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Maureen

@meau.bsky.social
399 followers 338 following 327 posts

curator with the heart of an archivist, standards enthusiast, preschooler mom, new Rhode Islander

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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I don’t use LLMs to write. (I have used Claude to troubleshoot coding). It feels miserable to fight this.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I’ve been a Wikipedia editor for 20 years. There’s an editor going wild marking new articles from this year as AI, including one I created that was featured on the front page. They rolled back a major revision I had done of “Mammy Kate” which had previously been based on racist legend.
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
And by inference, reconstructed the charter membership of First Af. When I tell this story to my constituents, it's to emphasize that "your" records aren't just yours. We live in a society etc etc
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
But my shop has the registers of most of the Philadelphia churches extant between 1807 and 1847 (when Second Af was founded). And so a community member came and looked in the "dismissions" section of every Philadelphia registers from the time period, for the phrase "dismissed to Colored church"
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Records gain power in the aggregate! I will tell a story: First African PC Philadelphia, organized 1807, the first Presbyterian church of freed Black people in the US, its first register of members lost over time,
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Loosing my mind: "Where institutional archives are built to function at scale and across collections, CBA collections are built to be alive" That's right! We ideally are built to function at scale! It's not just cheaper and more effective, but easier for users AND
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
There is no bravery in naming your cute baby Ruth or Mabel. Dare to Nancy!
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I grew up in the western US where there are no Maureens (my coffee shop name is Maria) and here in New England EVERYONE has an aunt Maureen, which rules, except sometimes I mistakenly get Pamela or maybe Kathleen. I sincerely love it. People treat me with lots of auntly warmth and deference!
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
DACS principles!!!! start with what's important
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
One terrifying thing about LLMs is that it lets GLAM people turn their bad ideas about our values into actionable software. Our systems are about to have the same internal incoherence as our SharePoint sites. We will be able to implement the dumbest and most byzantine rules we can dream of.
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Fonder of a community *built* archives, inside an institutional setting. UMass Boston does this well I think
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
When you succeed in doing that, congratulations, you have built an Institution. That's what institutions are for!
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Unmentioned here is you need a funding model that will keep you open when Mellon's (usual) five year commitment ends
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
You suddenly took in thousands of objects. You need 2-3x your storage space, 2-3 more staff. Your remote storage burned down. You are identifying every person in every photo you collect
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Reading a little of the Mellon report on community based archives, and brother,
“We are really working, trying to prioritize bringing objects to
the community to get the language, to get the history of the
objects, to make sure our record is as complete as possible.
When we get new photos, we take them over to the senior
centerandtry togetnamesandhistories and information for
the people in those photos.”
The museum’s ability to build its archive—including document-
ing community members’ memories while still possible--de-
pends on space and staff it does not yet have. Collections are
arriving faster than they can be housed, a vulnerability that
recently came into sharp relief:
“We need to double or triple our space. We just received
thousands of objects that we’re still working to bring into
our building. We had them stored off site — and that off-site
storage caught fire. We were very fortunate [the damage was
limited]. And of course, we also need two, three more staff people to do this work
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
An eighteen month project of combining the five PoC collections in the repo for language that makes white ladies nervous.
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David Staniunas @boxreceiver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Sorry I remember Undue Diligence, and the Georgia uni that actually tried to get perms for descendants of every correspondent in a 19th c collection
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Found it! It’s Simon Tanner’s landmark 2004 study funded by the Mellon Foundation (Reproduction Charging Models & Rights Policy for Digital Images in American Art Museums). He surveyed 100 museums and found almost none recouped costs once staff time and overhead were factored in.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
lullll
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Yes -- this Mellon study was the start, I think, kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/pu... and there has been good followup from Yale, Smithsonian about the positive impacts of no longer charging permissions siarchives.si.edu/sites/defaul...
kclpure.kcl.ac.uk
Reproduction charging models & rights policy for digital images in American art museums: A Mellon Foundation funded study
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
About fifteen years ago (+/-), the British Museum (I think) did a cost analysis of the permissions process and determined that the staff overhead was much, much higher than revenues. Does anyone else remember this? Can you help me track it down?
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Duke’s mayonnaise, please
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The new generation has lost the Ancient Wisdom.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It is astonishing to me that every special collections workflow I've encountered dutifully included the step of minting an ARK or PURL or whatever and they are almost all broken now. It's like we thought that these were a talisman for persistence.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I would call this a penthouse item – it has a very high floor. By contrast, the hummus wrap is a basement item. It has a very low ceiling.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Someone just posted something from the Atlantic 😬
