@ruthburns.bsky.social
Library person, bibliovore, retro gamer, goth, sporadic crafter
Pinned
💙📚 31 book December challenge. This time I've wrapped the books so it's more of a mystery what's coming next. I started reading on the 1st Dec, and am currently reading book seven, so have a comfortable margin at the moment- it isn't one book per day- so shall start posting them.
Having reached the aftermath of my book challenge I have a few reflections on how it has gone.
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Teaching in Semester 2?
Update your taught course recommendations in Reading Lists Online as soon as possible. Remember always click ‘Submit changes to the Library'
https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/services/teaching-services/reading-lists/preparing-course-materials
Update your taught course recommendations in Reading Lists Online as soon as possible. Remember always click ‘Submit changes to the Library'
https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/services/teaching-services/reading-lists/preparing-course-materials
November 17, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Teaching in Semester 2?
Update your taught course recommendations in Reading Lists Online as soon as possible. Remember always click ‘Submit changes to the Library'
https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/services/teaching-services/reading-lists/preparing-course-materials
Update your taught course recommendations in Reading Lists Online as soon as possible. Remember always click ‘Submit changes to the Library'
https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/services/teaching-services/reading-lists/preparing-course-materials
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When people say that Wuthering Heights doesn't have anything to do with race or that no film has engaged with race, what they mean is that for them Romani people do not count and they also haven't been paying attention. I'm going to share a little material from a recent talk. Content note: racism 1/
November 14, 2025 at 1:31 AM
When people say that Wuthering Heights doesn't have anything to do with race or that no film has engaged with race, what they mean is that for them Romani people do not count and they also haven't been paying attention. I'm going to share a little material from a recent talk. Content note: racism 1/
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This goes for scholars too. I've had conferences try to get me to agree that they can record and resell my presentation forever and that the materials now belong to them
The Medical Library Association contracts are the worst I've ever rejected 📚(and yes I've told them that, I tried multiple times)
The Medical Library Association contracts are the worst I've ever rejected 📚(and yes I've told them that, I tried multiple times)
When you are a new creator, whether in prose, comics, or other media, it can be very tempting to agree to every convention or other event that you're asked to do. Exposure is great, right? And it's wonderful to be wanted.
November 13, 2025 at 1:17 AM
This goes for scholars too. I've had conferences try to get me to agree that they can record and resell my presentation forever and that the materials now belong to them
The Medical Library Association contracts are the worst I've ever rejected 📚(and yes I've told them that, I tried multiple times)
The Medical Library Association contracts are the worst I've ever rejected 📚(and yes I've told them that, I tried multiple times)
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This week's ALN Staff Development Weekly Update is now available. Lots to look at including a last opportunity to join the first Frontline Forum of the academic year, this time on use of social media, and a last call for contributions on a green OA event: academiclibrariesnorth.ac.uk/staff-develo...
November 12, 2025 at 12:42 PM
This week's ALN Staff Development Weekly Update is now available. Lots to look at including a last opportunity to join the first Frontline Forum of the academic year, this time on use of social media, and a last call for contributions on a green OA event: academiclibrariesnorth.ac.uk/staff-develo...
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This week's ALN Staff Development Weekly Update is available at academiclibrariesnorth.ac.uk/staff-develo.... More job opportunities in the region this week, plus details of how to become a mentee on our next mentoring wave, a call for contributions on green OA and some interesting events.
Staff Development - Academic Libraries North
Our Staff Development Offer Infographic summarises all the great staff development stuff we do to support our member institutions.
academiclibrariesnorth.ac.uk
October 29, 2025 at 11:30 AM
This week's ALN Staff Development Weekly Update is available at academiclibrariesnorth.ac.uk/staff-develo.... More job opportunities in the region this week, plus details of how to become a mentee on our next mentoring wave, a call for contributions on green OA and some interesting events.
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My latest article, out now in Katina Magazine: 'How Fanfiction Can Help Us Reimagine Scholarly Publishing'
Basically: what if the next big idea for open access came from @archiveofourown.org instead of Els*vi*r? 👀 There's a thought...
Read here → katinamagazine.org/content/arti...
