If anyone asks why the library is providing 3d printers or whatever, just show them this, especially the last line: 'And, as Mr. Clark, the Librarian, says, "With this added attraction some students will see the inside of the Library for the first time."' […] [Original post on code4lib.social]

Normally, having breakfast at Wendy's at 1:30pm on a workday would sound like a lot of bad choices coming together

Hey AI, when you have a minute could you fix Google Scholar so it doesn't harvest dissertation titles like this kthx

Coming up here at U of Alberta Library's Digital Scholarship Centre #mastodon

A year ago the Guardian ran a story about a wartime onderduiker (under-diver: someone in hiding from the Nazis) in Enschede named Curt Bloch, a German Jew, who made a poetry magazine called The Underwater Cabaret for other onderduikers and their helpers. It's now online, all 96 issues […]

Have been talking about our early digitization work a lot this week, and now Facebook showed me a post from 2009 about the craft as we practiced it: "I's the b'y that parses the xml and I's the b'y that transforms her, I's the b'y that generates the html and sends it home to Liza"

Trump has a nice reminder of what he'll never have

#1lib1ref starts tomorrow! https://ca.wikimedia.org/wiki/1Bib1Ref_2026_1Lib1Ref

One thing I've noticed about tv these days is that I don't want to watch any show that has rhythmic scratching instead of a musical soundtrack

If you had offered me the job of prime minister of Denmark a year ago, I would have been all "Sure, I'll give it a go!" Not so much now.

this seminar plan may be getting out of hand, but when life gives you the opportunity to write a manifesto, you have to seize it

I know this is pretty small beer in the light of world events, but I was not expecting to have to write “risk of invasion by the USA” into the risk assessment for my fieldwork in Greenland in June.

I love bulleted lists but I'm starting to see I'm going to have to give them up so my stuff won't look like slop. Em dashes, though, you'll have to pry out of my cold dead hands.

In December I did the process of suggesting a new name/photo for a Pokestop near the library (it was named for a food place that hasn't been there for years). Got back to work today and the stop is GONE. Not renamed, not updated, just disappeared. I apologize to campus Pokemon Go players. 2026 […]

I wish I could hallucinate as lucidly as LLMs can

We discussed Ollama on social media today and I didn't once type "Obama" 😤

Ollama misbehaved in my workshop yesterday, wrecking most of my live demos. I see the new version, released 17 hours ago has a bugfix: "Fix error that would occur when running qwen2.5vl with image input". Let's see if that helps...

I wonder: after the AI bubble bursts, will there be retro-LLM-ists who post here about how they're recreating the original ChatGPT experience on their quantum phones? "Here's what I had to tweak to get the extra fingers back..."

I clicked two library catalogue "permalinks" today, one 2 years old and one 15 years old, from different catalogues, and neither one worked. We really shouldn't call them that if we're not going to make it happen.

(I shared this on Facebook 10 years ago and the idea just looks better and better) I'm going to move to Denmark and open a "Babette's Feast" theme park. You stay in tiny houses in a desolate windswept fishing village, with nothing to do all day but read ascetic sermons and sing hymns about […]

this looks like good prompting advice, probably even if you're not using OpenAI's apis: https://github.com/allenai/olmocr/blob/main/olmocr/data/buildsilver.py#L32-L39

What fresh hell is this

Trying out LLM Tool https://github.com/antoinelemor/LLM_Tool ("a research-friendly pipeline") - I like the text interface, which exposes the options nicely and saves every configuration choice as you work through the steps to set up LLM-assisted classification of research materials (with local […]

this fall I worked with the core Git folks on writing an official data model for Git and it just got merged! I learned a few new things from writing it. https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/gitdatamodel.adoc

How many people named Al are going to have their work attributed to AI, just because the description was set in a sans serif font?

