A.C.C.E.S.S.

Archival and Circulation Consultants for Effective, Strategic Searching No, we are not the IT department. Yes, we can answer your question! quasi-RP blog for the Librarians of Shield series by alpacamyhedgehog on Archive Of Our Own

[msmacabre310]

Was telling my friend about how Lin Manuel-Miranda is apparently singing background vocals on the new Mountain Goats album and he immediately shot me dead with this

[mariposakitten]

The upshot of people demanding others put their age in their bio is. Frustrating. And annoying. "What if you're a minor" what if I'm old enough that I was raised not to put my goddamn personal information on the internet. What if that.

[bethanyactually]

I don't wanna @ anyone because I understand how fast things seem to move in today's landscape of streaming shows dropping entire seasons in one day, and networks pumping out new series constantly to try to attract more subscribers with no intent to actually maintain those shows over time but I just saw someone self-deprecatingly lament that they are still thinking about a show that ended almost a year ago, making fan art and playlists for it, and I want to be very clear:

you can still create fanworks when it comes to old media!! PLEASE do!! there are always going to be new fans who will appreciate it, and veteran fans who are dying for new content and new perspectives. also, less than a year is NOTHING. the original Star Trek series was on TV six decades ago and there are still people losing their minds over it, writing stories and reblogging gifsets daily, and that's only one example.

a fandom lasts as long as there are people who love a thing, even if it's only a handful of people. love what you love and write and draw and make gifs and playlists about it!

[racethewind10]

raise your hand if you still have brainrot about a show that isn't airing

[userautumn]

[bitbybitwrites]

YouTube secretly used AI to edit people's videos. The results could bend reality

YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without telling users or asking permission. As AI quietly mediates our world, what happens to our sha

"It turns out, he wasn't. In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people's videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.

There's a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us. Eventually, the question won't be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it's eroding our ties to the world around us."

[evil-fact-checker]

1. What happened YouTube admitted it’s been running AI processing on some Shorts — sharpening, denoising, smoothing — without asking permission. Creators noticed their own faces looked subtly “off,” like they were wearing AI makeup. And the altered version is what the audience sees.

2. Why this crosses a line

Ownership: Your video is your work. Your face is your image. When YouTube silently rewrites it, they are asserting that they—not you—own how you appear on their platform.

Trust: Creators like Rick Beato and Rhett Shull rely on authenticity. If the platform itself tampers with that, it erodes the bond between creator and audience.

Consent: On your phone, you can toggle filters. On YouTube, you aren’t asked. That’s the difference between a tool you control and a platform that controls you.

Reality creep: These changes seem tiny, but they normalize the idea that media is always pre-processed. Once you accept that, the very expectation of “realness” starts to vanish.

3. Why YouTube thinks they can do this

Most people won’t notice.

Those who do notice won’t leave; there’s no real competition at YouTube’s scale.

With bigger global crises, this feels too trivial to fight. They know apathy and exhaustion keep most people quiet.

4. The deeper problem This isn’t about whether a shirt wrinkle looks sharper. It’s about power. YouTube doesn’t see itself as a neutral distributor of your work. It sees itself as the author of the experience, with full rights to “optimize” your content however it likes. Creators are just raw material. That’s why they didn’t ask: asking implies you could say no.

5. What can be done

Raise awareness. The only reason this surfaced was because creators with big audiences noticed. Keep amplifying it.

Demand control. A mandatory opt-out is the minimum. YouTube must not alter identity without consent.

Diversify. Explore Nebula, PeerTube, even Patreon-hosted video. Every bit of independence reduces monopoly leverage.

Frame the stakes. This isn’t “just a filter.” It’s a question of who owns your image, your work, your voice. If we concede that to the platform, we’ll lose the last trace of authenticity online.

6. The bottom line Google once said “Don’t be evil.” Now the motto is closer to “Don’t get caught.” They’re not testing video quality — they’re testing how much tampering people will tolerate before they resist. And if there’s no resistance, the platform’s ownership over your reality becomes the default.

[schmergo]

Whenever I tell people that I dream of playing as many versions of Cinderella’s stepsisters as possible, I have to mention the mildly deranged illegal production of Cinderella I was in when I was 12.

I used to go to this small drama camp as a kid that was entirely run by one nice lady, I believe named Carol. We would put on abridged minimalist versions of popular musicals at a local church with only one week of rehearsal. These weren’t licensable junior versions. Carol created them herself.

