridays mean nothing anymore all days are equally tiresome now

A watched Ovid search never loads. #medlibs

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single icebox in possession of some plums must be in want of a thief

TIL that the Ovid MEDLINE/Embase "all fields" search code is "af". Which is, objectively, "hilarious.af." Well-played, Ovid, well-played. #medlibs (Please don't @ me about how I don't need quotes there, I had to add them to prevent Bluesky making it a weird link.)

I just had the most amazing interaction with my cell company's customer service. I know about the rep's 11 month old daughter who is learning to walk, that she celebrated her 3rd anniversary with her husband, and that she is having a tough day. Plus she lowered my bill. Much better than AI, 10/10.

Join the MLA's UX Caucus for Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: A (Second) Database Tips Lightning Round on February 19 from 2-3:30pm EST. All are welcome; see link below for details & Zoom link. Over 200 people attended round 1, don't miss round 2! go.brown.edu/ux_lightning

"Complete search strategies are available upon request." Can we not? #medlibs

Is anyone getting any sleep anymore?

I have shared 3 memes in the work group chat today. This may actually get me through the day.