#NoKings in Billings, Montana.

Even short kings?

Y'all know better

Wikipedia is a better place to begin your research now than Google is because Google is just loaded with garbage, even if you're *really good* at your search terms. Wikipedia at least gives you places to begin easily.

AI failing to answer basic reference questions? Shocking, I tell you. www.ktvq.com/news/local-n...

B&T is a book distribution company that has been around for more than a century in support of public libraries book acquisition and collection management. That they are closing on such very, very short notice is creating new pressures on both libraries and other vendors in the space. Bad news.

The Trump admin’s offer to give preferential treatment to institutions that toe the party line reeks of bribery in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda. This is corruption. Adherence to ‘loyalty oaths’ would usher in a new era of thought policing in American higher education.

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

We really do need to stop referring to "Christianity" as some sort of monolith religion because it absolutely isn't and many Christians do not view other Christians as adherents.

Law enforcement agents burned nearly 200 pounds of materials — not just 2 pounds of methamphetamine, as previously reported — inside an animal crematorium in Billings on Sept. 10, according to burn records reviewed by Montana Free Press.

I actually think print is better for libraries than electronic on the whole. Not *inherently* -- stripped down electronic (e.g., unencumbered epubs or PDFs) is *superior to print* in almost every way, but as long as the vast majority of electronic is controlled by vendors it's a bad deal.

Montana State University-Northern placed a professor on leave in response to social media comments she made about the assassination of the conservative figure Charlie Kirk. The school said it will evaluate the situation, but it's unclear what that evaluation will include.

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

Make sure to wish a librarian a happy Gerald Ford Trapped in The Penn Library Elevator Day.

We are not living in the same realities and I'm really not sure how we address that.

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

i have said this before but when “getting rid of race in admissions” for the administration means “you can’t even try to reach out to underrepresented communities and encourage them to apply and if you do it is illegal discrimination against white people” then the actual goal here is segregation

I am so tired of the scapegoating of higher ed. No group that have had their speech rights more obviously curtailed, by the government, in the couple of years than college students. The govt is engaged in an obvious viewpoint discrimination lawfare campaign against campuses. But it’s not enough!

I had no wish for him to be murdered, but I’ll harshly judge anyone who flies their flag at half staff for that hateful extremist or talks about honoring his memory. There was no honor in his life.

the real war on Christmas is US trade policy

Yeah well whose fault is that??

The paradox of Trump 2, I think, is that it's a nascent autocracy with the qualities of a dying autocracy: The autarch is old, promising an early succession; he is using his newfound powers to undermine the stability of the realm; & the regime, for all that it's been accommodated, is run by idiots

i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.

The next two orders are the ones addressing "cashless bail." Let's be clear: What the Trump admin wants is a system where wealthy people can get out on bail and less wealthy and poor people have their lives ruined by being unable to afford bail and be stuck in jail while fighting charges.

you gotta understand that the staffers in this admin think the insurrection act is an "i win" button and its not that, not that at all

We've officially reached the "show me your papers" phase of Trump's fascist takeover.

If something is incorrect on Wikipedia, it can be sourced, traced, disputed, fixed. If it's wrong in the LLM, it's just...wrong. It's not a fact explicitly stored somewhere, it's just a string of words generated by a probability map

I really need y'all to think of your relationship with government as citizens, not customers or consumers. The world isn't zero sum and framing every interaction you have through the lens of economics is rotting our society.

Press needs to stop repeating govt euphemism of “clearing homeless camps.” I’ve witnessed it in other cities: massive destruction of personal property. Not just bedrolls & tents; family photos, Bibles, meds. Times I’ve seen it people weren’t even given option to move their things.

posting mean tweets about clarivate just to feel something again

Research @urbaninstitute.bsky.social shows that federal government's sweep of homelessness in DC & other cities is a fool's errand. Criminalization & forced relocation: —Are an ineffective deterrent —Disrupt resources access —Prolong homelessness —Cost a lot of $ What solves homelessness? Housing.

The deeper problem - perhaps the fundamental problem in this area - is that we have organized housing so that provision of a basic service is completely intertwined with a speculative asset market. The long run goal should be to disentangle them.

This whole administration is insulting to information professionals

Let's repeat the rules about transit investment: —Prioritize projects that will serve many people (you can do this by serving high densities of residents & jobs). —Serve those lines with frequent trains & buses. If you're not planning service every 30 min *at worst*, why are you building the line?

Obviously the current White House is rather more than a four bedroom ranch home. Its actual title is the Executive Mansion. And that’s a fair description, a mansion. This is a palace, a very visible statement of monarchical intent. No Kings, no palaces.

the trump administration is destroying ALL higher education but we only hear about the ivies because that's where the rich and powerful went or where their kids go. the obsession with them is missing the bigger picture.

you don't need chatGPT i am perfectly capable of drinking a bottle of water and lying to you

It will always be a puzzlement to me why so many poeple in library leadership do not realize that human work IS the work the library does. It's the interaction across the desk, the decisions of the cataloger, the help at the computer, that IS what the library does. The rest* is just tools. *ie books

Columbia functionally returning to its original name King’s College

I still think universities should say no to homework products that require students to pay to do their homework separately from tuition.

Public broadcasting is about more than content. It's about an ethos. That there need to be spaces in society that are not soaked in the logic of consumerism and profit. Where people are treated as citizens, valued for humanity and their ideas rather than disposable income. It's simple, but powerful.

If you follow me or any of the other lib-mil posters, you're probably familiar with repeated discussions about the "crisis" of masculinity and idiot cops larping as Seal Team Six. What if I told you these are actually directly related to each other and oh boy this whole thing smacks of gender

A two week lease costs $50 for libraries and somehow that's why authors aren't getting proper payment? Be serious, Mary.

Medical debt or bankruptcy isn’t a sign of personal irresponsibility, it’s a sign of a country’s irresponsibility.

Academic Librarians take note: This year is the first time that more U.S. college students will learn entirely online compared to being fully in-person. 📚 www.npr.org/2025/07/11/n...

If you grew up in a household with an evangelical right-wing parent, as I did, you already know that the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, like the reversal of Roe v. Wade, is the culmination of a 50-year project.

This is why I predict that the post-WW2 model of federally-funded science is dead: even if a future government wants to revive it, universities and other institutions will never again want to put themselves in the position of being vulnerable to Trumpian extortion. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This isn’t a bill, it’s a declaration of war