Vincente Lusitano, the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist born between 1520 and 1522, and who died sometime after 1562. Free Link archive.ph/2023.01.06-0... by @garrt.bsky.social #BHM #BlackComposors #ClassicalMusic 🎼🎶

I am pleased to see she comments 'potential difficulties remain – including whether the instructions and technology for reading the glass would remain available for future generations' as I was beating my head on the desk, sobbing and laughing hysterically from years of archivists hearing similar.

You’d think London’s roads calm down after work - but after 6pm the West End turns into Wild West, with no congestion charge and few parking controls. @cleancitiescampaign.org analysis shows dramatic increase of cars entering central London in evening 6-7pm (56%+) compared to morning 8-9am... 1/9

Fragments of First World War lives Trade union journals often carried photos & reports of comrades in arms - the serving, the rewarded, the missing, wounded & dead The hope for news shines through in the profiles of the missing Browse the Postmen's Gazette & more at warwick.ac.uk/services/lib...

A Conversation with Carol Kussmann: Digital Preservation Analyst at the University of Minnesota #Libraries (via @saa-official.bsky.social) saaers.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/a... #digipres #digitalpreservation #saa_ers

I feel that the fact that by 1918 much of the French Army on the Western Front consisted of forcibly-enlisted West Africans ought to be better known by military historians.

We’re delighted to announce that Legasee Educational Trust has been awarded a Records at Risk grant to support the recovery and stabilisation of its digital oral history archive. Find out more here: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sec... 📷Legasee Educational Trust

This is what AI scrapers are doing to our platform. Our database capacity is just being ruined every time they initiate a fresh scrape and our tech team has to scramble, taking radical measures, to keep the platform up.

Show Me the Data: New Practices for Historical Sources @ruthahnert.bsky.social, @kmcdono.bsky.social and @danielwilson.bsky.social

...and it’s the 222nd anniversary of the Battle of Pulo Aura, but I’m not going to attempt a better telling of that than this one:

There is probably more original wood from the USS Chesapeake in a building in Wickham, Hampshire, England than the amount of origninal wood in the USS Constitution in Boston. The Chesapeake Mill was built of wood from the ship when she was sold and broken up in 1819. #NavalHistory

📣Calling archive professionals Join us on 17 & 24 March for a two-part online introduction to manorial records: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/introducti... No previous knowledge of manorial documents or Latin required!

Slides, recording & transcript now available from our #OhioDIG meetings page! ohiodig.org/meetings #digipres

Question for #archivists providing online access to digital collections which include sensitive or offensive content. Do you have age restrictions or your platform? #archives #digipres

Why did some people develop blood clots after receiving the J&J or AZ covid vaccine? A study published in the NEJM yesterday appears to have solved the case: For a v. small number of people, these two adenovirus-based (not mRNA) vaccines caused vaccine-... 1/6 www.theatlantic.com/science/2026...

75th anniversary of the University of Manchester’s Ferranti Mark I includes description of the purpose of the preserved paper tape pictured below #DigiPres rylandscollections.wpcomstaging.com/2026/02/12/a...

Swarms of bots linked to IP addresses in Lanzhou, China are absolutely flooding the internet. An absolutely fascinating story from our Made in China newsletter this week, by @zeyiyang.bsky.social

The sun shone in Aberdeen today. Sunshine was last recorded in Aberdeen three weeks ago - on 21 January - the longest sunless period in the area since Met Office records began in 1957. 🩶 ⛅ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

An ideal workshop for archivists, archive managers and heads of service working across Scotland! Book for insights on how to promote the impact of your archive 👇

🗺️ Historic maps of South Asia – now at your fingertips The MAHSA Project is thrilled to share our open-access search portal for historic Survey of India maps! (1/3)

DSIT consultation on 'Opportunities for public sector data' closes 28 Feb (or sooner) 👇

This is cool. Attached to these depositions for a case between two clerks is a schedule of all the marriages, baptisms, and burials performed by the defendant clerk in St John Clerkenwell between 1771 and 1773. TNA E 134/15Geo3/Trin4 discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C6...

'Some Maya cities were established hundreds of years before the founding of Rome ... Both cultures developed sophisticated astronomy, mathematics, writing and agriculture, as well as elaborate trade...across vast cosmopolitan lands. www.theguardian.com/news/2026/fe...

