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

You can kill a French vampire with a baguette. It's a painstaking process but it works.

I'M DYING OVER HERE 💀💀💀 THE CAT GOT AI SCAM EMAIL 🐈 Aeschylus, our orange tabby, got an obviously AI email about selling more copies of the Oresteia on A**zon

Today’s first task: collating this little beast 😍😍 (cue the theme from 2001: ASpace Odyssey) - hand for scale #medievalsky #medievalmss #midwestmss @peripheralmss.bsky.social (Loras College)

Eduroam giveth, and eduroam taketh away

"The number of unpermitted turbines identified by Reuters is about double what xAI has publicly acknowledged."

Insight: Pollution from Musk’s unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has installed 59 natural gas turbines for its Colossus 2 data center project in Tennessee without securing federal clean air permits, according to commu...

reuters.com

What absolutely gorgeous initials in this 15th C Italian Psalter at Loras College @peripheralmss.bsky.social #midwestmss #medieval

Playing my favorite game of fingernail vs scribe with this little ex situ binding fragment from Loras College. 🔍👀 #medievalsky #medievalmss #midwestmss #manuscripts @peripheralmss.bsky.social

This little 15c missal (still at Loras College) is full of cadelle letters inhabited by little men with distinctive chins and noses, all wearing hats. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #medievalsky #medievalmss #midwestmss #manuscripts @peripheralmss.bsky.social

From the Loras College collections, the *best* vine-bird-dragon of all time?! I think so, yes! 😍😍 @peripheralmss.bsky.social #medievalsky #midwestmss #medievalmss

📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.

Jesse Locker@jessemlocker.bsky.social · 3w ago

Giving myself a headache in the archives

📢Fallen type klaxon!

Dr Liam Sims@liamsims.bsky.social · 3w ago

An impression from a piece of fallen type - an error in the printing process captured forever. In a copy of Constantius Applanus’s ‘Soliloquiorum’, printed at Cremona in 1496 and given to @theulspeccoll.bsky.social by Stephen Gaselee in 1934. CUL Inc.5.B.20.5[4036]. #fallentype #incunabula

Our @peripheralmss.bsky.social site visit to Loras College is off to an incredible start!!! (feat. @sarahloleet.bsky.social and her incredible student David!) #medievalsky #manuscripts #midwestmss #medievalmss #adventuresinspecialcollections

The comment count as of Sunday July 11, 2026 1:05pm ET.

For folks asking why bother commenting because the OMB won't care: comments help build cases for the courts by explicitly laying out harms. That's why it's really important to have your comments be as specific as possible. Also, contact your senators and reps! They actually do care about this.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 4w ago

Monday is the deadline for public comment! The Heritage Foundation has been mobilizing its members to leave comments in favor of the rule change, so every unique comment matters (don’t use a form letter or copy/paste—similar comments are batched and treated as one).

Monday is the deadline for public comment! The Heritage Foundation has been mobilizing its members to leave comments in favor of the rule change, so every unique comment matters (don’t use a form letter or copy/paste—similar comments are batched and treated as one).

Bethany Brookshire@beebrookshire.bsky.social · 4w ago

There's an OMB rule change that would require political oversight of scientific grants, and could pull any that don't "reflect presidential priorities" Another country has tried this before! It was the USSR and it was called Lysenkoism. By @thsaey.bsky.social www.sciencenews.org/article/omb-...

"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...

These Maine librarians are helping patrons resist AI and Big Tech

Despite breathless reporting on how AI is going to change the world, Hannah Cyrus, a Bangor librarian, said that, in her experience, most library patrons aren’t finding it helpful.

bangordailynews.com

🚨Job! 🚨 Open-rank, tenure-track position in pre-1800 history of medicine at Johns Hopkins #histmed #histstm apply.interfolio.com/182469?fbcli...

I built a free scholary converter for 20 premodern calendar systems — Julian, Hijri, Solar Hijri, Coptic, Armenian, Byzantine, Syriac, Athenian and more: kalkal.online

Millions of copyrighted songs were fed to AI music generators - now there's proof Suno and rivals are being sued for $150k per song. A sum that would bankrupt these companies and set an important precedent.

Millions of Copyrighted Songs Were Fed to AI Music Generators – Now There's Proof

Millions of copyrighted songs trained AI music generators, and new searchable databases from The Atlantic now confirm which tracks were used.

gadgetreview.com

I just learned that OMB is required to respond to every comment on the anti-peer-review rule. So that means our comments really matter, at the very least by gumming up the gears. Send your comment today.

@bowprow.bsky.social · 2mo ago

PLEASE submit a public comment opposing this rule change during the comment period. Do not let this go unchallenged. Urge your friends and associates to do the same. www.npr.org/2026/06/03/n...

us, lightly touching a document: I just need to move you so I can make sure you're properly supported on this table the document, the pages enormous: you SHOVE document? you throw the vellum like a paper aeroplane? oh! oh! jail for archivist! jail for archivist for One Thousand Years!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

And it devalues the research process and in practice - given constantly accelerating cuts to the programs that produce the work genAI merely trains on - makes that process less accessible to people who might want to learn. It is anti-intellectual, and anti-democratic not despite but because of that.

The fact that anyone can get any amount of *content* on any subject does not make *research* or *knowledge* a whit more democratic. It devalues not *credentials* (which AI companies appropriate in their own advertizing!) but rather actual *work*: time in the field, in the archive, at the keyboard.

Above all, taking direct engagement with sources, with the process of building interpretations from them, and with the education of judgment and social interaction that involves, and replacing it with a corporate platform for entering prompts, makes research as a human activity much less accessible.

Nor is using people's work or selling products using their names, credentials, likenesses, etc. without their consent a blow to credentialism, any more than stealing their papers and diplomas would be. If you struggle to see them as people, try anthropomorphizing them as you do bots. Go from there.

Equating whatever GPT has trained on with knowledge in general excludes a lot of work that was not digitized in the first place. That's not a win for accessibility or democratization of knowledge. If anything, it privileges what was already most accessible, and excludes unique and marginal sources.

I'm sorry but if I criticize the promotion of genAl as a surrogate "research assistant" for sidelining non-digitized sources, and for making the process of creating knowledge from them more opaque, and you tell me that's just credentialism, I'm obliged to ask if you read and understood the criticism