hrm...I don't think independence for arXiv necessarily=enshittification but I do wonder what the impetus for this is. Will be interesting to see how it plays out...hiring a library-world person for this role would be a good sign, but the size of that salary will definitely attract other types
Appreciating the call here for coordination as "essential to prevent duplication, ensure consistency, and close the widening gap between well–resourced and under–resourced organisations."🙌 zenodo.org/records/1893...
Reading over these rationales it becomes really clear how reckless, arbitrary yet totally hate driven the cancelling of these grants has been. The fact that ChatGPT was employed to do so is especially worrisome alongside OpenAI's recent defense/weaponry contracts
New report from UCLA Williams Institute School of Law: "Removal of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity from Federal Data Collections, January 2025 to January 2026" More: https://myumi.ch/jJ8Qg
"How can librarians fulfill their professional and ethical obligation to defend intellectual freedom in the face of threats to their reputations, their jobs, and even their physical safety?"
Great resource for anyone engaged or interested in US AI policy and governance from @geomblog.bsky.social and his team www.brown.edu/news/2026-03...
Friendly reminder that opposing both the oppressiveness of authoritarian regimes and this reckless war is not a contradiction on any front. Peace and safety to friends, family, and all living things in the Middle East🕊️
(video of a happy young goat at sunrise Jebel Shams, Oman from a recent visit)
enshittified is such a great way of putting it
For this week's #MemeMonday, don't be like Aragorn! If you're able to, please consider publishing your data in a reputable repository. We here at DRP deposit our rescued data in #DataLumos from @icpsr.bsky.social
"The “censorships” that the site purports to counter are not internet shutdowns or broad restrictions on content such as those in place in China and Iran, but European restrictions on hate speech and illegal content such as those in the Digital Services Act, or the UK’s Online Safety Act."
love these shots🫶
Preserving The Web Is Not The Problem. Losing It Is.
Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the…
In good news this week! ...hopefully these can be restored by summertime
"In a time when historical information is actively being deleted, disappeared, or obfuscated, and competing visions of nationhood and citizenship are put forward, how do we critically engage with the archive as a contested site?"
The extractive nature of LLMs can be seen in their exploitation of not only open content, but also in their damage to open infrastructures.
Awful Ai Books is a new blog by a librarian, including helpful tips on how to spot them: "This Awful Ai Book is actually trying to kill you" awfulaibooks.wordpress.com
yes, it's excellent. I saw a pre-screening with an audience of mostly librarians and some of the people featured in it...there were tears and standing ovations
🙌 "Every day, millions of Americans rely on federal data—often without realizing it...Data for the People! is a new podcast from the Data Foundation that shines a light on this essential but often overlooked infrastructure."
I'm starting to see chatter around the new Wikimedia Enterprise deal that basically amounts to "AI bad=Wikimedia platforms bad now," so this point bears repeating...that this isn't about capitulation but the necessary steps to maintain the integrity of the infrastructure and demand attribution
great point! I like the idea of referring to things like this by their intended function rather than “AI” or their cutesy/anthropomorphized model names…this is “OCR with chatbot UI”
Potentially good use case, but would like to see some more qualitative analysis. Even if there is just a small percentage of error, if those are conceptually or semantically egregious and the whole corpus still needs to be checked and corrected by humans, what really is the efficiency achieved here?
huge loss of a real one here😔 I was just last week re-reading her brilliant piece on "vocational awe"...something I find myself coming back to again and again: www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocatio...
On the weaponization of personal data: "If combined with the facial recognition and social media monitoring commonly deployed by the Department of Homeland Security, those reams of data would turbocharge ICE’s terror campaign in the short term and destroy American civil liberties in the long term."
Empire of AI by Karen Hao 🙌
Hello #DataRescuers! We're excited to start this AMA. We'll be answering questions over the next 2 hours. Please feel free to like, respond, or reskeet as we go.
New from 404 Media: here is the user guide for ELITE, the tool Palantir made for ICE. A map shows people on a map; ICE clicks them, brings up their dossier. ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to target. We obtained it, you can now read the document for yourself: www.404media.co/here-is-the-...
loving the creativity and humor of Philly resistance here🔥
Props to the developers behind ICE Map, cataloguing all known ICE incidents www.icemap.dev
💯 "Movements don’t usually collapse because the enemy is too strong, but because we refuse to confront the internal habits that make us undisciplined, incoherent, and easy to defeat."
