“You can't offer poverty wages to staff who kept the British Library running through the cyber-attack, then offer bonuses to directors who benefit from their hard work.” @graceblakeley.substack.com asks: who are Britain's cultural institutions really for? graceblakeley.substack.com/p/you-should...

Help us send 2,000 books to readers who are incarcerated this winter through our Books Not Bars program

Yours truly and @meganpiont.bsky.social are quoted waxing poetic about zines, lol. What's new? www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

An honor to have co-authored this piece with my colleague, and an honor to be included in this issue edited by the excellent Dr. Nicole Cooke and Dr. Aisha Johnson. Do check out the other articles: journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/issue...

Fire escape Springboro, PA

For anyone who uses archival methods, we’ve offering a $4,000 fellowship to use any of our holdings on site in Storrs, CT. Easy application! Please apply! Please repost! library.uconn.edu/location/asc...

my very excellent + thoughtful collaborator @whimsiful.bsky.social put together a discussion guide for our American Archivist (@saa-official.bsky.social) section on archival accessioning. it's got helpful discussion questions for every article. so rad! reviews.americanarchivist.org/2025/12/08/d...

A new issue of our open-access journal, The Political Librarian, includes ‘Inclusive Collection Development Doesn't Stop at the Statement: Access and Reference Service at Schlesinger Library as Case Study’ by Mimosa Shah and Madeleine Murphy. buff.ly/FfhU61W

Folks might not know a lot of people are getting *very* upset that the materials they request are not available in the libraries/archives they're requesting from. We're getting lots here at the Library of Virginia: requests of documents likely surfaced by large language models that *do not exist*.

Reading Rooms at the British Library are closed *all week* because so many of its workers refuse to work for pitiful wages in a contemptuously authoritarian and obliviously managed environment. We need leaders who get it and are big enough to sort it out! It’s a mess and a disgrace. Lift it up!!

cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to have stumbled upon the Paris building shared by metal music fans and the union for metal workers, what a delight

It's going to be fun when these fake archival sources just get copy-pasted directly from the chatbots into bibliographies and lazily re-cited for years/decades, until someone tries to actually find the original source, fail, and assume the archive has destroyed or misplaced it, rendering it "lost"

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 […]

what the fuuuuuck lists.clir.org/cgi-bin/wa?A...

Director of Barnard Archives and Special Collections barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Staff/... Salary range: $120,000–$125,000 annually, commensurate with experience. Please submit your application by January 5, 2026 to be considered. PASS IT ON 📚 📜

This! Take time to plan and fortify and relish the world we want to build. Libraries can be such a central piece of that.

This is really important. Both in the fact of IMLS reinstating grants. (Which have been *crucial* for libraries and civic life across the country. Notably in rural areas.) And in the example that the overall stalwartness and rigor of federal district/circuit courts has made a huge difference.

The Huntington Library was established over 100 years ago, and now the new Valerie J. Bower exhibit is opening long-awaited doors for L.A. artists. The full story: lataco.com/valeriej-bow... By Nya Manneh

"In the scattered, freelance-heavy world of audio archivists, Iron Mountain is seen more as the big gorilla of the business than as a collaborative partner. 'If they have some magic formula,... it’d be nice for the rest of us to find out what it is so we can help other people’s tapes.'"

Barton Lidice Beneš, AIDS Museum (Reliquarium), 1999, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum #WorldAIDSDay

I wrote a workbook earlier this year about taking risks in higher ed. The premise is that the current moment requires us to take action to advance our principles in a context of repression and fear. The reality is this can put our jobs and our safety at risk. halperta.com/shalperta%20...

A new show at Miami's Museum of Graffiti traces the origins and development of street art. What began in the 1970s with teenagers tagging New York subway cars has grown into a worldwide art movement. n.pr/44J1CFs

Northwestern University offered bland reassurance to trans students and faculty after signing a deal with the Trump administration that sacrificed them for restored funding. More here from the peerless @valorievandieman.bsky.social: www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

The Los Angeles Press Club is hosting their annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards this week, and my February piece on the HEA is nominated in the “Online Commentary/Trend, Other Arts” category! Im very proud of it! www.zocalopublicsquare.org/romance-genr...

