@jmarkockerbloom.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
A Philadelphian with professional interests in libraries, technology, copyright, and culture, and nonprofessional interests that include singing, reading […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
I've made a blog post out of my recent lightning talk at #c4l26, sharing some ideas I've been contemplating lately while in libraries and on trails.
The post includes my full text, links to sites and images shown in the talk, and some bonus links for context (including a book link that […]
Enjoyed hearing talks and meeting people at #c4l26 this year! Especially impressed to be meeting with a group which, as one participant put it, moved the whole conference across the state rather than compromise its values. (And for pulling that off on short notice, I'm willing to forgive any […]
Great to get to hear @natematias present (remotely) at #c4l26 on "Cultivating Knowledge in the Age of Agnotology".
(Agnotology is the study of ignorance, and apparently also of how ignorance is cultivated. As he points out, nowdays that's not just via suppressing knowledge, but also by […]
Yesterday the Post ran a story about the National Park Service censoring displays and exhibits critical of America's past. The NPS even has a database of what's being considered for erasure. I downloaded the 7GB database and turned it into a protest bot. Here's @nps-uncensored.bsky.social.
Attending Code4Lib remotely & I am *impressed* by how accessible they have made this conference. They had a venue canceled by CMU for politics, moved cities, & are still putting many orgs to shame by how inclusive it is to people with disabilities.
Librarians y'all 💪🏼📚🌈 […]
Until I visited the site yesterday, I'd missed that an appeals court had stayed the ordered restoration of the slavery exhibit at the President's House in Independence NHP in Philly. It's now only partially restored, with some community-added supplements […]
A number of pages and sites removed recently from .gov sites now have archives viewable at govarchive.us - just substitute "govarchive.us" for "gov" in the URL that doesn't seem to work any more, and see what you find! https://govarchive.us/ #c4l26
Hearing about Howard University's Black Press Archives in the #c4l26 opening keynote. They have over 2000 African American newspaper titles, and a portion of the archives have now been digitized, with selected titles having issues readable online: https://dh.howard.edu/bpa_archives/
I'm seeing #c4l26 projected on the screen at the #Code4LIb conference in Philly, so I'm going to assume that #c4l26 is this conference's official hashtag for people posting on social media. Don't know how many attendees are posting in the fediverse, but hi to those who are here!
(The conference […]
Bear with me if you can as I attempt to use HPV vaccines to demonstrate why many can’t see the danger of RFK Jr.
TLDR: Disease prevention takes time and discipline. Not discipline of an individual, but the ability to invest in public health when the benefits may not be immediately clear.
If you've realized that your AI-generated text is from a process designed to make it look just convincing enough to seem true without any assurance it actually is, the solution to your problem isn't "do another round of processing so it looks more convincing, but not any more true".
Hugh Rundle […]
PSA: The Amazon wishlist doxing threat is much greater and more immediate than folks might realize. Attack works like this:
Stalker who wants your address opens an Amazon seller account and lists themselves as a third party seller for any item on your public wishlist. Then, they order the item […]
"Transgender people across Kansas are reporting receiving letters... stating that they must surrender their driver's licenses and that their current credentials will be considered invalid upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday. Should any transgender person be caught […]
Wow. "Virginia State terminates six professors without due process.
Campus security escorted the professors —five tenured and one tenure-track— to their cars and issued no-trespass warnings. They have received no written explanation for their dismissals." […]
"You were sent here because your contribution triggered our automated and/or manual AI Slop defenses. Specifically, a human maintainer or senior engineer looked at your submission, experienced a profound existential sigh, initiated an immediate socket closure on your contribution, and pasted […]
It does not take much imagination to consider how today's 5-4 SCOTUS ruling (that the Postal Service can't be sued for intentionally failing to deliver mail) could inspire attempts to suppress mail-in ballots: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-351_7648.pdf
(There are probably other […]
Per a poll by NORC at the University of Chicago, not only have 43% American #transgender and nonbinary adults considered moving to a different state between the 2024 election and last June due to LGBTQ-related politics or laws, 9% have actually done so. (Numbers for LGBTQ population as a whole […]
Bloomberg: Map of U.S. with warehouse sites purchased by ICE for conversion to detention centers. Tens of thousands of "beds" for tens of thousands of people.
America will have its own Gulag Archipelago. Twenty-three concentration camps will soon come online, unless, together, we can find and pull the political handbrake.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/us-spends-hundreds-of-millions-on-warehouses-for-ice-detention-centers
Moved a little over 800 anonymous bulk Online Books submissions submitted in the last 24 days to low-priority bulk queue, or to the trash. They were from various IP addresses, but had similar characteristics, and a lot appeared to be redundant, rude, or mindless pattern-matching.
Also updated […]
I see the phrase "purity culture" is now getting much the same skeptical treatment online as "virtue signaling" has.
Both phrases can identify a real problem, or be used to shut down attempts to live and promote one's values. One way to reduce confusion is to ask: Are you focusing on ensuring […]
The ISSN portal has been updated. The site looks different, and searches return slightly different information from before. They now show ISSN-H IDs (used to cluster successor and predecessor serials) but selecting them on the free public interface just tells you to subscribe to see more […]
Reading Wars by Don Herzog will be published #OpenAccess and will be free to read and download from the LSE Press website and online open access distributors.
➡️ Publishing May 2026 doi.org/10.31389/lse...
@lselaw.bsky.social
@cstross.bsky.social Could be dicey if Grand Fenwick allies with Ruritania in response.
@mattblaze True. But the long delay they imposed on stopping collection seems to largely have the effect of emboldening Trump to keep doing it as long as he and not someone they like less is in office. (Trump just predictably announced another statute he'll invoke for the next round of tariff […]
"Famed mosaic artist and Philadelphia's Magic Gardens founder Isaiah Zagar has passed away at the age of 86." If you've walked much around the South Street area in Philly, you've seen his work, though pieces of his are all over town […]
I sent a donation to #Code4Lib's diversity scholarship fund, after I'd heard that CMU had pulled support because of it, and that the Code4Lib community had committed to keeping it. If you'd like to support it as well, donation links are on this page […]
A federal judge formally dismissed the NEA/ACLU lawsuit against the US Department of Education, after an agreement that the DoE would not attempt to enforce the anti-DEI "Dear Colleague" letter they sent schools last year […]
"Amid occasional applause from passersby, as National Parks workers restored the panels, an unnamed employee said, 'It’s our honor.'"
The slavery exhibit is going back up at the President's House at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia […]
No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.
America belongs to the people.
No Kings Day is coming March 28
👉 Find or start a peaceful protest near you
👉 Watch the #NoKings training
👉 Help a friend register to vote at Voterizer dot org
Show up. Stand up.
#Voterizer social.fieldteam6.org/s/wqxVI2z6
It's been a lot harder than I expected to find a definitely out-of-US-copyright edition of Arthur Ransome's _Swallows and Amazons_. The 1930 first edition sold slowly when it first came out, and as with many kids' books, copies were routinely trashed, and not often preserved by collectors. Later […]
