Sometimes I think that the true neoliberal solution is just to have insurance companies accurately price in the costs of hurricanes, forest fires, underpaid labor, and social unrest.

big day today, the Baltimore Seed Commons project I am part of has officially opened Baltimore's first seed bank providing free seeds to any and all! Find the stocked seed cabinet inside St Luke's Church in Hampden whenever they are open and take what you'll use 💚 seed donations welcome too xoxox

Appropriate since snakes do not have arms.

This is always the argument against "either a paywall or it remains inaccessible"

Couldn’t have said it better.

Never closes for Hurricanes.

A really good thing. At the US National Archives, the (signed, parchment copy of the) Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights now joined in the permanent exhibit in the main rotunda by the Emancipation Proclamation and the 19th amendment. 🎁 www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/a...

♫ psycho killer, cat cassette ♫

📣 New historical data visualization! "How Fast Was the Mail?" is an interactive map showing how long information took to travel across the US between 1882-1908: cblevins.github.io/mail-time/ +

On the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, John Sloan's searing March 1911 illustration for the New York Call, a Socialist newspaper, responding to the tragic event

Education happens everywhere.

Pop Leo asked if he should put on gloves to turn pages in the gorgeous Renaissance Bible and the librarian explained why it’s better to do so with bare hands. Glorious reaction. Every rare books librarian & archivist feeling very seen, I gather. www.instagram.com/reel/DUcpEBY... #BookHistory

To watch the full video of the professional examination, the initial prep, cleaning and digital scanning of the 16mm films by the specialists at R3Store Studios, visit: filmisfabulous.org.uk/preserving-d...

For all of the professional theory and practice of preserving archives, from environmental set points to housing standards to disaster plans, the biggest risk of loss comes from institutional decision-making.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, when Larry Tisch owned CBS, he ordered a New Jersey warehouse holding the CBS corporate archives to be cleaned out to save money. Those files were largely destroyed. They likely could've resolved several mysteries in U.S. media history. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

I worked on this on the Library of Congress project for about five years, and CBS was not interested in preserving their history!

Libraries, archives, and museums could be impacted by increased prices or limited supply of key preservation supplies, including Tyvek, Marvel Seal, Volara, Ethafoam, Colibri book covers, poly strapping, Coroplast, and ziploc bags.

Oscars looks 🤝 medieval manuscripts Some of these outfits felt suspiciously familiar, so we went digging in the collections… #MedievalMonday Shelfmarks: MS. Bodl. 265 fols. 58r, 60r; MS. Douce 364, fol. 61v; MS. Douce 195, fol. 003r

In 1818, John Williams was prosecuted for stealing 50lbs of rags “for the manufacturing of paper” from a Boston stationary firm. He probably planned on selling them to a different paper maker. Here’s a close up of the watermarks and chain lines on the rag paper used for his indictment documents 🗃️

Scenes and samples from today’s paper making and marbling workshop at Penn State’s wonderful Conservation Centre, led by senior conservator Bill Minter, for my graduate seminar on the materiality of 18th-century life writing. Today’s assigned texts: Adventures of a Quire of Paper &Tristram Shandy

Please come and use our very cool collections for your very cool projects. It is literally what makes any of this worthwhile!!! Also, "Quaker history" and "Peace history" cover a TON of stuff. If you're interested in it, the Quakers have probably been interested in it at some point too 🥸

A fun fact about tornadoes is they're shifting outside of historical tornado alley and moving eastward into more populated areas. This is not me saying they're going to be more normal in DC

🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran... #BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪

NYT: Paula Doress-Worters, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies at 87 By Penelope Green She wrote about postpartum depression when it was an unmentionable like abortion or birth control, and her research on her own suffering helped countless women. Gift link!

A generous €7m gift from The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation, to support conservation and restoration of cultural treasures at Trinity, was announced last night. Read more: www.tcd.ie/news_events/...

It’s the result of massive bot activity, downloading data at a scale which our infrastructure has found challenging. We have been finding this across all our metadata resources in recent months.

The Diocese of Oxford has warned against a social media trend in which well-meaning people clean gravestones in churchyards. They say “Many churchyard monuments & gravestones are made from soft stone such as Portland limestone or Bath stone, which can be easily harmed by harsh cleaning techniques.”

A William Morris vending machine Some things are nice 💙

Lost no more! A private individual recently contacted Museum Plantin‑Moretus after spotting our historical library stamp in a book bought at a flea market. Photos showed two clear impressions of our round stamp on the title page. #bookhistory #rarebooks #earlymodern 📚💙📜 /1

It's time to bind the St. John's Bible: The team originally "planned to secure the father of modern conservation binding, Christopher Clarkson, to bind the seven volumes of the Bible...His passing and [that] of Fr. Michael Patella...served as a wake-up call." saintjohnsbible.org/posts/2026/0...

For International Woman’s Day, a thread.

Memory lane stop 2: H.E.B. This is the grocery store that Floridians and Georgians imagine they have in Publix.

Also worth noting for the ‘everything is online’ crowd that the numbers of archives being destroyed means that an increasing proportion cannot ever be online.

Wake up, babe: New Waffle House Index just dropped.

Did you know books have been bound in leather not just from cows, but from reindeer, seal, and even shark?🦈 Learn more about historic bookbindings in my new episode of Bite Sized Book History! youtu.be/3aUdEy0Edf4?...

Hark, a return to the South (an airport), where I may engage in traditional foodways (a Bojangles biscuit sandwich and Bo-rounds).

I get asked a lot about how you become a game preservationist. Almost none of us set out to do that! I hope stories like Flori's show all the interesting and unusual ways you can end up working with games in cultural heritage

Who called it the French museum director resigning instead of 50 ways to leave your Louvre?

For the "everything is online" crowd in the back: Important to consider that "everything" cultural heritage related that is accessible online represents only 1% (one percent) of archives, libraries, and museum collections worldwide.

please don’t lick the archives

With the expanding campaign in the Middle East, I'm thinking once again of the importance of programs like @scholarsatrisk.bsky.social and our own At-Risk and Displaced Academics and Artists program with the Royal Society of Canada. rsc-src.ca/en/programme...

We are training undergrads (18-22) to digitize vcr tapes, cassettes, and vinyl. We introduce phrases like "rewind" into their vocab and made diagrams of what a tape looks like from 6 angles. And we get questions like "how do I rewind a record" which is understandable but turns my bones to dust.

A good introduction to how conservation work on a complex item is considered. open.substack.com/pub/anthonya...

"When a 65-year-old tree in Parker’s front yard died of oak wilt, he cut the trunk into “wood cookies” + transformed them into playable records, each encoded with migratory birdsong... The project emerged from Parker’s recognition that his grief for the tree echoed the loss of his father to cancer"

JOB ALERT! 📜📚 Who wants to be director & curator of special collections & archives at Middlebury College (Vermont!) — & work for a wonderful boss (& one of my favorite people), Rebekah Irwin? apply.workable.com/middleburyco...

Great to see a conservator like Todd involved in this story. www.wcvb.com/article/bost...

Tremendous heat in South Texas today! 104° F - in February - makes this the Hottest temperature ever recorded in winter in the US!