"Q: Does the @librarycongress.bsky.social replacement of MEXICO, GULF OF and DENALI, Mount (ALASKA) as subject terms following a Trumpian decree represent a case of abrogation of professional judgment and autonomy?" preview of Sandy Berman's auto-interview coming soon to my website 📚 #sandynistas

University of Iowa Center for the Book fosters annual kozo tree harvest for Japanese-style paper 📜 www.thegazette.com/news/univers...

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.

Hey hey thehairpinarchives.com

TODAY: Carrie Frye has some VERY good news about the archives of The Hairpin after a "horrifying zombie afterlife"!!!! flaminghydra.com/women-laughi...

Please share widely! 📜 RBMS 2026 CFP (with some changes this year to session formats): web.cvent.com/event/0f0104... The planning spreadsheet is in the re-blogged post.

"Ongoing digitization and cataloging work not only serves the interests of scholars and manuscript communities—it also creates crucial, publicly-accessible provenance records that provide an increasingly robust bulwark against manuscript theft and trafficking." hmml.org/stories/reve...

Help us send 2,000 books to readers who are incarcerated this winter through our Books Not Bars program

Amidst so much that is lamentable, I’d like to share this wonderful film I learned about last night, via Anthology Film Archives 🥰

We announced yesterday that the Black Zine Fair will be back on May 9, 2026. We'll be hosted for the 3rd year by @powerhousearts.bsky.social. Save the Date!

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation has completed the full rehabilitation of the humble, three-room clapboard house in Tryon, NC, where singer & civil rights activist Nina Simone was born. savingplaces.org/stories/nina...

Remember: www.ms.now/opinion/msnb...

“The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on November 12 terminated three out of five employees at its Video Data Bank,… permanently eliminating their positions. The SAIC additionally announced major cutbacks to the international video art distribution organization.” 😢

RULING JUST IN…John J. McConnell held that the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle IMLS and several other federal agencies via executive order was both illegal and unconstitutional! Read all about it: www.wordsandmoney.com/in-a-major-v...

Hi library 📚 colleagues! There are 12 days left to apply for two tenured, unionized positions at my academic library in Upstate New York. These are management positions that require supervisory experience, and the salary range for each is $85k to $115k. Details below, reposts appreciated! (1/4)

Reference question that I'm crowdsourcing: Does anyone know of any guides or resources for someone who is trying to transition to a new name in professional settings? This is specifically in the LIS field.

Friendly amendment. Everyone should know who Pauli Murray was. A life truly well lived. And one that shaped our world.

Excited for this virtual talk tomorrow afternoon on eighteenth-century print shops in British America:

New Haven, CT: Program Engagement Conservator, Yale University Link out to job announcement

I was faculty at The New School for almost 19 years; I worked across several of these departments — many of which are central to the institution’s unique (and truly remarkable) legacy and continued strengths. Such a tragedy.

When you really need to stress where the most important bit of the text is - 15th century, Avignon,  Bibliothèque Ceccano - 1094, f. 195v

Curator of Rare Books at Folger listing is live. You’d be working with some first class people! amherst.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FSL_Em...

Recently visited the Glass Flowers at Harvard, a collection of 4,300 extraordinarily realistic glass models of plants crafted by the Blaschkas, a father and son team of sculptors That’s right, these are all made primarily of GLASS — a fact difficult to accept given how accurate & lifelike they are

Please believe me when I say that this meaningless, historically suspect slogan is being used to sell "AI." Here it is in the just-released November 2025 report on AI by Microsoft. www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

My man @themountaingoats.bsky.social clued me into this fantastic essay about a Punjabi housewife's inadvertent techno masterpiece from 1982 4columns.org/dayal-geeta/...