I want to live in an apartment at the public library.

Archivists, this is how you lose the time war

i am once again thinking about my favorite ever excerpt from our yiddish textbook

Help my metadata prof's first example of something to make a MARC record for is an Individual. Cancelled. Check.

Complete with an S/C note, multiple creators, and a subject heading

What are we doing y'all

#GradSchoolGripes #BadArchivesPractice #Metadata

Currently doing some marking. A reminder to everyone involved in archives and collections: digitisation is not preservation. If I digitise a box of records and put the files on a USB stick I haven't preserved a thing. It's all about what you do with the files post-digitisation. #archives #digipres

If you're an academic who is protective or defensive about your own area of expertise (understandable, in this day and age), but are offended when it's suggested that professional archivists & librarians have unique expertise outside your own experience, that's worth some self-examination

TIL that Sabrina Carpenter's hometown is Quakertown, PA.

A modern version of "All the Quakers are Shoulder Shakers" has never seemed more likely

I spotted this on Mastodon and I find it horrible, not least for the speed with which this has happened.

every yiddish student learns to introduce themselves by saying “I am called [name]” (כ׳הײס [נאָמען]) and i am only now learning that it is common to instead just tell a stranger ״THEY CALL ME [NAME]” (מיך רופֿט מען [נאָמען]) like some jewish cowboy of some renown

Was EAD the first LAM XML standard? Or is it just the earliest one that's still used?

IIUC, EAD 1.0 was created in 1997–1998. Based on what I'm finding, the other major LAM XML schemas all seem to hail from 2002–2005 (MODS, MADS, METS, VRAcore, PREMIS, MARCXML)

Aside from my "was this really written in 2025, not two years ago" snarky response, I couldn't help thinking throughout this entire blog post that a huge part of why so many libraries are STUCK on dealing with AI is because we literally don't have the staff time or funding to deal with it.

You cannot run the basic infrastructures of a functioning society- healthcare to education-on systems that cut out human empathy & negotiation. So we have to reassert over and over again that the problems aren’t glitches or errors—even big ones. The problems are fundamental, systematic, endemic.

A friend recently texted me the same thing. “Do you really not use ChatGPT?!” It was a sign of where we are culturally on this. People are compelled to use it but also starting to question the normalcy?

That’s before I reckon with the ethics of using a thing for ghost efficiency that is pretty societally devastating.

And on a final personal note, I don’t want to become stupid before my time. I really don’t. I will keep mucking about so that I can keep mucking about, for as long as possible.

Man, I really want to read a history of digital libraries and metadata standards circa 1997–2007 that gets into

- The rise of digital library platforms outside of OPACs

- The focus on digitizing archival collections

1/3

All the time. ALL the time.

Pragmatism, consistency, risk awareness, and sustainability: we love to see it

“And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” - Alison Macrina