No Shelf Control
@litink.bsky.social
cultural heritage preservation | information science | place & public memory | literature & art | coffee | graveyards | professor | not always in that order
Fund your local public and academic libraries and librarians!
Lisa Rabey@pookiebear.net · 2d agoOK. Since I'm a librarian and I must ORGANIZE ALL THE THINGS, I took all the titles mentioned by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, @ali-alkhatib.com, and the Library Freedom Project and put them in a single list on bookshop.org: bookshop.org/wishlists/53.... (I did not coin "data politics," Tressie did.)
Do you use digitized medieval manuscripts in any capacity? Do you have opinions about the metadata that describes them? We want to hear from you! Please take a moment to fill out our very short survey. Please repost and share with anyone you know who might be interested! forms.gle/sBPXAnoRhwe1...
Digitized Medieval Manuscripts: Metadata Preferences
A brief survey about what metadata formats people prefer to go along with their digitized medieval manuscripts. The results of this survey will be used to consider what metadata we make available thro...
forms.gle
Clippy-mogging Copilot has crashed my work more than I care to talk about. I don’t use it; it’s just there running in the background whether or not I like it. No way to shut it off because of centralized IT management and contracts. Burn it all.
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 6d agoTimeline art
this was such an incredibly moving film and i still listen to the soundtrack regularly sad loss Glen Hansard, Irish singer-songwriter from the band the Frames and from the film “Once” (with Markéta Irglová), died.
I said this about the impact limited app menus on users. When you only ever use apps w/predetermined menus and limited choices you end up trying to apply binary choices and down-menu options to everything
Cyd Harrell@cydharrell.bsky.social · 3w agoan idea's been rolling around in my head about how what we lose with assuming everyone wants "answers" & not search results is similar to what we lose when "route" is the only kind of map we encounter I won't get the academic terms right, but it's some version of skipping an essential abstraction
someone on ig said that for academics July feels like Sunday night and August is Monday because then the semester starts, and I …
My summer reading book orders are coming in (yay!)… I’ll likely not get to these until December.
Can anybody who has driven #BayArea to #Vancouver BC please provide a realistic travel time including crossing the border? planning this drive and have yet to find a map or blog that describes that drive (maps are giving different times, no accounting for pit stops, etc). TIA
Gentle reminder to fund your librarians and librarians. It’s fine to call them hero’s and imagine them saving the world, but it’d be better if they were funded while doing so.
Tim Ellis 🍁@djdynamic.ca · 4w ago"They just want to turn it off." A fascinating story of the librarians who have started teaching classes showing people how to remove AI "features" from their phones and apps. www.bangordailynews.com/2026/07/02/m...
I initially read this as “more fiction” (as in literary fiction), and now I say yes to both more fiction and more friction! But not in the form of misinformation.
Alex Hanna@alexhanna.bsky.social · last mo.A message for the class of 2026: We need more friction!
And, with rising deaths. I believe we are up to 51 known names of detained deaths. Obviously the number is likely higher, but with lack of real oversight we may never know the real numbers.
Dave Byrnes@djbyrnes1.bsky.social · last mo.I can't imagine the soullessness necessary to transform the abduction of thousands of people by a masked secret police force, their disappearance into jails and private concentration camps, and the terrorizing and occupying of communities across the country, into "remarkable operational results."
Almost a decade ago now, I said to a colleague, “they’ll be coming for museums & archives”. She brushed w/ something like “they’re not worried about us”. Then we started seeing the defunding and dismantling. NARA closing two major sites. Link in comments.
Started watching In the Hand of Dante. Does it eventually get less stereotypical, pretentious, and irritating or is that the whole gag?
These robotic-observer-cop-tower things are annoying in my own neighborhood, and insulting at the place people are meant to linger.
amanda moore 🐢@noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · last mo.“Loitering is not permitted in this area. Please proceed to a designated location. Thank you for your cooperation,” a surveillance machine tells a small cluster of National Guard members as they patrol the fenced off Reflecting Pool in the rain.
in response to their claim that they’ll go bankrupt, this seems like the only appropriate place to quote that woman with all the sugary positivity it deserves: “let them 😌”.
Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · last mo.I need plenty of cake or I get cranky
The Lonely Race to Save Ukraine’s Past In a country ravaged by war, Ukraine’s conservators are torn between protecting the country’s past and fighting for its future. by Gina Errico www.biographic.com/the-lonely-r...
The Lonely Race to Save Ukraine’s Past - bioGraphic
In a country ravaged by war, Ukraine’s conservators are torn between protecting the country’s past and fighting for its future.
biographic.com
Does anyone have access to the interview between Trevor Noah and Jason Reynolds from Jan 23, 2018? Al links seem to be dead or gone from the host site as well as all other references to it. TIA if you access and can share! I use this interview in class and (hopefully) can continue to use it.
Absolutely, and let me be clear about this, absolutely TF not with “confabulation” to “fill the gaps”. Critical or otherwise.
Sarah E. Bond@sarahebond.bsky.social · 2mo agoSaidiya Hartman deserves so much better than for her methodologies to be used in this horrendous way.
*double sigh* because i can repeat this until I am blue in the face and yet every course I get the obviously auto-generated citations in the works cited lists in final papers and all I can do is grade what is turned in despite multiple warnings, examples, lectures, lessons, resource links, etc.
RA Walker@tchrgrrrl.bsky.social · 2mo ago*sigh* I taught students to do this. And the main idea I drummed into them--like beating a dead horse--was that if you use a citation generator and submit its mistakes, THOSE ARE NOW YOUR MISTAKES. Easier to just write your own citations. Everything else is twice the work. I will die on this hill.
pass it on As a west coast native I support this message. Now living inland, I still support this message.
David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 2mo agoPsst…the ocean is the only reason life exists at all and the reason Earth is habitable. Pass it on.
A flight to Peru is 2k. Yes, it is a miracle of science that we can fly there, but it’s a crime of capitalism that it’s 2k to do so from the US.
Got my gym time in, had a yummy homemade lunch, and now off to write for a couple of hours. ✍🏽✍🏽✍🏽 Realistically, probably 90 minutes, but I can dream!
We put a lot of faith in digital resources that are often at the mercy of budgets that are not at all related to researchers needs or interests.
Sharon Howard@sharonhoward.bsky.social · 3mo agoI don't think people fully understand yet just how fragile university-hosted digital resources are after external funding ends (especially if the lead academic retires or moves or is made redundant).
“I write with dismay, grief and sorrow for the permanent closure of MIT Libraries Barker, Dewey and Rotch, and termination of library staff in those libraries. For MIT to be closing three of its four major libraries..." fnl.mit.edu/may-june-202...
Lament for the MIT Libraries - MIT Faculty Newsletter
fnl.mit.edu
Michael D. Green, PhD@michaeldgreen.phd · 2mo agoPresident of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...
🧵 “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power a tomatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” “they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow”
Joseph Rezek@rezekjoe.bsky.social · 2mo agoWhy is this just so crazy to read from him. Explaining how the robots are not human. Just spelling it out
The re-meaning of everything continues. If you were alive anytime between then and now you know this is not what DHS was conceived to be. It was always about surveillance and policing. There was no harmony involved, and the only unity was between federal and state policing systems.
NPR@npr.org · 2mo agoDHS was originally conceived in the interest of unity and harmony — and the phrase "homeland security" was originally meant to be reassuring. n.pr/4nOx8KP
