Peter Barr

A powerpoint slide saying "An elephant in the room... I am aware how ridiculous it is for me to come here and lecture you about diversity"

A manatee says to Art Garfunkel "Hello Art, I'm Hugh Manatee"

The old Arts & Humanities Librarian Twitter Header...

⚡We are recruiting🌟

We are looking for a fixed-term Digitisation Officer and a fixed-term Digital Engagement Officer (with possibility to extend) to work in our Special Collections, Heritage and Archives team!

Find out more info here 👀👀➡️ tinyurl.com/4epkcfp2

A cartoon featuring a toy platypus being driven mad by a painting

#terrorinthelibrary all under the guise of 'engagement' with Sheffield Centre for the History of the Gothic

Two novels (Fictions by Jose Luis Borges and The Atom Station by Halldor Laxness) lie on a fake football pitch overlooked by a stuffed turtle

Beginning with my abortive attempt to run a 2018 World Cup of Literature. Here is a group match between Argentina and Iceland refereed by the Biomed Central Turtle

(the competition never got out of the group stage cos I had made it far too complicated and it didn't get the hoped for twitter pop)

I leave the University of Sheffield 3 weeks today 😢. As such I am clearing out my google docs folders. So please allow this retrospective of the nonsense they have allowed me to get away with over the last ten years #libraries #skybrarians

Basically, what Beth said. It's dependent on your political capital within the inst. whether you can cancel and the disruption it causes against a backdrop of precarity and widespread funding cuts across the board. Depressingly, the financial imperative convinces more than the big idea

Interlibrary loans, subscriptions and copyright in the UK academic library sector | Insights

Uk library peoples! Concerned about inter library loans and copyright in the light of potential journal cancellations? Well m’colleague and all round delightful chap, Andrew Johnson, has written all about it here so hopefully you can stop your panics doi.org/10.1629/uksg...

Weird Elsevier Schmaltz saying "to the Librarians of the world, thank you"

You're welcome

How scholarly publishers wield soft power - Impact of Social Sciences Scientific publishers exercise 'soft power' through their role in managing and curating research, but how is this role changing in an open research landscape?

💥New: How scholarly publishers wield soft power

✍️Eleonora Colangelo

#AcademicPublishing #ScholComm #SciComm

📢 Come work with us! The Open Research Manager is a reformulated role in our team - it would suit someone with a strong research support background, but I'm happy to chat to anyone about the role and criteria.

"An unreasonable expectation would be if that librarian felt the need to make sure that that patron, or any patron, never had a negative thing to say about the library. In my experience, it appears that librarians and libraries seem to have high expectations of influence."

Tbh, it would be simpler if they didn't divvy the money out and just bundled it at source and invested it.

Expecting individual libraries to act dilutes the effectiveness of their funding (as all sorts of local anxieties get in the way)

Yeah, wellcome could definitely be more explicit. You should, rather than you could, support OA.

UKRI are a bit more hamstrung by all the political lobbying from the big publishers that stop them taking a position

It's annoying because both that and UKRI money was originally meant to facilitate a transition - which OI, Diamond palpably is - not to be baked into fading inst. content budgets to subsidise stagnant TAs

Even if you do understand this, the issue is whether there is any 'spare' WT money to spend on Open Infrastructure?

If there isn't, could you prioritise this spend over APCs? (most libraries - as ever 🙄 - err on the side of caution, and meet the immediate user demand)

I mean, that quote seems to indicate that Clarivate has no agency in the embedding. These tools are being actively added to products by without the option of turning them off. Here's a thought. Maybe get the products right before releasing them like an untested virus into the scholarly environment?

Doublethink on AI highlights tensions in peer review - Research Professional News Survey reveals publishers’ tricky task in balancing efficiency and integrity, says Laura Feetham-Walker

32% of researchers use AI tools to support peer review, yet 57% wouldn’t want AI reviewing their work. This is one of several insights from our latest global survey, explored by Laura Feetham-Walker in her Q&A with Research Professional News, marking #PeerReviewWeek.

🔗 ow.ly/BCbU50WXooV

In a Tough Environment, How Should We Make—and Communicate—Collections Decisions? In this interview, Madeline Kelly discusses the Western Washington University Libraries’ annual collections evaluation process and what she’s learned about sharing news of subscription cancellations.

"Our job is to look at the big picture - across the university, across our consortia, across the publishing landscape—and make decisions based on that specialized knowledge...[stakeholder] input is critical... but that there’s not a straight line from their input to the final outcomes."

More news from outside the the library bubble...

Did you know that Dora the Explorer is a significantly more popularly thing to search for than Dora the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment 🤯

steady on...

New OA Book by Lever Press one of the publishers that @sheffielduni.bsky.social Library supports via its Open Scholarship Fund 🔓📘

YouTube video by United Kingdom Speedrunner Gathering UKSG GREEN 2025 | Sonic Mania | Tails (No Emeralds Glitched) | jordiiee | 48:24

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7jA...

While looking for an old @uksg.bsky.social talk, I have stumbled across the other UKSG!! (UK Speedrunning Gathering) where people try and complete computer games quickly.

I expect a WWF style lawsuit...

(we can't have people playing sonic when they should be learning about OA policy)

"more than 60% of librarians see themselves as key figures in AI guidance at their institution, more than academic staff, more than support staff... and far more than senior leadership"

www.helibtech.com/helibtech-vi...

I basically haven't got over the phrase "that's a big word for a little turd" that was commonly used at my school. I just thought I was finally in a space where I could use the word apotheosis without it coming up again

rewriting a journal article and still grumbling on the feedback "the language choices are esoteric"

But "esoteric" as a descriptor is an esoteric choice in itself.😡

Reviewer, review thyself

Blog Post | Looking to the Future - Mapping the Environment for Research Libraries - Research Libraries UK The current RLUK strategy, Transforming the Library, runs until the end of 2025. This year, we have been looking to draft a new strategy that will take us to 2030. Predicting the environment in which...

In a new #RLUK blog post, @davidprosser.bsky.social looks at how we can anticipate future challenges for research libraries & how this may shape the development of RLUK’s next strategy.

‘Business-as-usual’ offers from publishers raise walk-away fears Disappointing offers which ‘miss financial reality’ faced by UK higher education have heightened speculation that institutions will ditch proposed deals

Many UK universities are likely to walk away from journal access agreements after several publishers put forward “business-as-usual proposals” with “year-on-year price rises” rather than the cheaper deals demanded by national negotiators, a library chief has predicted. @jgro-the.bsky.social reports

The old 'walled garden' only survives if you can afford seeds in 20 years time.

It's true that some libraries haven't got explicit endorsement of their support for OA, but it doesn't follow that they can't get it (and portray it as strategic and mission-aligned)

👀 sheffield.ac.uk/library/libr...