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Meredith Farkas

@librarianmer.bsky.social
2.4K followers 634 following 1.4K posts

Community college librarian in Portland, OR. Solidarity, unions, slow librarianship, spoonie, autoimmune, still masking, disability justice. Blogging at Information Wants to be Free since 2004: meredith.wolfwater.com. 😷 🏳️‍🌈 🇵🇸

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Reposted by Meredith Farkas
Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 01/10/2026
Angry crowds hounding his every waking movement, especially to his presumed-idyllic Maine retreat, is the energy i want surrounding John Roberts from now to the end of time, or until he sincerely repents of the harm he's done & pledges whatever's left of his life to undoing it. Whichever comes first
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Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"As things stand, students who commit infractions like plagiarism — which typically has no real victims — are often punished more harshly than the male students directly responsible for making the campus dangerous for female ones."
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Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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UC Berkeley Labor Center @ucblaborcenter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Webinar: "Understanding How AI Impacts Worker Health and Safety," on Wed, October 7, 2026, 12-1 PT. A discussion of AI in the workplace looking at recent laws, worker experiences and a conceptual framework for safety professionals. By UC Berkeley LOHP and COEH. www.coeh.berkeley.edu/26WEB1007
Headshots of webinar speakers Mishal Khan, Terrysa Guerra, John Sadowski, PhD, and Yasin Khan.
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Will Jones @willpjones.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
More context
cornellsun.com
GUEST ROOM | Cornell's Dereliction of Duty
Dylan Jackaway '24, M.Eng. '25 calls on President Michael Kotlikoff to answer to the Cornell community and the Board of Trustees for his mismanagement of the Title IX investigation of the alleged Chi ...
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nick @unionnick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
On the *same day* the Cornell Seven drugged and raped Jane Doe, Cornell banned four students (including the President of Cornell JVP) from campus for three years for nonviolent, pro-Palestine protests. The same Cornell officials let the rapists off with apology essays.
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Catherine D'Ignazio (she/her/ella) @kanarinka.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
MIT spent $3 million on 500 AI-capable surveillance cameras while laying people off, shutting down libraries, and canceling journal subscriptions. In this article, 4 faculty & I discuss our new arts initiative to celebrate surveillance and repression on college campuses: fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...
fnl.mit.edu
How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance – MIT Faculty Newsletter
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Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Reason # a million I'm glad I opted to just build my own outlet years ago, where I can say whatever the fuck I want. And will ;) Meanwhile, receipts are in the book and keep an eye out for a new & improved @drilledmedia.bsky.social soon! geni.us/broughttoyouby
geni.us
Amy Westervelt, investigative reporter and host of Drilled, shows how the tentacles of corporate propaganda infiltrated our media ecosystem, undermined democracy, and now threaten the very nature of t...
Order now:
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Here's a neat thing! My mom retired after 25+ as a children's librarian at public libraries yesterday. (It was very cool! Hundreds of former Story Hour kids arrived, some as adults!) I let Ed Markey's office know in case they wanted to send a nice email back and they sent this! He's still got it!
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
How did Derry Girls not end up on the NYT list of the 100 best TV shows of the century? I expected stuff like the Expanse and Dr. Who to get ignored, but Derry Girls?!?
static.klipy.com
Clare Devlin in Derry Girls: 'This is Torture'
Alt: Clare Devlin in Derry Girls kneeling at a pew in church, looking anguished, and saying 'This is Torture'
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
As someone who had profound dry mouth with my connective tissue disease for years before it got diagnosed and treated, I would have struggled to be able to talk without something to drink (though for me it was always water). Don't be ableist; it's not hard, people.
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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 24/09/2026
Just when I think I can’t hate OpenAI and Sam Altman any more, new details come out about how ChatGPT helped a shooter plan one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history in Tumbler Ridge, BC. OpenAI made an explicit decision not to report the user to authorities.
motherjones.com
ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter focus on guns, tactics, and terror, our investigation reveals
OpenAI’s chatbot fed the shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
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Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Hey so uhhhhh that Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar relaxing its covid rules is an *absolute fucking hit piece* targeting the disabled, chronically ill, and covid-conscious and it would be great if folks sharing and joking about it could recognize that framing.
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I called the municipal court to ask about my jury summons. They said that being on immunosuppressants is a valid reason for being excused from jury duty. I'm so torn. I really want to serve, but I also don't want to get sick.
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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I know you’re now rolling your eyes and going “ughhh Bluesky scolllld” and I’m going to tell you right this very second you have absolutely no idea, not one fucking clue, the trauma there is from the social isolation that immunocompromised people have faced since Covid started.
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The provost of Dartmouth, at which I teach, has been using AI to write both academic papers & national op-eds, according to brave reporting by @thedartmouth.bsky.social. Many students are already bitter about AI. This leaves us as faculty no ground to stand on. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...
thedartmouth.com
Op-eds, academic articles by Provost Santiago Schnell flagged as ‘AI-written’ by ‘near-zero error’ AI detector Pangram
Schnell said he used artificial intelligence for “making writing processes more efficient,” but that AI was not a “substitute” for his own “intellectual judgment or authorship.”
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
So, just two times per year, I get the chance to meet with the faculty in my liaison subject areas and market library services services tp them. I just got summoned for jury duty for the date in the Fall (which is the most important date). What are the odds they'd excuse me for it?
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Anyway, panic is a psy-op. Stay furious. Stay serious. Organize.
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Nicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 17/09/2026
Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!
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Portland Jobs with Justice @jwjpdx.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"Monsters" "cowardly." Any objective observation of the bureau's 6000 uses of force in 2020 might have anyone with a conscience saying the same. #WeAreAllMitch
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aj-boston.neocities.org @aj-boston.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Photo dump from date night with an epidemiology paper-turned-AI agent that I successfully wooed into being my girlfriend.
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Mattilda B Sycamore @mbsycamore.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Yes, please 💥
Bright green flyer stapled to utility pole on sunny day with blue sky, street intersection, and trees in background

