I give you East Jesus, an art mecca curated and managed by dear friends, and relatives of my burning man village, the largest museum in its county, home to two big art projects I participated in creating (Uber Man and Lost Cargo), part of my home of the heart. eastjesus.substack.com?r=1ykvy&utm_...

Yes. Especially because they did not keep Gulf of Mexico as a 450. IYKYK. The trickle down impact of these changes ripples wider than one would think. ps repatriate the metadata to Canada! (wicked problem I know)

Posted another newsletter for my California friends. It's Christmas catch-up time. www.infodiva.com/RCF

truth.

That thing where you’re procrastinating on shovelling the drive before rainyness makes a treacherously large and tall ice patch with tailbone destroying bumps.

Kicked off my holiday break by going to the Hyland Theatre to see Muppet Christmas Carol. Because Muppets and Michael Caine. And because our repertory movie house is part of what’s great about #ldnont I love having a membership and go often. I miss the New Beverly in LA and having the Hyland helps

The ArQuives invites nominations and applications from individuals across Canada to join our active Board of Directors. Deadline for submissions: February 10, 2026, at 5:00 PM EST. www.arquives.ca/call-for-board-members-2026

Strategy Inc. joins Snowflake's Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) for a universal semantic metadata standard! 🤝 This improves AI & BI interoperability & breaks down data silos. Working with Pfizer & more! #AI #Data #Interoperability

Perfume bombed THREE times from entrance to 5th floor office. Undergrads, I'm getting really tired of tasting your stench. If I can smell it a metre away ITS TOO DAMN MUCH. How would you like it if I crop dusted you?. Fuck you & your smellmaxxng trend. It's rude.

today in #metadata #librarian land: working on funding application for summer grad student co-op project, more serials metadata work. Maybe some LCSH split headings IYKYK. Great ire @ having to be onsite. ie shovelling the driveway out x 2 + car out x 3. No covered parking for me @ uwo.ca

This is depressing AF. It’s not for Canadians. Yet. I have been boycotting crossing due to genuine anxiety and distress about it. I am a dual citizen fwiw www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...

today in #metadata #librarian land: I added "short-staffedness" to my spell check. Reviewing serials records for continuity changes and holdings information, part of the verification work with North/Nord for the COPPUL Indigenous Historical Periodicals Working Group. Attending a vendor preso.

Lake effect snow can suck it. The snow line in SW Ontario varies. Usually we’re south of it. Polar vortex and Alberta clippers make it dip below Huron county. It seems like a lot but it is actually normal. we’ve been spoiled with warmer gentler winters the past few years. 10cm last night 20cm to go.

today in #metadata #librarian land: Damn. Now I need to write the damn thing :-) "Thank you for submitting your proposal to the special issue of the Journal of Library Metadata. This is an interesting and timely piece. I am pleased to accept the proposal."

Ploughshares is doing good work. apple.news/A6L795WK0S_q...

grrrr Completely unacceptable. globalnews.ca/news/1155832...

today in #metadata #librarian land: bailing on Code4Lib North. Couldn't do 2nd day tomorrow due to emergent "all must attend" meetings + the one thing I was really interested in hearing about moved to tomorrow. Would have possibly done 1st day today but I've got no spoons for coping with the 401

Awww. Mutaytor reunion for Alpheus bday. Still sad I couldn’t be there. Nothing like hard funk and knowing everyone in the room. Miss you my loves! (wait to hear the horn section it’s worth it) www.instagram.com/reel/DRakXSm...

SageMaker - so cataloging makes a sage? Well color me a sagacious mistress of information science.

The "innovation" of generative AI wasn't creation; it was laundering. They built a machine that strips the metadata—authorship, context, rights—from human labor so the output can be booked as a proprietary asset. "Intelligence" is just other people's work with the serial numbers filed off.

I killed inertia & returned to regular gym going habit after a year of stone walling myself due to chronic pain. It’s going to hurt regardless & it’ll hurt worse in the long run if I don’t. Accepting that I am hitting late middle age & need to swap strength & stretch for spin classes is the thing.

I think if Canada wants to have a strong cultural identity we need to go back to doing what we're best at, making the weirdest fucking TV shows you've ever seen

Gentle soul”? Perhaps. Her behaviour debating our current councillor during the election did not reflect this take. I found she started all the acrimonious parts, spoke over the other candidate. Basically rude and contemptuous to the point where an audience member called her out.

I must have this at the ginjoint.org for the next SideBurn www.infodocket.com/2025/11/21/r...

@profdownie.bsky.social I’d buy it just to keep Farhi from having it. I bet some more historical buildings become high rises.