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
lol lice have been suspected at preschool and the parent WhatsApp group is BLOWING UP. Latest volley started with “what if we let the bugs win?”
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
A Lexus SUV honked at me and my preschooler because he was taking too much time in the crosswalk. View from her window:
static.klipy.com
Bear Attacking Camera
ALT: Bear Attacking Camera
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Seth Rockman @sethrockman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
This is a big one: Brown University is searching for the next director of the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Please help us identify excellent candidates to lead this signature program into the future. Please write me with ideas; please share in your networks; please apply.
networks.h-net.org
Brown University - Professor and Director of the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice | H-Net
1. Academic Accomplishment. We seek a scholar with a strong scholarly record, including excellence in both research and teaching, appropriate for appointment at the level of full professor in a social science, humanities, or arts department at Brown.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I was trying to let a potential donor know that his books are hell of not rare so I was doing a worldcat search while not logged into my institution and it actually locked me out
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Stabilize and get on with it. 🏆
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
(Swiped this from a parenting book that read me for filth - it makes the argument that most parenting conflicts stem from parents who have a hard time managing their own emotions when they set expectations of children. If you can't STFU and must yell or explain to a 3-year-old, talk to a counselor)
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Text written and deleted for my upcoming workshop: Any archives staff that perform reference, collections care, or acquisitions activities need to have access to collection files. If this makes you uncomfortable, you may benefit from counseling to address your relationship with control.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
I love fragrance and have no idea where to start. Where/how do you get samples?
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Acallidryas @acallidryas.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
In a recent tragedy a 9 yo child was hit by a minivan and killed in a nearby area. I don't think I would have noticed before I started listening to @thewaroncars.bsky.social but every. single. headline. talks about the scooter and not one say what he was struck or killed by.
A screen shot from a google news search that shows headlines: 9-year old boy riding e-scooter killed in Fairfax Co. crash; No charges filed against driver after child killed in Fairfax County scooter crash; Fairfax county mourns death of 9-year-old on e-scooter; Updated: Child riding e-scooter killed in Herndon-area crash; Police urge riders to wear helmets after 9-year-old dies following e-scooter crash in Fairfax County; 9-year-old boy riding electric scooter killed in Herndon collision; 9-year-old boy killed in crash in Northern Virginia while riding e-scooter.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
At the risk of doing Quaker rehabilitation, the designs for the original penitentiary were designed for two months sentences and were the luxury condos of their day with running water and lots of light and outdoor space. This design obviously degraded quickly.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
About 18 lifetimes ago, I managed a grant that scanned books from North Africa & the Middle East and this is the software we used. The QAQC on it was pretty good. sakhr.com
sakhr.com
Sakhr Software — Arabic NLP & Language Technology
Award-winning Arabic NLP solutions for governments and enterprises. Machine Translation, OCR, TTS, and more.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Job searching is the absolute worst. I hope you know to hit me up if there’s anything I can do to help.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Greg Weideman talks a lot about how the best way for anyone to think about resource management is to start on the file system and I totally agree. There’s no shortcut to understanding the domain before making the fancy power tools.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I spent the years between 2010 and 2013 making some wild ass EADs as mail merges with a lot of different elements and rules and nesting and it was great. My life got easier once I got better at XSLT and XQuery, but it was an amazing place to start to learn the domain
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I truly believe that the first lesson in an introduction to computational thinking workshop should be a mail merge
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Laura Millar @millarlaura.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
The Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) Board of Directors has released the Archives Canada Working Group (ACWG) 2026 final report on Archives Canada. See: lnkd.in/gbjfEpPV. The future of Canadian archives is under severe stress. I urge everyone concerned about archival services to read and respond.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
If you don’t tell me the name & concept of their podcast, I will be so disappointed
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
There were many doubters and haters, but my mom and I did succeed in getting six Broyhill Brasilia chairs home from Beverly, Massachusetts in a Nissan Rogue. The bungee work was all my own.
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Get that thing TF away from my kid
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Observed in my neighborhood: - the lady at the paint store recommended some guys at the carpet store that “won’t mention it to anyone if they find lead paint on the stairs.” - this book in a LFL
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Move almost done — all of my neighbors have come over to introduce themselves. So many preschoolers! And I got a compliment on my vintage George McGovern campaign poster.
Upside down poster — an American flag being reassembled
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Often executors of estates don’t have a very strong understanding of how property law works and their incentive is to cross things off the list. Not the archives‘ problem!
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Maureen @meau.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
This is excellent and yes please — let’s get coffee!
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