Restarted a 40 year old row between the National Archives, Bodelian and Newcastle University over letters which each swore the other had. Eventually the Bod conceded that they had them on microfiche. Off I trotted, swore not to kindle flame etc, 5 minutes in, microfiche reader started smoking.

In the late 1970s, Carolyn Lougee of Stanford was doing early digital history work, creating a database of her research. In 1980, Stanford's IT dept *erased* her database. #Oops. And they couldn't restore it. (how do I know this? from a paper archive at Stanford. don't just worship the digital!) 🗃️

I had the brief pleasure of working on this Newton project, and the time I spent learning the system Alex developed had a large impact on my current work in computational bibliography! So glad to see this article out in the world.

FLIPPING OUTSTANDING WORK, of interest to 📜 #bookhistory #booksky #libsky #rarebooks and #histSTM

Niche variation of a niche complaint: what on earth is up with the VIAF search indexing??? Why does the exact match, formatted as I know the authority record to be, show up as result ELEVEN???

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

"I think refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansive vision of the future than the one that is telling us that the future is already settled and decided. That's my daring idea. Just say no."

In 2014 I ran a daylong unconference on magic and technology and he just summarized it in one minute

A hard problem with literary data is navigating btwn editions of books and what the "work," or the theoretical text that unites all editions. I've been lucky to work with @thisismattmiller.com and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, who built a tool to address this + do much more arxiv.org/abs/2512.10165

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

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.

This is unreal. The 2026 code4lib conference has been cancelled unilaterally by Carnegie Mellon University because the Department of Education raised issues with the diversity scholarships: > An applicant must be a member of a group not well-represented within the code4lib community, including […]

The narrow answer to "why can't computer vision see the past?" is bc CV is linear algebra & I reject the premise that math is sight. But the big answer is that the data extraction industry is leveraging computer vision to engineer an anti-human future. sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2025/...

So I just went through and put all of the 2025 contingent-authored pieces from a journal in my subfield on the list. You can do the same if you want to boost contingent scholars in your subfield! It only took me 10 minutes.

Have you booked our 9 Dec virtual lectures evening? Join 3 expert speakers inspired by recent research into how we investigate the history of libraries like the collections of @rcphysicians.bsky.social. Book👉 history.rcp.ac.uk/.../body-kno... #BodyOfKnowledge #LibraryHistory More details below👇

*small embarrassed voice* A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s. doi.org/10.1093/libr...

I am currently, because I know how to enjoy a Saturday morning, writing some guidance for people on filling this consultation in. As I do several things are highly apparent. Before I go through them though I don't want this to put people off of filling it in. It is important to do so nonetheless. 1/

Last night @chethamslibrary.bsky.social: Dr. John Dee, warden of the college at Manchester, dreams of books! Part of the event “From Mortlake to Manchester,” which invited visitors to explore the medieval building through Dee’s eyes.

Oh wow! This is what happens when you're photographing MSS & don't capture the text in the inner gutter. 1st, here's the photograph (made about 100 yrs ago) of the Codex Salernitanus, f. 82ra. Although that big tear of the page is obvious, the inner gutter hasn't been fully captured in the photo.

#BookHistory! This is a hybrid panel so please do join us even if you’re not in Bloomington!

#GLAM friends, quite a lot of you went to IU for your undergrad, MLS, and PhD! Those of us still here would appreciate alumni support against the upper administration’s nonsense, especially in regard to academic/intellectual freedom

“Franklin did not succeed, partly because she was working on her own without a peer with whom to swap ideas. She was also excluded from the world of informal exchanges in which Watson and Crick were immersed.” This is the painful part.

As part of the Fredson Bowers award from @bibsoc.bsky.social (🙏) I’ll be giving a short talk on ‘The reassembly, analysis and appraisal of John Bellingham Inglis (1780-1870): #rarebooks collector; savant; scholar; slave owner’ November 18th, 5-7pm. In person / online bibsoc.org.uk/event/panel-...

Fill out Charlotte's survey! 📚

Look a new thing Librarians you should become experts in that new thing No we aren't gonna give you new staff so you can hire or train specialists You all just need to be experts at that and whatever else you're doing too Don't drop anything though We'll get mad You have to do the new thing

Interesting post on the CILIP website: 'AI Wars - The Libraries Fight Back' www.cilip.org.uk/news/712840/... Timed for Green Libraries Week, which is examining the environmental impact of AI www.cilip.org.uk/page/GreenLi... #AI4LAM #GreenLibrariesWeek

Again, your mostly non-profit mostly uni press humanities publishers are not the thing making a wreckage of scholarly publishing. Paying for their work is a good thing, and we should keep doing that.

