ABCDEF... Goose! Newly conserved French popup book thanks to Gillian Marcus @newberrylibrary.bsky.social! #SillyGoose! (Wing ZP 939 .Z24)

"please don't lick the poisonous books"

I often think of how more people are employed by art museums than by coal mines now.

Job: The Huntington Library is hiring a curator of early printed books huntingtonlibrary.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Huntin...

Missing: "a sculpture from Ghana that represented the collective Africans' grief at the assassination of President Kennedy. And there were ornate hand-carved wooden doors carved from 700-year-old wood that contained scenes of Yoruban village life. That room is now completely gutted and emptied."

This was a great listen that really covered both the basics and some of the ethical challenges.

Oh wow. Greggs has made an 8-metre Bayeux Ta-pastry, on display this weekend 🤯 www.greggs.com/news/unveili...

There aren't a lot of West African manuscripts older than 400 years because they quickly disintegrate once they're taken out of storage This 350-year-old manuscript was nearly intact when it was collected in the 1960s, but only fragments of it remain today

People have been asking, so I will once again share my Free Stuff Thread. Thousands of silent movies to stream for free thanks to archives, national libraries and nonprofits. Sweet deal!

“‘Myrtle gives ink a green tint’ – not on this planet it doesn’t. ‘Sugar adds gloss’ – like hell it does, that’s the job of gum arabic. Sugar just stops it cracking. ‘The addition of tannin deters mould’ – does it really?!” This is so good. 🖼️ 📚 🎨

Serendipitous discoveries in the archives and stacks aren’t possible if you shut them down “The document – a scrap of parchment inserted into an account of the Ramsey Abbey manor of Warboys in Huntingdonshire…”

SCOOP: The Trump administration is paying millions to quickly cover four enormous bronze horses with extra-thick 23.75 karat gold leaf. The money for the rush job is coming from National Park Service funds. In total, I found ~$100 mil spent on new DC beautification projects.

Anatomy of frog from ‘L’ecrevisse (anatomie et dissection): planches coloriées à feuillets découpés et superposés’ by Jules Philippe Louis Anglas, 1916. UW-Madison’s Special Collections. #foldoutanatomy #animalanatomy #naturalhistory #scientificart #sciart #rarebooks

Also MIT: We’re closing down the libraries and firing the librarians!

I am trying and failing to think of the last research library conservation lab that closed. By every measure, as research libraries move toward greater digital access, preserving special/distinctive collections has become more valuable: for digitization; for exhibition; for teaching; for research.

Personally, the closure of MIT’s Wunsch conservation lab hits hardest. It’s tragic to lose these highly-specialized skills in an established lab where experts have both stable employment and relationships with the collections/community. Conservation work *is* design and technology!

When UBC took floors from the library to host senior administration we were told all the removed books would be easily and quickly available from storage. Then the robot arm that was supposed to pick them broke down and a replacement part could not be found for years.

We should be clear that the MIT library closings were announced in December. A mournful faculty letter six months later does feel about right though. thetech.com/2025/12/04/m...

Applications are open for our Resilience Grants funding programme! Resilience Grants, worth up to £20,000, support archives to respond to change and develop sustainable solutions to any challenges they face. Apply by Monday 6 July 2026: nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sec...

Sweltering in the UK heatwave?? Why not visit your Local Archival Repository! Low temperatures and humidity GUARANTEED* And we throw in the history for free😍 *by regulatory standard BS4971:2017 Archives - Where the records are cool and so are you.

timeline cleanser check out this mini Quran I saw yesterday

Twas ever this: "They had to ask questions, possibly intrusive ones ... They listed illegal businesses (when they could find them) next to legal ones. Making a good map must have required some combination of nosiness, charm, officiousness, tact, and pushiness, depending on the situation."

The books had to be light and small enough to fit in servicemen's pockets. The motto of the Council on Books in Wartime was: "Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas." n.pr/4uO1S1f

A San Antonio library created a “Read Like Wemby” campaign to highlight the NBA star’s love for reading. The goal is to inspire people of all ages, especially children, to read more. More from @mirinfader.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/athletic/730...

All the Marble: On this day in history, 115 years ago, May 23, 1911, President William Howard Taft presided over the opening ceremony for the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. (1/5)

My fancy dog has discovered mulberries. Now every walk includes a few minute below the mulberry tree to sample the ever ripening fruits that the foxes have left behind.

This is a UK study, but from everything I've heard, this rings true in the U.S. as well. Woman up, Book Bros.

Choose your fighter, celluloid style 🥊 Lubitsch's DESIGN FOR LIVING on 6/1 & 6/2 📨 Richard Fleischer's DESIGN FOR DEATH 📤

remember when Google offered unlimited digital storage to colleges and universities and then when adoption reached the right levels rescinded that promise, capped everything, and started pricing those services without the subsidies? idk man just something I think about a lot

"Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to." open access link: archive.ph/qt59c 2/🧵

This is the document that started a revolution. The original Stamp Act — held in the UK's National Archives — is extraordinary to see in the flesh. Lucy Worsley Investigates the American Revolution — Monday 9pm, BBC Two Link to watch 😃 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Humanities and social science profs are finding out how natural scientists treat authorship and we are losing our damn minds.

This is some next level evil. As always, Florida is something else when it comes to unexamined white supremacy. www.detroitnews.com/picture-gall...

Interesting to see differences between this Guardian list of 2026 from the Modern Library list of best novels of the 20th century from 1999. Someone else will do the analysis, but there is a very apparent difference in the genders of the authors in the top 10. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

The Dark Ages (1997-2481)

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

a note for all the people who told me that AI would be the perfect tool for transcribing handwritten historical records into searchable text :

📜 a thread on what AI in archives may look like.

We've all wanted to throw our writing in the toilet—& might preserve it for posterity. In Germany, a "well-preserved notebook from the 13th to 14th centuries" was found within a medieval latrine. 🚽 It is a Latin text in/on a mixture of a leather, wood, and wax. www.lwl.org/pressemittei...

The Japanese weaving technique 'tsumekaki hon tsuzure ori' requires fingernails to be marked with notches, in order to stack the fine thread. soranews24.com/2020/08/20/t...

US wildfires have *doubled* the previous record for this time of year. We've already burned more land than in many full years this century

So, my colleague, @katielcoldiron.bsky.social, and I co-authored a handbook with simple, common sense tips for identifying and writing a grant. #6 in the @dlocaribbean.bsky.social Handbook series. See the book here: dloc.com/AA00115422/0....

Today I learned that demosioi, the public slaves of Athens, were the archivists (and clerks, book-keepers, writing-checkers)

Readers, please don't do this to library books! Removing sticky notes can tear pages and/or make them stick together, and it's just as bad long term as writing inside them 😱😭 Conservation team to the rescue...

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

Zero security incidents reported in classes that drive innovation by means of paper book platforms. www.umass.edu/it/news/moni...

Fish leather has been having its day in bookbinding circles, but how about egg leather? youtu.be/o7vcbvY1o9k

A big thank you to @brittashoot.com for this lovely story about the small team of volunteers working to rephotograph all 500,000 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Pro tip: have tissues handy. www.kqed.org/arts/1398904...

Yep. When you digitize old stuff, you now have to look after the original artifact *and* it's digital surrogate. "Just put everything online" is not the labor-saving flex laypeople think it is.