I know no one cares about John Greenleaf Whittier so please stop me from telling this dealer that I don’t think that’s a legitimate signature
Public services sure was more fun before genAI fucked my inbox all up
Surprised every time by how early “Q” comes in the alphabet
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I told a researcher months ago “PERHAPS WE’LL NEVER KNOW” how a periodical got into our collection but it turns out that no, we definitely can know.
What are the two closest wawas? It feels like the answer must be “center city somewhere” but “five blocks in downtown Media” has to be a contender 🦅
I went to the makerspace to test out the sewing machines and now I am the insatiable mouse with her cookie, never leaving the tinker room
Who is going to stop Doing Discourse long enough to call up a couple of boxes (ok, like 8) at the Clements and do actual reporting
“Sure, make that decision, I don’t care,” I say, caring severely
It’s the Ben Franklin Bridge’s 100th birthday!!! Absolutely fantastic piece, in design and reporting, in @inquirer.com on the building of the bridge incorporating really cool construction photographs from Lehigh and LCP collections. Walk across it tomorrow with me :) share.inquirer.com/EB7jKe
Spanning 100 Years: How Philadelphia’s monumental bridge was built
A century after opening, this is how the Benjamin Franklin Bridge was built to last.
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I'm seeking a tool for Arabic OCR—anyone have anything they'd recommend? Specifically I'd like to run it on an early-mid-20thC printed periodical, and would really like hOCR or ALTO output So far I've had moderate luck with Kraken and not much with Tesseract
Personally I think the most crucial literacy we’re not teaching enough is how to recognize a grift
Bittersweet to be at desk 1066 in BL manuscripts today
Great garbage email this AM with an entirely superfluous mention of genAI. Yeah, Alexey, I figured that part out before para 2.
I can’t believe I almost didn’t visit the Grohmann Museum, the oddest “rich weirdo buys thrift shop art celebrating labor (but not the organized kind!!!)” museum I’ll visit this year. Yay printing!
Zoom voicemail transcription is trying to tell me a patron is asking about “a SAML band” I’m curious: is SAML a common enough abbreviation that most people would recognize it? Or do we need to teach Zoom German and/or book history?
I turned my interpretive-sign art into a sticker, for all of you out there who stop to read every historic marker and sign on trips…. littlebraincomics.etsy.com/listing/4516...
The aggressive workplace spam filter has refused delivery of an email titled “Genealogical research, Quakers.” It’s just like me!
You aren't future proofing a library while eliminating library jobs.
Librarians who co-sign deliteracy & deskilling can go straight to hell, which is an infinite slidedeck presentation of inaccurate AI summaries of books deaccessioned into oblivion.
Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2mo agoThe official reason seems to be that use of printed materials is declining - which even if true doesn’t necessarily mean that one should close libraries and fire staff. MIT has amazing humanities programs; shouldn’t an institution this rich be able to support them? libraries.mit.edu/about/vision...
Our staff summer reading challenge is four days old and at 8,600 pages so looks like somebody is gonna be seconded to the “leaf drawing department”
I used to really enjoy strategic planning (I know many disagree!) but it turns out with enough ego, silos, and micromanagement, anything can be made painful!!
Read Kiki Arantia's article about Shakespeare in the Kitchen in @inquirer.com today! @phillyinqfood.bsky.social share.inquirer.com/GE1MCw
The Taming of the Stew: Penn State professor cooks from Shakespeare
Penn State Abington professor’s new book, “Shakespeare in the Kitchen,” looks at the playwright’s works with a culinary gaze.
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Audited one of my favourite drawers today. As far as I can tell there was an entire generation of past mollusc curators who communicated entirely by means of passive-aggressive drawer notes to each other
sorry all our infrastructure is so bad, but i want you to know our admin had a lot of fun drinking with the vendors of this software product! <3
Who will be the leftist of 2026 to create the next schlock collection? www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
How a Radical Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76
Yale’s Bicentennial Schlock collection offers a window into the star-spangled commercialism that swept the country 50 years ago.
nytimes.com
