Sarah Ames

We've been working on our new Digital Collections Platform - launching formally in 2026. Thanks @emmahorrell.bsky.social for all your UX guidance and support!

blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-comm...

(dataset used, 'Scotland on the Internet', available on Data Foundry soon...)

'Who decides what’s worth remembering, and how does that shape our shared story?' @andreakocsis.bsky.social and Dorsey Kaufmann's exhibition, Digital Ghosts, opens in November. Really happy that NLS could partially fund this work through our Digital Research Fellowship: data.nls.uk/projects/dig...

The day Return became Enter A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard

A really interesting piece on the Return/Enter key. aresluna.org/the-day-retu...

I also did some work on the terminology of "return" in this context in www.sup.org/books/media-...

Customer feedback this week;

‘Please can you get some more diversity at the National Trust by encouraging more hot men to visit.’

Ideas for how we do this v welcome. Nothing too racy please - we are the National Trust not the National Tryst.

Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration

So @theturing.bsky.social has decided they no longer need Humanities (!) - so the The Alan Turing Institute’s Humanities and Data Science Interest Group are having one final event: "Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration" In person and online, Oxford, 25th Sept. Pls share!

Spent the morning seeing if I could map some of London pornographers' addresses during the mid-19th century w/ the National Library of Scotland's georeferenced maps. Did I need to do this? Probably not. But very neat to see some of them laid out spatially.

Is this our youngest author on Transkribus Sites?

Scottish writer Marjory Fleming was just seven years old when she starting writing her diary, which became popular in the late Victorian period.

You can read the diary in full on Transkribus Sites 👇

app.transkribus.org/en/sites/mar...

The fact this confected issue has smothered everything else in the national debate – and is being allowed to by the government – is a tragedy and going to end very badly if the course does not change quickly.

Generative AI does nothing for 95 percent of companies : MIT NANDA study finds only 5 percent of organizations using AI tools in production at scale

GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40 billion on fire

www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/g...

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

Generative AI and the Future of the Digital Commons: Five Open Questions and Knowledge Gaps The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) relies heavily on the digital commons, a vast collection of free and open online content that is created, shared, and maintained by communities. However,...

"Developing AI technologies in ways that truly benefit the public and treat common resources with care would constitute a more responsible practice, requiring further commitments to transparency and accountability around negative externalities."

Noroozian et al on AI and the digital commons.

On Gaza’s killing fields, journalism faces its darkest hour – but that won’t stop us reporting | Asef Hamidi Israel’s actions are an assault not only on individual reporters but on the entire global public’s right to know the truth, says Asef Hamidi of Al Jazeera

On Gaza’s killing fields, journalism faces its darkest hour – but that won’t stop us reporting | Asef Hamidi

A banner advert for the University of Warwick, which says "Beyond ignores curiousity". This is a spelling error.

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere.

But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.

A sign reading ‘It’s our birthday! 100 today’ in front of the National Library of Scotland building in Edinburgh.

🎪 The mayhem begins!

Celebrate with us! Doors open at 10am at George IV Bridge (Edinburgh) and Kelvin Hall (Glasgow). Be among the first 500 at each site to get your special edition centenary comic, created by Beano!

#NLS100 #Beano

Screenshot of the app showing a page from a book + different views of existing and new ocr.

Many VLM-based OCR models have been released recently. Are they useful for libraries and archives?

I made a quick Space to compare VLM OCR with "traditional" OCR using 11k Scottish exam papers from @natlibscot.bsky.social

huggingface.co/spaces/davanstrien/ocr-time-capsule

The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched

[Blogged] The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search - From Clarivate's Summon to Primo Research Assistant, content‑moderation layers meant mostly for chatbots are "quietly" blocking controversial topics from being searched
aarontay.substack.com/p/the-ai-pow...

Slide with title Digital Humanities for a World Unmade, blue background with stylized images of a Dutch windmill, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Hagia Sofia, Big Ben, and the Singaporean lion.

Here's a write-up of my keynote from #DH2025, since academic publishing is slow and this was written for right now. roopikarisam.com/talks-cat/dh...

Unsure if that's an opposition to AI or an opposition to the opposition of AI. But the culture of backlash it has created is a real danger that could undo 20 years of utopian thinking, argumentation, and implementation.

About this Collection | Selected Datasets | Digital Collections | Library of Congress Datasets are increasingly a key digital resource used in a wide range of fields. The Library of Congress selects, preserves, and provides enduring access to datasets with the goal of cultivating a bro...

The Library of Congress is looking for feedback on their amazing/unique "Selected Datasets" collection. You can see the collection here and the survey link is at the top of the page. www.loc.gov/collections/... Anyone interested in working with datasets check out the collection and take the survey.

The 2025 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI

Stanford HAI AI Index: 'training compute doubles every five months, datasets every eight, and power use annually' but AI models 'often fail to reliably solve logic tasks even when provably correct solutions exist, limiting their effectiveness in high-stakes settings where precision is critical'

Wragge Labs A compilation of things I've built over the last 30 years to help people see and use the online collections of libraries, archives, and museums.

For 30 years I've been experimenting with ways to see & use the online collections of libraries, archives & museums. I've made useful things, playful things, & weird things. Here's a big list of them for you to explore! https://wraggelabs.com #GLAM #histodons #digitalHumanities

Is it human to make a huge profit from knowledge? asks Hilde Van Wijngaarden from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in this afternoon's session on Knowledge as a Catalyst. #LKFS2025

Knowledge Futures I want to start in a singular place of culture, the British Museum. From the Great Court one can now peer into that symbol of human knowledge, the round reading room.  We all somehow have it i…

here's my presentation to the super #LKFS2025; super important conversations. Many thanks to @masudk.com and colleagues for showing the way to knowledge futures. and here's Allan Ginsberg on the library dancefloor!

anatomiesofpower.wordpress.com/2025/06/27/k...

Library Catalogues as Data book cover

Happy to see this published today, and it's been a real privilege to work on with Paul Gooding, @melissaterras.bsky.social and the @facetpublishing.bsky.social team. Thanks to all the wonderful contributors! Here's the link: www.facetpublishing.co.uk/page/detail/...

Library Catalogues As Data book

Hurrah! My next book is instantiated, and in-the-world! Library Catalogues As Data: Research, Practice, Usage. Edited with Paul Gooding and @semames.bsky.social. Proud of this one! Official publication date soon… www.facetpublishing.co.uk/page/detail/...

Today we launched a small service on JSTOR to help expert researchers get bulk access to bibliographic data and full text content. A fun part: you can go download 12M+ metadata records bulk in one file, right now: www.jstor.org/ta-support

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums "This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

'“I don't think that people appreciate how few people are working to keep these collections online, even at huge institutions,” Weinberg told me. “It's usually an incredibly small team, one person, half a person, half a person, plus, like their web person who is sympathetic to what's going on.'

Fancy Edinburgh Uni as a visiting fellow? Global Majority Fellowships in NLP 2025-2026, for early careers researchers. For this 1st year, we welcome applications on “Responsible NLP and Digital Cultural Heritage”, working with me! 2-3 months in duration, Visa fees, stipend &travel. Please share!

Today we released Institutional Books 1.0, a 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections, refined for accuracy and usability. 🧵