Basically: what if the next big idea for open access came from @archiveofourown.org instead of Els*vi*r? 👀 There's a thought...
Read here → katinamagazine.org/content/arti...
October 29, 2025 at 10:12 AM
My latest article, out now in Katina Magazine: 'How Fanfiction Can Help Us Reimagine Scholarly Publishing'
Basically: what if the next big idea for open access came from @archiveofourown.org instead of Els*vi*r? 👀 There's a thought...
Read here → katinamagazine.org/content/arti...
Basically: what if the next big idea for open access came from @archiveofourown.org instead of Els*vi*r? 👀 There's a thought...
Read here → katinamagazine.org/content/arti...
Yesterday's brief canal walk after the Standedge tunnel trip. The tunnel gate has a design of metal legs going from centre up to the arch of the tunnel to represent the leggers who used to propel boats through pre-electric engines.
October 26, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Yesterday's brief canal walk after the Standedge tunnel trip. The tunnel gate has a design of metal legs going from centre up to the arch of the tunnel to represent the leggers who used to propel boats through pre-electric engines.
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All hail Sir Gaslightalot!
"Have you tried simply not being seriously unwell?"
#MECFS #pwME #LongCovid #MedicalGaslighting #Spoonies #MEDeliveryPlan #TheGreatestMEdicalScandal
"Have you tried simply not being seriously unwell?"
#MECFS #pwME #LongCovid #MedicalGaslighting #Spoonies #MEDeliveryPlan #TheGreatestMEdicalScandal
July 21, 2025 at 7:31 AM
All hail Sir Gaslightalot!
"Have you tried simply not being seriously unwell?"
#MECFS #pwME #LongCovid #MedicalGaslighting #Spoonies #MEDeliveryPlan #TheGreatestMEdicalScandal
"Have you tried simply not being seriously unwell?"
#MECFS #pwME #LongCovid #MedicalGaslighting #Spoonies #MEDeliveryPlan #TheGreatestMEdicalScandal
I was up stupidly early for me this morning and it was an absolutely beautiful day to go spend two hours underground. 1/8
October 25, 2025 at 3:49 PM
I was up stupidly early for me this morning and it was an absolutely beautiful day to go spend two hours underground. 1/8
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Interesting post on the CILIP website: 'AI Wars - The Libraries Fight Back' www.cilip.org.uk/news/712840/...
Timed for Green Libraries Week, which is examining the environmental impact of AI www.cilip.org.uk/page/GreenLi...
#AI4LAM #GreenLibrariesWeek
Timed for Green Libraries Week, which is examining the environmental impact of AI www.cilip.org.uk/page/GreenLi...
#AI4LAM #GreenLibrariesWeek
AI Wars - The Libraries Fight Back
Open Fifth explains how library management systems are fending off the AI bot attacks… for now.
www.cilip.org.uk
October 22, 2025 at 11:54 AM
Interesting post on the CILIP website: 'AI Wars - The Libraries Fight Back' www.cilip.org.uk/news/712840/...
Timed for Green Libraries Week, which is examining the environmental impact of AI www.cilip.org.uk/page/GreenLi...
#AI4LAM #GreenLibrariesWeek
Timed for Green Libraries Week, which is examining the environmental impact of AI www.cilip.org.uk/page/GreenLi...
#AI4LAM #GreenLibrariesWeek
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In Mexico, blackouts caused by data centers destroyed people's refrigerators and oxygen equipment in hospitals, and water shortages meant toilets couldn't flush in schools.
AI is another version of colonial extraction.
AI is another version of colonial extraction.
“By 2035, data centers globally are projected to use about as much electricity as India…according to the International Energy Agency. A single data center can also use more than 500,000 gallons of water a day, nearly as much as an Olympic-size swimming pool.”
🎁:
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...
🎁:
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...
From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy
www.nytimes.com
October 20, 2025 at 12:49 PM
In Mexico, blackouts caused by data centers destroyed people's refrigerators and oxygen equipment in hospitals, and water shortages meant toilets couldn't flush in schools.
AI is another version of colonial extraction.