HATE TRUMP QUIT GPT

ChatGPT is currently the most popular Al chatbot, but many users don't realize that the app:

FUNDS MAGA

OpenAl's president Greg Brockman was the largest donoe to Trump's Super PAC, MAGA Inc, according to the ter

SUPPORTS MILITARY SURVEILLANCE

Trump's Department of War signed a $200 millon act that could lead to Al for mass surveillance and

RECRUITS FOR ICE

ICE screens recruits for Trump's deportation program on OpenAl's GPT-4

ACCELERATES ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

A single Al data center uses the same amount of energy 100.000 and consumes up to 5 million gallons of water on dirty energy like diesel generators that out our contribute to climate change.

Learn more & join the boycott:

QuitGPT.org
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Carly Lane-Perry @carlylane.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
WIDOW’S BAY SWEEEEEEEP
static.klipy.com
Widows Bay Show
Alt: Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) dancing in Widow’s Bay
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Portland Jobs with Justice @jwjpdx.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Higher education service employees across the state will vote on whether to strike next week, potentially coinciding with the first week of UO fall term. ❗
dailyemerald.com
SEIU calls for strike vote next week - Daily Emerald
Service Employees International Union Local 503, the union representing University of Oregon’s classified staff, is calling for a strike vote next week.  Employees in the union, who serve meals to stu...
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
An excellent thread about the value of the aspects of inquiry that many librarians and other instructors are telling students it's ok to outsource to AI. I couldn't agree more that the early "brainstorming" work often seems the most important and relevant to info-seeking in their everyday lives.
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Some woman just called to invite me to a local bible study, wouldn't back down when I told her I was Jewish (she clearly knew 0 about Judaism), and asked "don't you want eternal life?" I said "not really. I think it's the finitude of life that gives it meaning." She seemed really flummoxed by that.
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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
🙅🏽No, AI is not helping worker productivity🙅🏽We dispel 5 common myths in my new video, Myths Around AI and Productivity. The first myth is that AI will improve productivity, which studies not only largely contradict, but sometimes suggest the opposite effect. youtu.be/3BO0iy91lfU
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mike taddow @miketaddow.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
kudos to macklemore here for —right off the bat— the perspective and acknowledgment of who the real victims are
I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour.

