LOEX

Reminder that this is due next Friday, Oct 31!

Registration is now open for LOEX Fall Focus 2025! This is an online, information literacy & library instruction conference focused on:
- Focus 1: Artificial Intelligence
- Focus 2: Archives & Special Collections
- Focus 3: Sense of Belonging

loexfallfocus.org

November 17-19, #loexff2025

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

So for-profit AI companies have trained on the world's largest collaborative volunteer project and a precious free resource, to make money for their for-profit enterprises. They have crushed traffic to the volunteer project, starving it of donors and volunteers

www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

"Inclusion and Empathy Are Not Enough: Cultivating Student Belonging in the Academic Library Through Compassion" by Emily Reed, Penn State Harrisburg (portal: Libraries and the Academy)
rebrand.ly/q9o9al4

“We’ve decided to make it so society can’t trust anything they’ve shown so you’re just going to have to “evolve” with that.”

ACRL University Library Section (ULS) Professional Development Committee, Call for Proposals The ULS Professional Development Committee (PDC) hosts several online programs throughout the year (prior programs available at https://acrl.libguides.com/uls/committees/professional-development). Th...

The ACRL University Libraries Section Professional Development Committee has issued a Call for Proposals for online programs that further ACRL members' professional development, knowledge, and practice.
Due Oct 31, 2025.

More details about this webinar series at forms.gle/BJk9Swh9wWBa...

This is next week!

"Reading Between the Lines: Celebrating Banned Books Week Through the Lens of the Information Literacy Framework" by Chakraborty and Ford (C&RL News)

rebrand.ly/aahcn1o

The proposal topic for the California Conference on Library Instruction #ccli2026 is ready! Propose by October 29, 2025 for our in-person conference May 29, 2026 at Cal State Monterey Bay. More information on our site: www.cclibinstruction.org

The call for LOEX 2026 (Norfolk, VA, May 7-9) Breakout Session Proposals is posted! "Oceans of Knowledge:
Diving into Information Literacy" loexconference.org/proposals/br... Due December 1, 2025 #loex2026

"Librarians as Faculty Developers: Shaping Disciplinary Classroom Experiences through Information Literacy" by Rachel Fundator et al. (C&RL)

rebrand.ly/b5h2oi8

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: ACRL ULS PDC: Citational Privilege: Disrupting the Patriarchy and Empowering Students Through Feminist Citation Practices. After registering, you will recei... Coined by Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life, citational privilege is alive and well in academia. Citation practices have the power to create canons and shift scholarly discourse. They can offer a w...

Free Online Presentation: "Citational Privilege: Disrupting the Patriarchy and Empowering Students Through Feminist Citation Practices" by Laura Sheets et al (BGSU) - October 8, 2025, 2-3pm ET

Sponsored by the ACRL ULS Professional Development Committee. Register ala-events.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Column | Teachers got mad about a cheat button in Chrome. Now Google’s pausing it. Google quietly added a “homework help” button to the world’s most-used web browser. Educators say it makes cheating too easy.

“Chrome’s cheating tool exemplifies Big Tech’s continuing gold rush approach to AI: launch first, consider consequences later and let society clean up the mess.”

"For-Credit Library Instruction: Exploring the Experiences of Academic Librarians Serving as Instructors of Record" by Elizabeth Nelson and Angela Davis (C&RL)

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"Effectiveness of Academic Library Research Guides for Building College Students’ Information Literacy Skills: A Scoping Review" by Erica Lynn DeFrain, Leslie Sult, Nicole Pagowsky (C&RL) rebrand.ly/eawa2ne

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: ACRL ULS PDC: A Discussion of Faculty and Predatory Journals: The Potential Role of Librarians. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email abo... As a webinar registrant, you will receive follow-up correspondence from ACRL specifically related to this webinar (including, but not limited to, instructions for accessing both the live webinar and i...

Free Online Presentation: "A Discussion of Faculty and Predatory Journals: The Potential Role of Librarians" by Stephanie Wiegand et al (OSU) - September 17, 2025, 2-3 pm ET

Sponsored by the ACRL ULS Professional Development Committee. Register ala-events.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Is the LLM response wrong, or have you just failed to iterate it? Many "errors" in search-assisted LLMs are not errors at all, but the result of an investigation aborted too soon. Here's how to up your LLM-based verification game by going to round two.

This is a good post on how to get better at using AI. It's the product of pretty intensive research on what consistently works although I don't surface that research directly in it.

Bluesky and AI, so obviously comments on this are off. mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/is-the-llm...

These are due tomorrow!

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History "These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."

AI "boring history" slop has taken over YouTube and is particularly insidious because it flattens history and drowns out the tireless work of creators who have been integral to legitimizing YouTube as a place for high-quality history videos

www.404media.co/ai-generated...

The ALAO Annual Conference is taking place November 6 & 7, 2025 at the OCLC Convention Center in Dublin, Ohio (just outside of Columbus). Registration is now live. Note that early bird rates will end on September 19, 2025.

alaoweb.org/conferences/...

I just had my first (actual) reference question of the year. A FY student asked for "books on anatomy."

A textbook question?

No! He wanted comprehensive, overview books that he could read ahead of the class to "get ready."

I found 3 books, explained the LOC, knighted him, and sent him on his way.

The fire alarm just went off at LOEX HQ in Ypsi, completely surprising me, and my body clenched so hard I almost pulled something.

Glad it's just a test and I can easily hear it!

Ha! Well, he was wrong there...that was one loud & often obnoxious movie (Mater was insufferable) but I appreciate the sentiment & understand where he was coming from.

Exactly. Ebert had broad tastes. The man loved movies of all shapes & sizes, and could tell you why--in a sound bite or in long form.

It's terrible to lose critic positions. Just like librarians, they can help people sift through an avalanche of content & guide you towards the good stuff.

Your assertion is that Roger Ebert, the man who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, rarely liked fun movies?

Call for Proposals for ALA 2026 in Chicago next June. #alaac26

Program and Poster Proposals are open through September 22, 2025

Celebrating 150 years of the American Library Association.

2026.alaannual.org/call-proposals

“[Students] wondered why faculty weren’t doing more to adjust teaching practices to match the fundamental changes wrought by new technologies—and potentially improve the learning experience in the process.”

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

Not a fan of the music -- I appreciate the attempt to give it that Weather Channel, smooth jazz feel. But it sounded pretty generic to me, and turns out, it's all AI.

Still, I'd pay a small yearly fee to have this accessible with one button on my TV. Overall, useful info done right.

WeatherStar 4000+ Web based WeatherStar 4000 simulator that reports current and forecast weather conditions plus a few extras!

This website is something else. I have many problems w the big weather sites/apps out there, as they are snowed under by ads.

This is a nostalgia-driven, all-killer / no filler, weather report. It's scraped from weather.gov - shows value of good govt information.

weatherstar.netbymatt.com