AI is another version of colonial extraction.
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![1
Nurse:
It’s become a real problem in this area
2
Nurse:
We’ve seen the whole community lost to addiction
3
Show a building sign posted:
Westminster ‘X’ Addiction Clinic
With various Westminster people or looking at their phones outside it
Nurse:
Ministers, Spads, Researchers…
4
Nurse:
Most mornings we’ll get a call about someone acting strangely
[Nurse on phone taking a call]
Ok - we’ll be right over
5
Nurse:
We just have a gentle chat
[Nurses approach a minister –Robert Jenrick? - standing in the Palace of Westminster
Minister:
I understand your concerns…
6
Nurse:
Are you OK love?
Minister:
Yes I’m just hearing legitimate concerns from real voters
7
Nurse:
That’s a robot, a Nazi and a poorly-disguised Russian
[Show that the people he is talking to are precisely these characters]
Nurse 2:
Give us your phone, love
8
Nurse:
At the clinic we put them in a Grass-Touching Pod, with a real voter to talk to
[We see them back at the clinic, holding the minister's head and pushing him into a glass isolation booth with a grass floor. And it is a baffled looking woman, on a chair, ready to talk to him.]
9
Minister:
YOU MUST BE WORRIED ABOUT THE COMING CIVIL WAR
[woman looks baffled]
10
woman:
I just want a bus service
Minister:
LOOK AT MY FLAG
[produces a St George's flag]
[ends]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4m3we4apbjayclzcnhwe3pfp/bafkreicahofq6s4xow7vowj7dx6odw6ejdwr4kwcmzta7qwi4hg2nvywji@jpeg)
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This is a welly good dog.
October 19, 2025 at 7:21 AM
This is a welly good dog.
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oooh. Bookmarking this! "How to turn off AI tools in Apple, Google, Microsoft, and more." Step-by-step instructions from Consumer Reports.
How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More via @ConsumerReports
AI features are crowding into Google search, Gmail, iPhones, Windows laptops, and other products. If you're suffering from AI overload, these settings can help.
www.consumerreports.org
October 15, 2025 at 8:53 PM
oooh. Bookmarking this! "How to turn off AI tools in Apple, Google, Microsoft, and more." Step-by-step instructions from Consumer Reports.
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I was pleased to see this news story shared by my institution to promote the work we have been doing to expand our access to digital archival collections: www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/n...
New collections: widening the range of our digital archives
Significant developments include the completion of a number of online portfolios, notably the high-quality reference material of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia series and the wide-ranging Global Is...
www.manchester.ac.uk
October 14, 2025 at 9:42 AM
I was pleased to see this news story shared by my institution to promote the work we have been doing to expand our access to digital archival collections: www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/n...
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The destruction of statutory youth services in the UK, particularly England, is criminal. (F the guardian and better late than never, but not much better). A biography🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Britain's youth clubs have been quietly decimated. What's most revealing is that few seem to care | John Harris
These vital spaces have been the first targets of cuts in a nation that favours age over youth – despite being the remedy for blights such as social division, polarisation and loneliness, says Guardia...
www.theguardian.com
October 13, 2025 at 9:58 AM
The destruction of statutory youth services in the UK, particularly England, is criminal. (F the guardian and better late than never, but not much better). A biography🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
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real shitposters only use lower case because we are anti-capitalism
October 10, 2025 at 1:22 PM
real shitposters only use lower case because we are anti-capitalism
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Skeptical of AI transcription services (transloption?)?
Want to support a small but fantastic disabled-majority, unapologetically intersectional AND research specialist transcription social enterprise instead?
Contact us quoting code SPOOKY10 for a spooky 10% off our definitely all-human services
Want to support a small but fantastic disabled-majority, unapologetically intersectional AND research specialist transcription social enterprise instead?
Contact us quoting code SPOOKY10 for a spooky 10% off our definitely all-human services
Conducting #QualitativeResearch or #ParticipatoryResearch this autumn?
Prefer the peace of mind and ease of proper human transcription services over the inaccuracies and confabulations of automated transcripts that cost you editing time before analysis?
