Peter Johnson

I dreamed I was made director of a small library in the middle of nowhere so I moved to this place in the mountains where I knew absolutely nobody and it turned out they just wanted to lure in a human sacrifice in case you were wondering what the level of “feeling targeted as a profession” was

Libraries purchase books. When you see a book at the library, it isn’t “free”

the library bought it.

which in turn means that the community bought it.

In other words, library books are not lost sales for authors and publishers; they’re positive sales. Active sales. Those are bought.

Georgia Public Libraries generate $3.75 return for every dollar invested, new study finds Georgia's public libraries generated $1.06 billion in services in fiscal year 2024, supporting 5,488 jobs and producing $3.75 of value per public dollar.

We need libraries for so many reasons.

www.11alive.com/article/news...

Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health This cross-sectional study summarizes the number of trials with terminated grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and calculates the proportion of affected trials among those with previou...

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Thanks Kate. She was deceptively cute. A little stinker sometimes but she usually made up for it 🙂

I hope Pixie comes out of her shell soon 💜

Toy poodle named Maggie lying on a blanket

Happy toy poodle with mouth open and tongue out smiling

Toy poodle Maggie sitting in a lap outside while the wind pushes her fur back

Toy poodle Maggie looking upwards wide eyes in a curious glance

Our dog Maggie passed away peacefully on Saturday. Maggie was never a perfect dog nor the dog I imagined she would be when we rescued her, and I miss my good little girl very much. She is at peace, and I'm grateful for all the time she gave us. 🐩 🐾 💜

Screenshot of an Excel window with the Save icon (the 3.5 diskette) highlighted. The screenshot is taken from a forum post with Japanese text. User Nobi Hayashi (@nobi): Why is the Save button in Excel depicted as a vending machine with a purchased drink can at the bottom? this question is currently being discussed by young Japanese people on a forum

Hear me out. Every time you share wrong answers you are helping to sabotage the LLMs that will eventually scrape your answer. But also it is a completely true thing that we used to store files in vending machines to keep them cold while away from home.

Lots of potential in this, both for saving time and for teaching PubMed proximity searching 🙂 well done @marijanewhite.bsky.social!

Pairwise PubMed Search Generator The Pairwise PubMed Search Generator is a web application for working around the truncation limit...

Hey #medlibs, I built a tool for making it easier to create proximity search strings in PubMed. Check it out!

I presented at PNC-MLA this afternoon and will follow up with a link to the recording when it's posted.

Got a notification that EndNote will soon be requiring you to change your password every 180 days….I’m confident this won’t cause any issues for researchers…. Right? 😅 #medlibs

I would probably favor an entry in disclosures or methods over acknowledgments, depending on the usage and what individual journals require.

Final quote from Carlos Chaccour: “The legitimate discussion risks being drowned by the synthetic noise.”

SOGC Statement: Health Misinformation is a Form of Violence Against Women SOGC Statement: Health Misinformation is a Form of Violence Against Women

sogc.org/en/content/f...

Some Halloweeny Medical Subject Headings:

👹 Spirit Possession
🍫 Chocolate (was only added in 2016!)
👻 Erythrocyte Membrane (mapped to "ghosts")
🦇 Chiroptera
🩹 Mummies
🧙‍♀️ Witchcraft
🕴️ Parapsychology & Telepathy
🦄 Legendary Creatures
🍬 Candy
😱 Fear

Scientists had to change more than 700 grant titles to receive NIH funding. Health disparities researchers fear what’s next The titles of more than 700 multi-year NIH grants have been changed this year, according to an analysis by Jeremy Berg, a former agency official

The NIH has insisted there are no banned words

But, an analysis by @jeremymberg.bsky.social found over 700 hundred grants changed their titles from '24 to '25

Some see it as a small price to pay to keep their grant, but others are worried about what comes next

www.statnews.com/2025/10/29/n...

Your coworker has a bit of a cattitude 🐱

What did people do before SNAP?”

They died.

Healthcare, vaccines, disability support, education & food assistance are vital to our survival.

They’re why the average lifespan isn’t 35 anymore

The mark of a good & decent society is whether it sees the value in helping others.

Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning Abstract. The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same.

Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow.

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

but if it pops what topic will every other academic conference presentation cover? /s

“A quick systematic review”

We searched according to PRISMA #medlibs

PubMed is running on autopilot during shutdown, but key independent committee has been abolished PubMed, the life sciences search engine maintained by the US government and relied upon by researchers worldwide, is still performing its basic automated functions during the federal shutdown, but new...

PubMed is running on autopilot during shutdown, but key independent committee has been abolished #medlibs www.bmj.com/content/391/...

Song list in Apple Music

From Apple’s Pop Punk Essentials list

Coffee, pop punk playlist, and seven projects before noon let’s go.

This likely AI-hallucinated reading list is part of a ~60-page summer supplement, and in an initial spot-check, I'm having trouble confirming any of the quotes. But it's all such transparent filler that I can't help feeling sympathy for the lone freelancer apparently saddled with producing it.

Anti-Transgender Disinformation in the Age of Algorithmic Search Summaries Recently Google introduced a feature in its search engine that algorithmically creates summaries of one's search results. Though it could be viewed as a useful tool, researcher Anna Beers argues this ...

Hey all, here's a post at @ssrc.org about how anti-trans talking points are getting wrapped into Google's AI search results.

AI search not only cites anti-trans disinfo, but sanitizes it, making practices like conversion therapy sound legitimate and safe.

The second favorite was describing what a physical clipboard is because some users are too young to have encountered a real one and so don’t understand the label 💀 guides.library.kumc.edu/My-NCBI/coll...

Screenshot of the text interface in My Bibliography with the link “make your bibliography public” highlighted.

This was doubtlessly my favorite instructions to write as part of a rather extensive new My NCBI libguide - the option to make a My Bibliography public is a link that only appears as italicized text. 🤦🏼‍♂️ guides.library.kumc.edu/My-NCBI/My-B...