Ruth MacMullen (Mallalieu)

Illuminated bat from the Ashmole bestiary showing a bat on a gold background inside a red and green frame. The bat is brown with black wings and cartoonish, with incongrously detailed human-looking facial features.

Three outlines of three bats as marginalia in a yellowed page from a Bodleian manuscript. The bat marginalia are hastily drawn (likely added by a different hand than the scribe who wrote and illustrated the rest of the text). The bats have simplistic facial expresisons; one has two eyes and a straight line for a mouth, the second has a soft smile, and the third has something between the two.

A page from a bestiary showing Latin text and a black bat illustration in an embossed gold square. The bats wings look feathered and the shape is bird like, suggesting whoever drew it may not have seen a bat up close before.

An immediately strange looking illustration from a medieval Paduan text. A bat flies above an illustration of a man, and both are roughly the same size. The bat has cat like legs and a long tail, and is shaped like a winged rat.

RIP Ozzy Osbourne. We scoured the archives to find our best medieval bats in the rocker’s honour.

#MedievalMonday.
1. Bodleian Library MS. Canon. Misc. 554
2: Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 304.
3: Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 764.
4: Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511.

Congratulations on your new post, we are almost neighbours! 😍

CLOCKSS is proud to launch an official YouTube channel, where we’ll share webinars and resources about digital preservation.

📺 Our first video: How COUNTER metrics and CLOCKSS preservation services work together www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0cY...

✅ Future events: clockss.org/events/

746 proposals for a total of 3M (about 13 will be funded).

If orgs spent 4000 in personnel time preparing their proposals on average, then this mechanism actually reduced funding for open science.

Open science is extremely underfunded.

Q - how do you deal with people co-opting the language of open for politically dubious purposes?

Heather Joseph - call it out, loudly and quickly and often

#openrepos2025

Some things in our ecosystem will break from the current pressures.

Listening to Heather Joseph’s @hjoseph.bsky.social opening plenary at #OpenRepos2025 and it’s so good!

Just astounding service! Thanks for the good laugh today 😆

Very excited about this development - great to see a company which is so responsive to its community 🧠 🤓

As the Trump administration purges web pages, this group is rushing to save them The Trump administration's erasure of federal data has put the Internet Archive in the spotlight. The organization, with its small but mighty team, is working to help save the world's digital history.

Great @npr.org article on the vital work that our friends at the @archive.org are doing to preserve online history against political attacks.

Spontaneous post-conference pub buddies are the best! Lovely to put the world to rights for a bit 🍻

*bookmarks to read* congratulations, looks great!

Looking good #RLUK25!

Closing day two of #RLUK25 we're looking forward to hearing two keynote talks by Mahaletchumy Arujanan (ISAAA) and Emmanuel Boakye (African Reproducibility Network)

Chaired by Suzy Cheeke @bristolunilib.bsky.social

A large pepperoni pizza in front of a laptop and a pint

A small pizza on a skillet, a bowl of french fries, and a glass of red wine

Okay, the sessions and networking at #RLUK25 are excellent, but I’m also very proud of managing pizza two nights in a row. Will there be pizza at the conference dinner tonight? 😆

Takeaways from #RLUK25 Day 1:

- Using times of crises to rebuild and re-position our services

- The importance of collaboration in Open Research, collections and AI

- Advocacy is an vital skill for LIS professionals

- Classification systems can reflect biases and libraries as non-neutral spaces

A current consideration! Open Repositories is there in June; I *really* want to go, but not there….

We're going to have a Copim Corner this evening, #RLUK25. Details TBC, but likely to be www.nicholsonspubs.co.uk/restaurants/.... All most welcome! (The #OABooks and #openresearch discourse will likely be strong, but will it be stronger than the drinks?)

If I may say so myself, it was a great discussion! I think we need a follow-up blog post to capture and explore some of the fascinating points made 😁 #RLUK25

#RLUK25 parallel sessions now:

🔵 Building an open monographs future with @ruthmacmullen.bsky.social @kjsanders.bsky.social Silke Davison @oapenbooks.bsky.social Andrew Barker (Lancaster), Bethany Logan (Sussex) & Sarah Thompson (York)

Is anyone else having zero joy editing their profile on PheedLoop for #RLUK25? I’ve been trying to add a job title and bio for ages, via the phone app and web browser…

This is my main bugbear about travelling in t’north! It takes me almost three hours to travel to my parents, which is less than 100 miles away. See you soon 🚂

Six reasons why open institutional publishing matters A new wave of institutional publishers is changing the way we think about academic publishing. Here’s why they’re worth watching

The revival of university/institutionally based presses in the UK has been one of the most exciting developments in #scholcomms in recent times - @suzannetatham.bsky.social & I wrote for @timeshighered.bsky.social about why this matters

www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/six-r...

That’s great Jenni, will be lovely to see you again! 🙌🏼

Hurray! See you there. Looks like the sun will be shining 🌞

Who do I know who’s going to #RLUK25 then?

Between Covid and mat leave, I feel very out of practice at in-person conferences!

That’s amazing! What a pro. Even I like geese now after reading that slide (after years of being chased on the York campus…) 🪿

Wonderful way to start #IDCC25 from @martateperek.bsky.social. She captured not only what has changed in the last 20 years of digital curation, but did by reflecting on her own journey and brought in the voices of 12 female colleagues and the power of community. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Just wow. 👏🏼

The new Chancellor of the University of Oxford (Lord Hague) was admitted by Convocation in the Sheldonian Theatre today. Here is a list of all Chancellors from 1224 to the present, most of whom held the position until death, but now there is a fixed ten-year term en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Eurostar travel is fab 🤩, but…

…I am still in slight disbelief that I can travel from London to Brussels (more than 200 miles) in half the time that it takes me to make most domestic journeys of c. 100 miles by public transport…