But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.
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Betsy Z @betsyzz.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The Oregon for Human Rights coalition is calling for a broad human rights screen on the City's investments. I was one of those Jewish elders testifying in support, representing Coalition member Jobs with Justice @jwjpdx.bsky.social. Councilor Zimmerman is calling me antisemitic. Wild.
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
This is beyond infuriating. Please Portlanders in District 4, don't rank Zimmerman. People who use claims of antisemitism to silence legitimate criticism are not protecting the Jewish people and do not speak for those of us who believe "never again" meant never again anywhere and to anyone else.
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Emily Guerrero @gossippractice.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Thrilled to have this article out in the world with @libraryleadpipe.bsky.social , a journal I’ve read closely for over a decade. It’s a career highlight to be published in it.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 11/09/2026
"...solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal."
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Adam @abrokenbattery.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Today marks 25 years since 9/11. 8 months after the attack, psychiatrist Simon Wessely argued that illness reported around Ground Zero was being wrongly attributed to environmental toxins, suggesting “World Trade Centre Syndrome” was driven by social and psychological factors.
Screenshot from the article
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Not sure it'll do anything, but I reported it to Cloudflare and their domain registrar for copyright infringement and impersonation. I've been feeling pretty disgusted with everything lately and this feels like the final nail in the coffin. Not how I wanted to spend my day for sure.
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Back in 2018, I sunsetted the Library Success Wiki and eventually stopped paying for the domain registration. TIL that some company registered the domain name and pulled a shitty version of the content up from the Wayback Machine circa 2015. Not really sure what I can do but my name is all over it!😱
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I actually read this garbage and equating student anxiety over math tests with student antipathy and fears about AI is a real leap. Sometimes, concerns are actually totally reasonable and the answer is not always more exposure! But you'd think a cognitive scientist might understand that.
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That Librarian: Amanda Jones @librarianjones.com · 06/09/2026
Guess who won an Emmy!!!! @thelibrariansfilm.bsky.social
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
what is it about academics becoming university presidents that makes them lose 30 IQ points
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Thomas “Scary” Fuchs 🎃👻💀 @thomasfuchs.at · 05/09/2026
I find people who think the particular technology they’re super into will save us all are extremely annoying.
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
My son got an email offering him admission there and an automatic $40,000 scholarship based on his SAT score and there's a part of me that really wants him to accept, go for a year, and write a fantastic book about this white-supremacist indoctrination factory masquerading as a "university."
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
The theme for our all-staff events this year will be "Inclusivity, Access, Accessibility." yet the one all-day in-person event (with no remote option) will be in February, which is usually the height of winter illness season. I've spent 2 years advocating for the winter meetings to be online. 🤯 1/6
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Hey, anyone with an Information Today-published book involved with the Anthropic settlement? As I'm the sole copyright-holder on the book, I'm wondering why they might be trying to claim 100% of the settlement themselves.
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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
When I was volunteering at the COVID19 vaccine POD in 2021, people would say over and over again that they were getting vaccinated for the people they love. Last year, only 17.5% of American adults got the COVID19 vaccine. Please get one for the people you love. 💕
Photo of a brunette with a braid in her hair, standing in front of a sign that says Vaccinated with a count of 30,000. 

She is wearing glasses, a Sun Studio t-shirt, and an orange high vis vest.
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Outlier is pretty fun! I found a Rarity-83 word worth 95 pts in OUTLIER. EAGLE EYES · 837 points · 10 rare words. Only 19 players have ever found it in all of Outlier. 2 finds no one else found today. OUTLIER: the daily word hunt where the rarest words win. Can you beat me? playoutlier.com/s/JHLLBC
playoutlier.com
OUTLIER · Day 99
librarianmer scored 837 on Day 99. Can you beat them?
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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 26/08/2026
Dolly Parton is credited in at least 37 research papers on the COVID vaccine, including the first phase I trial results published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020.
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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 26/08/2026
Hey, @mayor.nyc.gov, did you see the study of 26,000 kids that showed "A.i." use causing a DECREASE in exam scores of up to 24 POINTS? Don't leave our kids behind by pushing "A.i." on them! Please declare a 2 year moratorium on "A.i." in the public schools NOW! cc @aimoratoriumnyc.bsky.social
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John Kostyack @kostyack.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Ceres estimates data centers in 7 states used ~3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater for electricity in 2024 alone, ~12X the combined total of Los Angeles, Phoenix & Washington, D.C. Big increases projected (4T to 8T) for 2030. Tech companies say they're working on it, talk about how ag is worse.
latitudemedia.com
Data centers’ hidden water footprint is linked to the grid
A Ceres analysis shows that data centers’ indirect water footprint from power plants dwarfs direct cooling.
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Meredith Farkas @librarianmer.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Knowledge Commons #scholcomm folks, I have what is probably a really dumb question. I put a book chapter into Knowledge Commons works.hcommons.org/records/ejb0... and was hoping it would be indexed by Google Scholar, but it never was. I must be missing something obvious. How can I make that happen?
works.hcommons.org
Neoliberal Time and the Promise of Slow Librarianship.
Chapter from the book Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices that describes how neoliberal time has operated to intensify and center work time, encouraging overwork, constant growth, and individual achievement while discouraging solidarity and community care. Slow librarianship offers a communal and values-driven vision for thinking about time, the purpose of our work, and how we view our relationships with and responsibility to others. This chapter describes the problems neoliberal time has created in libraries and the alternative that slow librarianship offers the profession for creating libraries more attuned to the needs of patrons and more supportive of library workers.
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Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
CALM 2026 Opening Keynote: Slow Management in a Fast World w/ @librarianmer.bsky.social youtu.be/frkgyhEERfs?...
youtu.be
CALM 2026 Opening Keynote: Slow Management in a Fast World
YouTube video by CALM Conference
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