Loving the new flyer for next year's (50th anniversary) Magic Lantern Society convention

In Europe less than 5% of collections have been digitised. There are millions and millions of pages to identify before you even consider the prohibitive costs and pre-digitisation conservation work

New article out by me and @ashleyblewer.com titled “Each character you create requires a full 15 blocks!” Preserving Video Game Memory Cards in the Age of Cloud Storage." In it, we examine the sociotechnical challenges of preserving video game memory cards. Read it here: tinyurl.com/53pnv64b

Books are low-key goated when preserving the intellectual + creative birthright of all humanity is the vibe

NEW: Organ tuners have been leaving temperature and humidity records in little-known books for decades. 🎹 They reveal how temperatures inside churches have changed over time due to climate change and increased heating. A new scoop for The Reengineer! www.thereengineer.pro/p/church-org...

Wait until you hear that LLMs can only train on digitized/datafied info. Most of the FACTS scholars use are in archives/libraries. Less than 1% of archival colletions worldwide have been digitized. Also: lots of facts are not even in archives, but in the attics.

When viewing the fake article in Google scholar on my university network, there is a link to access the article via my uni's library. That link sends me to a library page that makes fake article appear real... Turns out library page is made programmatically from info on Google scholar 🤦

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Welcome to the public domain, Sam Spade, Miss Marple, Betty Boop, and many more! They'd throw their caps in the air, but they're 95 years old, so they don't quite have the arm strength they used to...

61% of U.S. libraries have at least one building system or feature that poses a potential health or safety concern, per a new report from the Government Accountability Office: bookriot.com/gao-report-o...

The University of Florida spends about $21 per month per student on library materials and database access.

Conserving a medieval book binding found in the Thames London Museum video. 📜 youtu.be/8K2FgTUE9p4?...

I have a weird question for the #bird people on here. Do you think someone could tell that a book was pooped on specifically by a sparrowhawk (or perhaps hawks generally) just from the feces? I'm looking at a 16th c. case where witnesses claim books were pooped on specifically by sparrowhawks!

WOULD YOU RATHER: -Cite something that does not exist -Use something without acknowledgement

The digital dark age has only taken two decades to arrive. #digipres www.bbc.com/future/artic...

This week's discussion of AI's negative impact on libraries and archives with the creation of imaginary citations really has me feeling confident about the long-term outlook for physical collections and the importance of investments in conservation practices and preservation planning.

"This document outlines the reasons why we don’t currently use AI in archival processes – including archival appraisal, acquisition, arrangement and description (processing), digital preservation, and access – as well as how we support our user communities who want to employ AI..." (via Nate Hill)

To propose that GenAI can compensate for "archival silences" perverts Trouillot's work. It's is a contradiction to say that a product whose logic exacerbates power imbalances--creating a most-likely guess based on the existing record--can restore absences that are the product of those imbalances.

NEWS: Artist, developer and Library of Congress Innovator in Residence Vivian Li invites you to explore three American communities with Anywhere Adventures, a new interactive mobile site showcasing local history through items from the Library's digital collections. newsroom.loc.gov/news/library...

Report: #AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals (via @sciam.bsky.social) www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-s...

16th century Venetian lawyer/bibliophile Odorico Pillone shelved his books spine-inward and commissioned Cesare Vecellio (Titian’s nephew) to paint their fore-edges with colourful images suggesting their subject matter. Here’s how they looked on the shelf news.yale.edu/2019/03/14/p...

If you are near Philadelphia, have 123 dollars, and roughly 28 cubic feet of space to store 1,600 VHS tapes in reasonably climate controlled conditions until I can get up there, I will retrieve this collection of almost guaranteed vital archival value and digitize its entirety.

The arguments I had with WaPo management about its neglected photo archive and the money they were leaving on the table … well, let’s just say I didn’t win those arguments.

More than ever it's crucial to be able to understand the provenance/trajectory of information to determine authenticity + reliability. Generative AI tools "cannot indicate that no information exists; instead, they will invent details that appear plausible but have no basis in the archival record."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... The conflict between "No heritage artefacts have been affected by this damage" & "between 300-400 works, mostly books, were affected by the leak - and that the count was ongoing." It's ok, it was just 19thC "Egyptology journals" and "scientific documentation."...

Apparently we’re now pioneering twee protest

This is so amazing and underrated, and probably great for like a low(er)-key Advent of Code datasittersclub.github.io/site/index.h...

Solange Knowles’ Saint Heron has launched a free digital archival library of literature by Black and brown authors, poets, and artists. Readers can borrow rare and out-of-print books for up to 45 days

Good news today for anyone who got a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services: all grants are reinstated! www.imls.gov/news/statem...

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

Our acquisitions person has been checking every book that comes in. This is the fourth AI-generated book in four weeks. I’m willing to admit that I bought this, mistakenly thinking I could trust what GOBI highlighted on their book lists.

Eventually today's boring payroll record become tomorrow's fascinating database.

University of Iowa Center for the Book fosters annual kozo tree harvest for Japanese-style paper 📜 www.thegazette.com/news/univers...

11/11 "...our understandings of history and ourselves rest on those invisible foundations. This book clarifies those foundations [labor and theory that upholds archives] while offering new possibilities for imagining archival futures in and outside of institutional holdings." www.weherepress.org

6/ "We determine which voices are under- or over-represented in relation to the political composition of the collection as well as its content and we trace the origins of these biases in the digitisation process." www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

5/ "This article explores the methodological and epistemological issues of using colonial records of violence from the Caribbean as a starting point for life writing about the enslaved." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2/ "Materiality looms large in the world of archives in storage, conservation, and shape or materials of the records. How does this materiality change in the digital age?" www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10....

Some great books and articles on archives and libraries that came out in 2025. In no specific order. 🧵

Publication day! The Routledge Handbook of Heritage & Creative Practice is out today and it includes my piece on creative responses to the mass removal of love-locks along with some amazing pieces by some brilliant people www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

A #tinyjoy to take you into the weekend. I just learned that 13- year-old Charlotte Brontë's TINY book, A Book of Ryhmes [sic] (it measures 9.5 cm by 6 cm) contains a poem titled "A Thing OF fourteen Line's. commonly called a" (& her tiny handwriting made the next word illegible.) #BookHistory

Today in art crime www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/w...

Cal Lane, Canadian trained welder and metal artist, transforms common tools and also industrial steel products into intricate sculptures #WomensArt

Great piece, Dan. I can confirm: Over the years, this has indeed been a longstanding problem. I've helped fund numerous projects over the years trying to address handwriting recognition and it is exciting to see what we can do today.

Welcome to our three-part series on book rebinding, where Library of Congress advanced book conservation interns Brittany and Devon will take you through all the steps of rebinding a book from the Library's Thomas Jefferson Library Collection. Stay tuned for parts two and three!