#medlibs Show off your database wisdom at the MLA UX and SR Caucus's 2026 Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: Database Tips Lightning Round! MLA membership required to present, but all are welcome to attend or watch the recording. Learn more at go.brown.edu/database_tip...

#SystematicReview #EvidenceSynthesis

#medlibs Show off your database wisdom at the MLA UX and SR Caucus's 2026 Favorite Features & Sneaky Solutions: Database Tips Lightning Round! MLA membership required to present, but all are welcome to attend or watch the recording. Learn more at go.brown.edu/database_tip...

My old pal @eniiler.bsky.social with a killer story. What we save defines us as a culture—the archive is our memory and our future. And we’re throwing it away? Madness. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/c...

You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.

This is just a note to say that I have eaten the falcon in a widening gyre and that you were probably saving for anarchy Forgive me it was delicious so rough and full of passionate intensity

You knowe the useful thinge about LLMs? Aye, me neither.

Truly touched by the number of people who've checked in to offer support at a terrible and scary time. Feeling very lucky in my friends, family, and colleagues.

This is college in the United States. Video from inside a Brown University building shows the moment that police found a group of students who were sheltering after the shooting on campus. This isn't freedom.

Factory resetting my Kobo because it's been freezing a lot and I can feel my soul leaving my body.

Oh, and it's free today. KOBO www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/... B&N www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-magpie... APPLE books.apple.com/us/book/the-... AMAZON amzn.to/48HyBv1

Mr. Collins in Love by @leewelchwriter.bsky.social. Truly a “hold my beer” romance premise — what if one of the most annoying characters in literature was the hero and he’s still Mr. Collins but now you loved him and wanted him to get the queer HEA he deserves? Landscapes Tolkien would die for.

Top romance of the year, possibly of the decade: After Hours at Dooryard Books by @catswrites.bsky.social. Listen, you need this one. This is what historical romance is fucking for: to look back into times that are like and unlike our own, and find clarity and courage. You’ll cry and thank me.

I could not agree more with her recs for After Hours at Dooryard Books and Mr Collins in Love. ❤️🥰❤️

“Have Yourself A Merriam Little Christmas” Merriam, a career-oriented lexicographer from the city, returns to her small town for the holidays and meets Webster, a ruggedly handsome librarian, who shows her the true DEFINITION of Christmas.

So I was invited to accept an award for "imagination in service to society." This forced me to think a bit about what "imagination," "service" and "society" mean to me. Here's the speech I delivered last night: buttondown.com/charliejane/...

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.