Contact us for a free no-obligation quote 📧
Prefer the peace of mind and ease of proper human transcription services over the inaccuracies and confabulations of automated transcripts that cost you editing time before analysis?
Contact us for a free no-obligation quote 📧
Home - Academic Audio Transcription Ltd
Get high-quality, human-made transcripts and closed captions from our specialist disabled-led and disabled-majority team of expert transcribers.
academicaudiotranscription.com
October 6, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Skeptical of AI transcription services (transloption?)?
Want to support a small but fantastic disabled-majority, unapologetically intersectional AND research specialist transcription social enterprise instead?
Contact us quoting code SPOOKY10 for a spooky 10% off our definitely all-human services
Want to support a small but fantastic disabled-majority, unapologetically intersectional AND research specialist transcription social enterprise instead?
Contact us quoting code SPOOKY10 for a spooky 10% off our definitely all-human services
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On the off chance: Does anybody have these two Dorothy L. Sayers books *in these editions* and are willing to part with them for money? I'm finding it impossible to get my eager hands on them.
October 3, 2025 at 7:40 AM
On the off chance: Does anybody have these two Dorothy L. Sayers books *in these editions* and are willing to part with them for money? I'm finding it impossible to get my eager hands on them.
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Our CILIP LGBTQ+ Network seeks a new Chair. You'll act as leading officer, informing the decisions made to raise awareness & advise Library, Knowledge & Information workers on LGBTQ+ subjects. Role open to those identifying as LGBTQ+ or Queer. informationprofessionaljobs.com/jobs/chair-u...
September 30, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Our CILIP LGBTQ+ Network seeks a new Chair. You'll act as leading officer, informing the decisions made to raise awareness & advise Library, Knowledge & Information workers on LGBTQ+ subjects. Role open to those identifying as LGBTQ+ or Queer. informationprofessionaljobs.com/jobs/chair-u...
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YES! THIS on GenAI!
Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:
"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."
Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:
"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."
Large Language Muddle | The Editors
The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...
www.nplusonemag.com
September 29, 2025 at 7:07 PM
YES! THIS on GenAI!
Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:
"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."
Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:
"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."
Reposted
When I was a teenager there was a bus direct from my hometown in Germany to London - we had a British army base, and this direct bus connection was one of the benefits of that. One summer I went on that bus to go volunteer in an old people's home in Southend-on-Sea. I had just turned 18 and was... 🧵
September 29, 2025 at 12:32 PM
When I was a teenager there was a bus direct from my hometown in Germany to London - we had a British army base, and this direct bus connection was one of the benefits of that. One summer I went on that bus to go volunteer in an old people's home in Southend-on-Sea. I had just turned 18 and was... 🧵
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Time for me to deploy my expertise from having worked with databases of individuals and their data in the public sector: whatever you might imagine will be happening behind the scenes of a digital ID card, the actual reality of that dataset is going to be an information governance nightmare.
September 26, 2025 at 10:50 AM
Time for me to deploy my expertise from having worked with databases of individuals and their data in the public sector: whatever you might imagine will be happening behind the scenes of a digital ID card, the actual reality of that dataset is going to be an information governance nightmare.
Reposted
When we posted this a couple of weeks ago, we had some AI enthusiasts insist that this diagram was the result of poor prompting, or that the prompt that the original poster made was to generate a funny, bad diagram. So we decided to test ChatGPT's capability...
Today in AI Is Not A Good Source For Learning About The World's Most Misunderstood Body Part, meet this ChatGPT gem.
Funnily enough, we're actually going to talk about how most of this is kinda sorta right (for small values of right), as a cautionary tale about generative AI.
Funnily enough, we're actually going to talk about how most of this is kinda sorta right (for small values of right), as a cautionary tale about generative AI.
September 19, 2025 at 12:56 PM
When we posted this a couple of weeks ago, we had some AI enthusiasts insist that this diagram was the result of poor prompting, or that the prompt that the original poster made was to generate a funny, bad diagram. So we decided to test ChatGPT's capability...
Reposted
“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”
Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books
It’s a trippy time to have a library card.
www.404media.co
September 18, 2025 at 1:58 PM
“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”