Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social
Librarian and digital scholarship/data person working in cultural heritage. Also a former journalist and current local journalism booster in #Brooklyn / #NYC I work for the largest library in the world but all skeets and thoughts here are my own
Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.
Jason Heppler@jasonheppler.org · 5d agoFilm you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t James Carville’s last successful political insight closer in time to JFK’s assassination than it is to today?
"Is this process annoying? Maybe. But if asking the owner of a $5 million property to submit some forms over the internet is 'harassment,' how should we describe the process of obtaining SNAP benefits, or unemployment checks, or health insurance on the exchange?" hellgatenyc.com/second-home-...
Feels like we're in an era related to that old plumber anecdote about charging for years of experience, not the actual action: Using LLM tools to build interfaces and datasets: mostly simple Having 20 years of experience w/ common pitfalls, appropriate uses, and where to look for data: priceless
Okay I gotta hand it to the illustrator on this one for sorta combining Minard's visualization of the loss of troops during Napoleon's Russian invasion with Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa. Figuring out how to combine those in a viz has gotta be a bucket list item for dataviz people.
Dr Ian McCormick@wokestudies.bsky.social · 7d agoHandy Guide to the death count in The Odyssey. #Homer #epic #film #Nolan
I’m no epic poet, but it feels like there’s a metaphor in there somewhere
Josh Hadro@hadro.bsky.social · 7d agoYou can see amidst the rubble the remains of the Statue of Liberty illustration that was painted over the old Sherita sign at Atlantic Av and Classon Av in Brooklyn
You can see amidst the rubble the remains of the Statue of Liberty illustration that was painted over the old Sherita sign at Atlantic Av and Classon Av in Brooklyn
Josh Hadro@hadro.bsky.social · 2w agoFare thee well, Sherita sign and the building upon which you stood Your history was sketchier than almost anyone knew (www.thecityreporter.nyc/2025/05/19/s...), but you were a Brooklyn landmark nevertheless
This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b
New York City's hottest club is Aboard's Office Hours event with @hadro.bsky.social and @ftrain.bsky.social: luma.com/aboard-p9g1 (Is there anything better than a library party?)
Databases for the People: How to use AI to unlock library archives · Luma
Join Aboard for a night of conversation with Josh Hadro, acting chief of the Library of Congress Digital Innovation Division, as he discusses an…
luma.com
I don't generally trust automated historical geocoding because streets change often, but for a work-in-progress the NYC addresses are basically stable and useful as a broad indicator of where listings clustered.
Fare thee well, Sherita sign and the building upon which you stood Your history was sketchier than almost anyone knew (www.thecityreporter.nyc/2025/05/19/s...), but you were a Brooklyn landmark nevertheless
Dream event! I’ll be talking about my Directory Pipeline work, and some of the projects my data extraction tools have enabled — it will be fun, I promise
Paul Ford@ftrain.bsky.social · 2w agoLibrary-focused event next week @ the Aboard office, featuring @hadro.bsky.social, regarding the intersection of The Most Forbidden Subject (LLM-based AI) and The Most Beloved Subject (librarianship and open access). Free, open, friendly, snacks. luma.com/aboard-p9g1
Hey, New Yorkers: Mayor Mamdani is recreating the city's digital service, after Mayor Adams destroyed it. They're hiring devs, designers, and product folks to work on-site in Brooklyn, starting now. You don't even have to be a city resident. Get on it!
NYC PIT Crew
nyc.gov
Getting pretty close to finishing a first pass on a fun personal project that brings together travel listing across a bunch of different publications from ~1930-1966
“Hey Steve why are you so concerned about making Grand Army Plaza safer?” “Oh no reason”
The bottleneck isn't model size, it's data. And pooling pays off: adding one collection made the model better at collections it had never seen. Every institution that contributes makes the shared model better for everyone. I'd love to see this kind of thing built by the GLAM sector!
Say, for example, if we had 3 examples of labeled city directory data from every state in the US, we could easily train a generic city directory parser! (I’m actually working on this, and I’ll have it done relatively soon, but @danielvanstrien.bsky.social’s point holds in so many other cases!)
Daniel van Strien@danielvanstrien.bsky.social · last mo.If libraries, archives and museums pooled their (labelled) data, they could build state-of-the-art open models for the things they actually care about! I tried a small version: one open model (NuExtract-3, 4B) fine-tuned to read archival index cards across several collections.
I cannot urge you strongly enough to spend a random evening every now and then hand-transcribing 150 year old city directories from where you live, because you will find out that an inventor from 1876 lived around the corner from you!
Well, it was bound to happen, and it did: Claude just explained #IIIF to me like I was 5 years old.
I get to spend a percentage of my time working on the Revolution Crossroads project, and there’s some great stuff coming down the pike!
Diane Zorich@dzorich.bsky.social · 2mo agoA joint initiative by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress using advanced AI to reconnect long-separated Revolutionary-era records. Website accessible below Open-Source Datasets on Hugging Face at lnkd.in/eFUrCa6K
Calling library and general GLAM data people 📜📚: If you were looking for training data related to historical city directories, where would you look? I'm considering fine-tuning a small GLAM model to parse 19th and early 20th century city directories, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel!
I did this with Emily Wilson’s Odyssey when my kid was in the NICU for 30 days. Not sure the kiddo cared what I was reading given they were -2 months old, but I can confirm it was a fun version to read out loud
Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 2mo agoI've been reading Emily Wilson's Odyssey out loud to my kids and it absolutely rocks for that purpose. So much fun to read aloud and flows so smoothly. The kids would never have sat still for her wordier laborious predecessors.
Over the weekend I built a prototype data explorer for the 1921 edition of the Tulsa city directory, which was published just a few months before the Tulsa Race Massacre: hadro.github.io/tulsa-city-d...
Polk-Hoffhine Tulsa City Directory, 1921
Browse 69,843 entries from the 1921 Tulsa city directory — compiled months before the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed the Greenwood district.
hadro.github.io
NEW PIGEON WHO DIS besties, THE CITY is now The City Reporter extra extra read all about it!
THE CITY Is Now The City Reporter
New name, new pigeon, same award-winning journalism for all New Yorkers.
thecityreporter.nyc
Can an LLM agent help me with all the "class action notice" emails I get and wake me up if there's ever actually a genuine payout for the various ways technology companies have violated my rights in recent years?
Built a useful GLAM model this week: flags blank index cards before expensive OCR. Cheap, scales, adapts. IMO the technical barrier is now very low, the main one is knowing how. So I wrote this up as a chapter: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-for-glam/patterns/index-card-classifier.html
My 2yo was really grooving to St Thomas when it came on the radio this AM. Only later did I realize why all the inter-segment music buttons were by Sonny Rollins. RIP to one of the true greats.
Maybe if we went back to the era where license plates were printed in annual indexes along with your name and home address, there’d be more accountability for drivers running over pedestrians E.g., digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0b4ed4...
Sam@samd.bsky.social · 3mo agothe whole point of license plates is making it easy to track the 2-ton pieces of heavy machinery that collectively kill 40,000 Americans every year! if anything, automated enforcement reduces the need for dangerous and problematic police enforcement of traffic laws!
Thanks so much for putting "The Case for Boring AI" right up front! I've been carrying that banner for a long time -- but just in conversations and meetings -- so now I have this chapter and amazing book-in-progress to link to.
Daniel van Strien@danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 3mo agoWhat is "AI for libraries" beyond a catalogue chatbot? IMO: design patterns (OCR, extraction, classification, search), and agents that both run them and develop the small models behind them. As part of work with @natlibscot.bsky.social started a book on this: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-...