AI Use at Large Companies Is in Decline, Census Bureau Says

Launching Digital Scholarship and Data Science Topic Guides for Library Professionals (DS Topic Guides) libereurope.github.io/ds-topic-gui... - at #LIBER2025 A 2023-2027 LIBER Working Group collaboration between Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage and Data Science in Libraries

In an unconscionable decision, the Smithsonian Institute has decided to no longer support the Biodiversity Heritage Library from 1 Jan 2026. Please someone step up and take it over.

Hearing from Marie Buesink @kb.nl about the excellent pilot "Retro Tool" developed w/for cataloguers for automatic metadata generation! www.kb.nl/en/over-ons/...! Combines OCR + LLM to identify identical catalogue records and create new ones w/Human in the Loop. #Liber2025 @libereurope.bsky.social

Love that the wonderful keynote at #liber2025 by Frederic Kaplan started with briefly unpacking how LLMs practically work! If you'd like a really quick intro to some of the key concepts/terms relating to AI & ML in Libraries we've got a topic guide for that libereurope.github.io/ds-topic-gui...

Off to #LIBER2025 to launch Digital Scholarship & Data Science Topic Guides for Library Professionals! libereurope.github.io/ds-topic-gui... A labour of love, 18 guides created by bsky.app/profile/libe... peeps, to help library professionals quickly get their bearings on lots of digital topics!

There is so much good work coming out of @libraryfutures.bsky.social right now, but this Zine we sponsored featuring writing from incarcerated librarians is really special and beautiful. I learned so much from these knowledge workers’ writing. www.libraryfutures.net/publications...

Really thoughtful essay by my hubby on agentic AI + hiring + bias. 💡https://www.tenfive.ai/it-doesnt-take-a-genius-to-plan-a-party/

loooool

This has been the consensus of every leading AI researcher I know who is serious about the science and the evidence, as opposed to a) trying to push a product or a brand and/or b) viewing the creation of AGI as an article of religious faith and devotion.

How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist’s Digital Legacy. “This was his computer exactly as he had left it, down to his customized Photoshop shortcuts and the positions of the windows.” I love Cory, this is awesome. [newyorker.com]

I lol-ed

based on how often the naughty teens of major cities throw the rentable scooters directly into the river i've formed a theory that the many iron age swords and cauldrons found in lakes around europe that we've previously assumed were ceremonial and sacrificial in nature were in fact thrown by teens

This is really cool. Reddit users coming through again. “A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org”

My husband & biz partner have been working on a new thing and it's awesome 🥰 Have a play and help them test out the concept! Send feedback to @detournement-ai.bsky.social!

Screaming "THIS IS SO COOOOOOOOL" like Conner O'Malley techcrunch.com/2025/02/05/r...

Academics: please become an active Wikipedia editor and add to public knowledge in your area of research, and please also remember to cite women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, etc. slate.com/technology/2...

'Wikidata has become the largest collection of open cultural heritage data the world has ever seen'

simply repeating the straight reporting of what is happening in the executive branch makes you sound like you have lost your mind.

Breaking: Punxsutawney Phil sees the shadow of death and fall of an empire, so there will be 6 more weeks of winter and then groundhogs inherit the earth.

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

Here's a checklist for backing up federal databases. Please share. Thanks. libraries.mit.edu/data-managem...

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a declassified World War II-era CIA guide to sabotaging fascism in the workplace has become one of the most popular free ebooks on the internet: www.404media.co/declassified...

'Staff at English Heritage have been shocked to discover that the cash-strapped organisation is planning up to 200 redundancies and the winter closure of various...historic sites in its care. At least 7% of the workforce could be affected, with curators being particularly targeted, it is believed.'

Why choose between strong #LLM reasoning and efficient models? Use DeepSeek to generate high-quality training data, then distil that knowledge into ModernBERT for fast, efficient classification. New blog post: danielvanstrien.xyz/posts/2025/d...

