James Truitt

LLMs as contrast dye for where resources are missing.

Cataloguers, do you have any recs about where I can get a sense of the landscape of the field? What % of original records come from what orgs, what the balance of copy v original cataloguing is done at different kinds of institutions, etc.?

NOT looking for info about MARC, RDA, or other standards

This is really neat! Glad to know about it, thank you

I think there's a deep, subterranean ideological assumption that civilian causalities are the result of insufficient care, insufficient attention, or insufficient technology. They're really just a basic consequence of choosing to go to war.

wHaT wAs ShE wEaRiNg

look at these 1908 women getting catcalled! they couldn't be wearing more clothing if they tried! so much clothing!

One of the side-effects of the way we talk about this technology is that human intention and human judgement get drained out of situations we're they still, in fact, decisive.

The United States switches to daylight savings time on Sunday. 🕰️

I remember calling time, a phone number that would give you the time at the sound of the beep, to make sure I set my watch and clocks as precisely as I could.

Most of the talk about OpenAI, Anthropic and “mass surveillance” neglected to mention that widespread scraping of the web is in itself mass surveillance.

HBD!

I believe the phrase for this is “eating the seed corn.”

How the Damascus Dossier Investigation Failed Families of Syria’s Forcibly Disappeared The landmark international effort has been nominated for a prestigious award, but those living with the effects of Assad’s killing machine called it a media stunt

New addition to the literature on mishandling of archives & the consequences for human rights newlinesmag.com/reportage/ho...

Citations:
[1] www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/...
[2] www.loc.gov/aba/about/ca...
[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_p...
[4] Just look at the title of the item cited in [1]

On paper, it seems like 20 years ago there was labor to spare: around 2007 LC had 400 cataloguing staff¹ and was getting through ~350K items a year,² vs. ~300K new titles and re-editions pub'd in the US in 2013.³ But that doesn't feel like it matches lived experience—or 2007 discourse⁴

Personal opinions also welcome. What kind of backlogs are typical? Does it feel like there are enough cataloguers to get everything done? (My sense is no, but I'm just an archivist with an interest in the infrastructure of bibliographic cataloguing)

Cataloguers, do you have any recs about where I can get a sense of the landscape of the field? What % of original records come from what orgs, what the balance of copy v original cataloguing is done at different kinds of institutions, etc.?

NOT looking for info about MARC, RDA, or other standards

$3.7 Billion: Estimated Cost of Epic Fury’s First 100 Hours Operation Epic Fury costs nearly $900 million per day, driven by the large expenditure of munitions. Because most of this is not in the budget, the Pentagon will soon need to ask for more money.

Never forget that the U.S. can always find money for war, but not for education, health care, or to help those in need. This is 100% a choice. And it is 100% the wrong one. www.csis.org/analysis/37-...

Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs | Cornell Chronicle Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study into “corporate BS” r...

news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

A conference slide asking "What is Digital Preservaton?" The slide answers with a definition from the DPC: "The series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary." The slide annotates this definition: "managed activities": Multiple copies, Format normalization, Virus checks, Fixity checks, Metadata, Cybersecurity, Digitization, Web archiving, Policy "continued access": The overall goal is long-term access. "digital materials": Any digital file: websites, emails, photos, spreadsheets, etc. "as long as necessary": The digital lifecycle can include deaccessioning.

I really love this annotated definition of #digipres that Natasha Fisher (digital archivist at arquives.ca) gave at #c4l26.

In fact, I'm so fond of it that I've printed it out and put it on the bulletin board by my desk!

Care to elaborate?

"קװיר" I love it!

teaching about morphology today which meant making my linguistics students scream the word PHILAFUCKINGDELPHIA at me in unison to show how we can predict where the FUCKING goes based on which syllable is stressed

Born-Digital Collections Coordinator #00220 - Richmond, Virginia, United States Title: Born-Digital Collections Coordinator #00220 State Role Title: Library Specialist III Hiring Range: $78,000 - $88,000 Pay Band: 5 Agency: The Library of Virginia Location: The Library of Virgini...

Apply to join my team by 3/16!

Be the Library of Virginia's born-digital collections coordinator, leading planning and management of electronic gov/manuscript records. We're looking for a techie archivist type who can help improve access to our born-digital wonders.

$78k-$88k in Richmond VA.

there are two kinds of historians: historians who need to stop reading and write, and historians who need to stop writing and read

a pack of kittens closes in a a large dog standing on a chair

David Attenborough [whispering]:

“As the predators close in on their helpless prey, we can only watch in silent horror, for it is not man’s role to interfere in the hierarchy of nature.”

5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.

Someone on Code4Lib prompted me to create an additional meme

Someone on Code4Lib prompted me to create an additional meme

Less "don't really like" and more "don't really get or appreciate"

cc @amandalicastro.bsky.social