Metadata Rising Earlier in my career, I was working on an infrastructure protection task and we were reconciling data from several sources that addressed the same road network. The data from the locality was authoritative, but it lacked some information we needed so we were conflating other data…

today in #metadata #librarian land: North/Nord shared print Indigenous Historical Periodicals Inventory designing API calls to knock off the “easy” record matches in Western’s Omni catalogue before sending staff to the stacks to verify holdings and material condition at risk titles. New big project

today in #metadata #librarian land: Ex libris is going to disband their advisory group for authority processes in Alma and rely on the annual sys enhancement voting process (where AUTHORITY IMPROVEMENTS NEVER GET ENOUGH VOTES). Self defeating spiral, rat bastard vendors enshittifying things.

Today in #metadata #librarian land: too many back to back meetings 11am-2pm, listening to job candidate presentation, submitting that article proposal to Journal of Library Metadata, figuring out if we can suck up the obscene article processing fee for Gold #openaccess (no. yay for Green).

Thinking a lot about Canadian metadata sovereignty led to wanting to know more about the history of national union catalog development. Just found two sweet sweet sources. I remember UTLAS and AMICUS and have the protest letters when OCLC got it all. This goes a bit deeper.

With update to Win 11 I had to install a new instance of MarcEdit. The Z39.50 config for Alma is an effing PITA that took me forever to get working on Win 10. The same config is not working on my new instance and I want to scream.

today in #metadata #librarian land: Prof wrongly blaming a bad citation in discovery layer on AI & slagging the library for allowing AI incursion into catalog. Vendors sent bad data to harvester, we sent them a ticket. System has regular quality checks, millions of accurate cites. Kindly fuck off.

The gods have smiled upon me. A lake effect snow dump happened on a night my sweetie was here. You know you’re loved when you get excellent coffee in bed and a shovelling out to save your fragile osteoporotic spine.

ISBN. notice it doesn’t say anything about classification and shelving. We use ISBN in cataloging to choose records, reconcile duplicates, analyze different editions. It does provide consistency. Only error? Library barcodes don’t use ISBN, publisher barcodes do.

Many dear friends in the group, most dear friends attending, many coming from afar. So.much.sadness that it's not safe nor affordable for me to cross the border for the reunion. Some of the best memories of my life involve these folks. Unsurprisingly sold out! lastheplace.com/2025/11/09/t...

Super impressive work! urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=.... Loving the mixed methods, loving the theoretical framework. Loving that our local research project used basically the same eval criteria independently over the past year of data gathering. Validity, reliability ftw.

AI companies slurping up Open Access content, at a scale resulting in what amounts to denial of service attacks makes me feel like gathering torches and pitchforks. Sheer robber barony.

Celebrate Trans Awareness Week with The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions. Free all year around 💻 💡 Genderqueer in Canada: https://ow.ly/ANaC50XoVs9 Gender Review: https://ow.ly/Njzl50XoVsb Gendertrash: https://ow.ly/H4gi50XoVs8 Rupert Raj and Trans Activism: https://ow.ly/WIWY50XoVsa

today in #metadata #librarian land: obligatory AI in the Libraries working group getting formed. Drew straws with coworkers for who volunteers (guess who "won"). We can't ignore it. It's rife in Alma/Primo. I'm finishing a research paper on AI enhanced metadata. Still feels like shooting our feet

this bites

that morning thing where you dread opening the blinds because it snowed and you don’t want to see how much shovelling is required. Especially when you have lower spine pain from osteoporosis that flared in the night because you had the audacity to rollover in your sleep

awoke this a.m from a nightmare that I missed a meeting. I was hyper focused on a task, lost track of time. At next meeting my colleagues handed me a list of all I had done wrong in 4 years working there. Then got up one by one and read them into the minutes. I can’t shake the emotional residue

“human-in-the-loop” connotes noose around the neck.

So hard to review vendor AI enhanced metadata while they know the issues & fix them as you're doing your research. Our snapshot is dated. Thing is, their processes and eval rubric ARE IN A BLACK BOX. We extend decades metadata quality eval lit. The point is validity, reproducibility, and open data

I.love.this

Grrrrrrr. I don't even have kids. I voted carefully in school board elections because IT MATTERS. Municipal political control was a move that fundamentalists and extremists used in their long game to take over and force their views on us. School boards influence school libraries. /soapbox

today in #metadata #librarian land: sadness that I can't cross the border for CODE4LIB. It's in Pittsburgh, one of my favorite cities, where I can see many dear friends while being at the best prof dev conf in my field, able to save $$ because it's a drivable distance and won't need a hotel. Tempted

today in #metadata #librarian land: tinkering with some OAI-PMH, finishing proposal for Special Issue on AI Implementation in Library Metadata for JLM, some meetings, cheerleading some coworkers bummed out about a thing, smdh at budget cuts think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issu...

The long-running ideological war on libraries, education, and government workers is not separate from AI boosterism. It is the same ideological war on human knowledge and expertise. In some cases AI is being used to directly supercharge this effort: www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

watched Wrath of Khan last night during windstorm power outage, all cozied up in the comforter, candles lit. It was the best I’ve felt in weeks. Still SUCH a good movie.