Get in touch with us by Friday if you’re interested in presenting at our fundraising webinar: www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/EJERFR/ All you need to apply is a brief description of an income-generating initiative your archive has successfully implemented 📈

I mentioned this article on a C16 wedding conducted using signed language and a colleague pointed me to this @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social article, 'Speaking in Hands: Early Modern Preaching and Signed Languages for the Deaf' by @rosamundoates.bsky.social academic.oup.com/past/article...

STUDY: “The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of an outdoor cycling intervention on cognitive function and mental health and well-being in older adults.”

A cafe in Dublin airport has a robot that delivers hot food orders! But it just sped off without letting the people get their food out. When it came back it had a human minder. And when my order arrived, the same human bought it, saying she couldn't trust the robot. This is a post about most AI.

Exploring the itineraries of King Edward I 🤓

what if we kissed while singing little tunes from the 15th century heart shaped book of french love songs ?

Creative Commons Licenses are ill-equipped for the AI era and the rapid ingestion/scraping of open content by bots. - training for AI doesn't fit traditional copyright definitions because text is converted into statistical patterns that are tokenised processed and used for probability-based outputs.

New DPC blog post: Supporting COPTR, our community-owned tool registry www.dpconline.org/blog/support... #DigiPres

The @ads-update.bsky.social Archeology Data service (ads) are looking to recruit a Digital Archives Assistant. jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/digi... #digipres #digipresnorth #archivejobs

Today we launch new AI guidelines to help galleries, libraries, archives and museums prepare for the future - read more here: www.archives.org.uk/news/new-ai-...

It is always a pleasure to read about Margaret Calvert. Absolute legend. Her contribution to the look of modern Britain is immense. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

The research guide on Environmental History that I wrote for The National Archives, UK is now live! Includes research advice and resources on colonial environments, pollution, agriculture, and animal histories. Available here: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-yo... #envhist #envhum

A very unexpected surprise. Browsing the 17th Century Agarde indexes (as one does) and found these lovely illuminated pages. TNA IND 1/17089

Thanks to @thefnl.bsky.social this exceptionally rare Tudor map of Kingsbridge in Devon has been acquired for public research at the Devon Heritage Centre, after more than four centuries in private hands.

🚨 New on Substack: Council Housing in Plymouth before 1914: ‘the merry homes of England’ municipaldreams.substack.com/p/council-ho...

It's World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day, so join @rogerhighfield.bsky.social as he shares the fascinating story of a remarkable recovery and explores why often-overlooked illnesses demand global attention https://bit.ly/4qPEpdK

Currently peer reviewing an article that uses the term 'archive(s)' in the title, the key words, several times in the abstract, and c.50 times in the main text, yet fails to cite a single recognised archivist, archival theorist, or archives journal. This keeps happening. #archives

A guide to the tools and databases librarians use, plus a personal fact-checking workflow you can run in under 60 seconds

Discworld QOTD, from Carpe Jugulum

443 children are injured on the school run in London every year. That's equivalent to an entire primary school of children 😱, and 16% of these injuries are serious. London’s children deserve safer streets. We need #StreetsForKids. www.standard.co.uk/news/london/... @solveschoolrun.bsky.social

📢 NEW Will of the Month Post 📢 January's post looks at the wishes of a Yorkshire widow who made a 'Living Will'📜 She not only divided up her material wealth, but also expressed hopes for later life, pre-empting any future incapacity. Read about her wishes here: sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

Our latest exhibition, Love Letters, is now open at The National Archives, revealing 500 years of love. From paupers, monarchs, queer networks & quiet acts of affection found in government records. Very proud to have been lead curator on this one, working with so many wonderful people! 💌

Calling archivists, researchers & heritage professionals! Join us online on Wednesday 25 February (1PM) to learn about the responsibilities and considerations involved when providing access to records related to traumatic histories: Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/working-wi... (1/2)

Thanks for the helpful auto-complete, Gmail.

Love Letters opens today at the National Archives, Kew. Free, no booking required. Closes 12 April 2026.

If you have graduate students working with medieval manuscripts this free online training might be useful 👇 www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...