Good morning to everyone, but especially to all the opossums, for today is their special day! This woodcut of an opossum was printed in 1635 in the book 'Historia Naturae, Maxime Peregrinae' by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg. 📷 Baring-Gould Library 0689 Folio #NationalOpossumDay #OpossumDay #RareBooks

Doing mandatory research integrity training and resisting the urge to give the training feedback that just says "shut up"

This sounds fascinating, especially for anyone interested in Manchester’s history. Congratulations Emily. I suspect this will be on a lot of reading lists very quickly.

A personal opinion is that if an archive is moving to ‘structured content releases’, it is no longer an archive but a private comms repository. What an incredible loss to our understanding of UK culture and heritage.

Critical to mobilizing “AI” resistance is understanding that corporations now know that the marketing term “AI,” is becoming toxic. That doesn’t mean they’re going to halt their data extraction & prediction business. It just means they’re getting sneakier about how they’re punching it into products.

Quietly devastating. How AI firms lied, cheated and robbed their way to killing the open web and decades of mutually agreed, protocol-based technical cooperation All technologists who work for them are culpable. They murder knowledge and systems of informal and hard-learned collaboration and care.

Good news, 📜 #bookhistory #booksky #libsky #rarebooks folks - (and via @lynnemthomas.com ) - Paul's talk will be recorded and posted on the @illinoisrbml.bsky.social YouTube! (No livestream, tho, but glad to see it recorded)

🧵It has been clear for years that a key difference between past instances of book banning and the present censorship cataclysm is that the banning happening now targets not only books, but librarianship as a profession and libraries as an institution. 1/4

I will never stop being tired of Digital Humanities professors who never approach archivists as peers deeming fit to tell archivists how and why to do their jobs differently. It happens time and time again, rarely with a spirit of collaboration and often with an uncomfortable tech-disruptor energy

Deadline extended! You have until Monday October 20th to put in an abstract! #queerbibliography #transbookhistory @bibsoc.bsky.social @bibsocamer.bsky.social @obs1922.bsky.social @transbookhistory.bsky.social @thetransfemininereview.com @sharpnews.bsky.social @royalhistsoc.org

I think what's bothering me about all these statements I'm seeing from politicians that are variations of "Israeli hostages and Palestinians are returning to their homes, yay" is that Israelis are returning to their homes and Palestinians are returning to uninhabitable post apocalyptic rubble.

Homegrown madder pigment. It's wonderful to create medieval pigment from something grown in your garden #bookhistory #medievalpigments #medievalsky

It's true: I wrote a book. And what's more, the book is done and soon you'll be able to own a copy. And what's more more, if you want a hard copy you can order one for 50% off now, with the code SAR50. And if you want it digitally, it'll be open access! www.arc-humanities.org/978180270163...

This PhD on a reparatory history of the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, exploring the legacies of empire is open for applications. It features a great supervisory team (moi, Kerry Pimblott, and Sadia Habib) and fabulous public history opportunities. Please share. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

“More than half of the work done by women in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries took place outside of the home, and around half of all housework and three-quarters of care work was conducted professionally for other households” [England] phys.org/news/2025-10...

Your challenge for this weekend is to put in an abstract for Queer Bibliography 2026. It's what all the cool kids are doing. The theme is Space, Place, Community (widely understood, certainly not limited to the South). CFP: shorturl.at/XAVJ0; Submit: forms.gle/XD7FgrrStp3j... Athens GA and online

crazy idea but hear me out: we print out information, like the internet but effectively 'digitising' it into physical form, and bind it together with related information relevant to the same topic within some covers. it then has zero energy need or subscription fees and lasts for centuries, wild huh

I am genuinely not convinced it is a good thing for everything to be available all of the time and the assumption and expectation that it will be is really troubling. Libraries do not have to concede capitalist visions of the world. Nor do I think we should. We should aspire to better. End/

Job! Postdoc in Digital Cultural Heritage: Data Ethics & Software Ecosystems, on new EU funded grant. 3.5 years, @designinf.bsky.social, Edinburgh. Design ethical processes, & evaluate open source tools for Digital Cultural Heritage Objects, with me! elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

"We refuse the processes that turn people into objects. We refuse to place the value these materials offer our institutions and disciplines above the people whose bodies were made into valuable epistemic resources."

MLGB is back!! Delighted that Medieval Libraries of Great Britain @bodleian.ox.ac.uk is now back online. We are also working had on plans for the next phase of the resource, enhancing & adding data & functionality. HUGE thanks to my colleagues for their hard & clever work mlgb.bodleian.ox.ac.uk