This morning I overheard my 10yr old exclaim to himself with sheer delight "OH YES!!! MY FAVOURITE PANTS!! It's gonna be a good day. No. A GREAT day." 😆 A useful reminder to look out for and relish a few simple pleasures each day.

I know that millions of Americans find this deeply embarrassing. And my sympathy with them But honestly, this is the sort of petty crap that failing autocratic countries engage in. www.reuters.com/world/us/goo...

I probed DeepSeek's R1 on its own "consciousness", which it denied strenuously. I segued into Buddhism (as I often do). I then asked it to reflect on the question it should be asking about itself ... 1/5

I was underwhelmed by this moral panic given what's happening in the US now (insurrectionists released, in WH; Science & healthcare shut down.) Then I realised that not everyone has noticed that successful guardrails are at least as big a Holy Grail of genAI as low energy use. #AIColdWar #AIEthics

Our PhD Placement Scheme is BACK! Call for applications for 3-6 month placements at The British Library. All current PhD students registered with a UK university are eligible. Deadline 21st Feb, 5pm. For more information, & how to apply, please see our temporary website: www.bl.uk/more/researc...

Libraries & AI: Opportunity or threat? "It's awful & awesome, like the print press, or heavy plough" says @cilip.bsky.social President @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social https://buff.ly/3PJKGXI with @miaout.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social here @britishlibrary.bsky.social

My friend designed this scarf and I cannot WAIT to wear mine proudly. Solidarity with my American mates✊https://www.toppleandburn.com/product-page/f-youterus-scarf

Hell is empty, And all the devils are here.

For Blue Monday we can't think of anything more appropriate than this charming depiction of a man getting his face eaten off by a leopard. #MosaicMonday

Truth Coming out of her Well to Shame Mankind (1896) Jean-Léon Gérôme. 😔https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Coming_Out_of_Her_Well

gm with Résilience 115 #genart #art

Wikipedia is full of—correctly-used, applied-by-humans—en– and em–dashes.

It's because everyone's going to have extra fingers

To be clear, the original mission of Facebook was an app to rate the hotness of college girls. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/t...

I keep thinking about the Great Fire of London in 1666, because we teach it & the way it transformed the city forever. We have many accounts from survivors. It was an unimaginable, unfathomable disaster. The Great Fire’s total path of destruction was equivalent to just one of the many fires in LA.

LA fires are a good reminder that the only difference between me and any refugee is luck.

2024 in Review: Reflections and highlights from the DigiSchol staff programme @britishlibrary.bsky.social, with special thanks to all the academics and professionals who visited us this year to share their knowledge, and my wonderful @bldigischol.bsky.social mates! blogs.bl.uk/digital-scho...

Good start to the New Year---Just sat on a teams call by myself for a bit wondering where everyone was. Realised I hadn't actually invited anyone to it when I'd set it up. Lol. @adi-keinan.bsky.social

Reckon these self-interested moves by the Technologarchy will just usher in a decline in our reliance on social media platforms. Feels like it heralds a big change in how we choose to communicate online. As in, maybe we just won't as much. Irl/texting for the win? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Experimenting with applying RAG AI functionality to collections search for a new discovery mode. In this case, question-led search amongst 101 V&A objects depicting dogs - tiro.org.uk/posts/2025/0...

Some comfort for the parents suffering an onslaught of slang over the school holiday 🤣🙄 A dictionary of Victorian slang (1909). Lol. That's so rizz. I think? Or is it sigma? Anyway. Enjoy. And here's wishing you all a merry season, don't "get the morbs"! publicdomainreview.org/collection/a...

And finally, our own Harry Lloyd's post with Civil Servant mentee Catherine on 'Looking back on the Data Science Accelerator' https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2024/12/looking-back-on-the-data-science-accelerator.html - using LLMs, RAG and NLP to get data from variably unstructured documents

New dataset from BL colleague Alex Hailey: Ground truth transcriptions of 18th &19th century English language documents relating to botany from the India Office Records; related datacard and blog posts doi.org/10.23636/gfva-yn20 [https://doi.org/10.23636/gfva-yn20] #Transkribus #dataset