We finally got some snow last night, and now we're getting that late-afternoon soft pale pink winter sunshine on the snow, and it's nice, since I worked at home today

Ah Cleveland! "As late as 1952, Herbert Gold could write to Allen Ginsberg without any sense of self-parody, “Come to Cleveland and we can do a job together. I’ve been casing Lindsay’s Skybar . . . where Art Tatum and Muggy sic] Spanier alight, and where every other drinker hopes to submit a […]

I don't have an enchanted oak with a hole to whisper my findings into, but I have a blog, which is basically the same thing https://myjetpack.tumblr.com/post/134283180448/a-recent-cartoon-for-new-scientist

New word (for me): dedatafication - used by Gwen Shaffer in discussion at Responsible AI conference just now - they want us to treat datafication as a natural good, but it really isn't and often needs to be fought - let the Dedatafication Wars begin!

Hey #digipres folks, over on the #ApplesauceFDC discord, someone's been working through how to archive punch cards (since they've got a large stack of them), and put together a documented #format for #punchcards […]

I mean ... I mean ... https://www.library20.com/guns-in-our-libraries

When will the era of digital preservation produce an article title to compare with "Dumped from a Wharf into Casco Bay: The Historical Records Survey Revisited"? Or has it already done so?

Mathematics is a language. But innumeracy is also a language and our president is fluent. It's not just that he exaggerates, lies, and says things that make no sense when talking about numbers "often" no this is something deeper. He is deeply committed to *never* speaking about any statistic […]

Did we ever get insider confirmation of how Four Seasons Total Landscaping happened?

"The [museum] has just recently put their collection online and there are some amazing pieces. Their database does not have permalinks to individual artifacts, so you will need to search via the Object Number for more details on each piece." Can this be true of a museum website? In 2025???

I always get activists and archivists mixed up

I have always carried Donald Barthelme's line about writing around with me ("Endings are elusive and middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to being.") - but you know, that's only true until you've begun. After that, worst of all is to middle, to middle, to middle.

Toby yesterday, trying to decide whether he should tell us how game 7 was going to end

"Like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the report’s authors seem to be following the lead of MAGA Republicans in the United States. They argue that all universities in the province should curb EDI initiatives and remain silent on pressing political issues. The report even uses the American phrase […]

"as ML hardware and capable storage trend towards being standard in consumer-accessible hardware, curated local tooling will outcompete data-warehouse LLM-SAAS, and data provenance and process transparency will become more and more important. ... librarians are going to be way, way more […]

We've had an Images of Research competition for a few years now but this year we're also doing Sounds of Research: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/graduate-studies/training-events/research-showcases/sounds-of-research.html

trying to focus on making a nice slide; mesmerized by the lorem ipsum

Gil McGowan - head of the Alberta Federation for Labour and the Common Front has said - “I just want to make it really clear that if the government puts a gun to the head of the teachers and they’re not able to continue their strike, then we in the broader labour movement will stand where […]

I'm rather happy with the fact that I didn't notice the AWS outage at all

I have mostly kept my two twitter accounts alive out of some kind of morbid curiosity; watching something that belonged to all of us dismantled and destroyed by ONE idiotic male. But these new changes break the model completely. ➡️ Fediverse, brace for another migration.

Another letter-burning experience, from *Dear Lindy*, about the Australian woman whose baby was taken by a dingo. It starts a few weeks after she was released from prison. She had received a lot of letters about the case (p.3): > I was in the backyard. Apparently they'd knocked on the front […]

I predict that within the next few months Alberta premiere Danielle Smith will visit Washington, and the next day Trump will tweet that he's invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to override some inconvenient constitutional right.

funny how I got through decades and decades of my life carrying fingerprints around on my fingers and getting zero benefit from them, and suddenly now they're part of my daily routine for just about everything

From one of my grandfather's letters saved from burning: he and his friend Bill Adams (son of historian E.D. Adams), as grad students, have been discussing how to deal with family expectations: "Specialization leads with grim certainty to a kind of fame and a kind of usefulness which are […]