She wrote the scripts to include the major plot highlights and famous lines from the various musicals and she arranged and accompanied all of the songs on the piano herself. We did Annie, Mary Poppins, the Wizard of Oz, and, the year before I came, Peter Pan. These shows were definitely illegal, but they were so small that nobody really noticed, and they were a ton of fun. The camp was also extremely affordable, so nobody was getting rich off of it.

But Cinderella, my final production with them, was next-level. When I arrived for the first day of camp, I was curious to see if it would be the Disney version or the Rodgers and Hammerstein version.

It was both. And neither.

Carol somehow wrote an almost entirely original book for Cinderella that used the best songs from both the Disney and R&H versions. That meant that I, as a stepsister, got to sing the “Stepsisters’ Lament,” a peak song if you ask me, but adorable little kids playing mice also got to sing “Cinderelly, Cinderelly.”

The one thing about combining both versions is perhaps an overemphasis on the Fairy Godmother, because the songs “Bibbidy Bobbity Boo” and “Impossible” are both no-brainers to include. But somehow, things worked out perfectly there, too, by splitting the role.

See, we didn’t just have a Fairy Godmother.

We also had a Fairy Godfather.

I was 12, so I didn’t quite get the joke, but as an adult, I’m obsessed with the implication that Cinderella got her dress, slippers, and carriage through some kind of vague affiliation with the mafia.

[solradguy]

Ok I guess if you want to get really absolutely technical about it, I guess Martin Luther's 95 Theses were a zine. I guess. I suppose.

[seven-winged-liar]

AUGUST IS OVER??????

[seven-winged-liar]

my bad gang there's one more

[estrapaded]

[life]

Today marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a pivotal day in WWII where US troops and Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy. Pictured here is a view of the Normandy beachhead, taken one week after D-Day by LIFE photographer Frank Scherschel and published in the June 26, 1944 issue. According to LIFE, “A Week after first landings, the Normandy beachhead had changed from a battlefield to a gigantic port area. Allies had captured small ports like Ouistreham and Isigny, but the beach was still the best place to land reinforcements, equipment and supplies.” (Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #DDay #DDay75 https://www.instagram.com/p/ByX1_m-jnaN/?igshid=18376alp1bmls

[riversidearchives]

Strange Lights Over Ventura County

When we think of unidentified flying objects or U. F. O.’s, we think of space and of course NASA. The Navy is not the first government agency you would think of when it came to U. F. O.’s. At The National Archives at Riverside in our Naval records there is a U. F. O. report from the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, California. This is a report in which two police officers from two different cities in Ventura county reported the same sighting to the Navy. Officer Orville Clinton of Fillmore reported to see four round silvery objects in the sky in the vicinity of the San Cayetano mountains heading north. As you can see from this report, about the same time in Santa Paula (which is just north of Fillmore) Police Sergeant D. A. Kelly saw the same four objects in the sky.

We have a subscription service to Fold3.com, which has the records of an Air Force program called Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book was created to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects between 1945 to 1969. There is a report of this sighting in Project Blue Book and here is the link to that report.  What is interesting about the Project Blue Book report is the Air Force found out about this incident through the local newspaper. The Project Blue Book report is very poor and they were waiting on the Navy to provide them with more details–which did not seem to show up. It seems the Navy was unaware of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. At least the eyewitness accounts have been found at The National Archives at Riverside and if you are interested in viewing the originals or to view Project Blue Book on Fold3.com for free please come in for a visit.

Series: Central Subject Files 1957-1959. Record Group 181: Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments 1784-2000. (National Archives Identifier 7450434).

[librariansofshield]

In celebration of Pride Month, we asked NYPL staff members to tell us about a book that was a transformative part of their LGBTQ experience.

[todaysdocument]

England, D-Day -2: 6/4/1944

Excerpted from: “D-Day to D plus 3.” Series: Moving Images Relating to Military Activities, 1947 - 1964. Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 - 1985.

Uncover more World War II Resources at the National Archives.

[librariansofshield]

D-Day’s Top Secret Map

The night before the invasion — dubbed Operation Overlord — Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, British General Bernard Montgomery and other leaders gathered in Portsmouth, a port city on the English Channel, for a last briefing on everything from the weather to the terrain. One of the key presenters was U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Charles Lee Burwell, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate who, while being “scared to death,” nonetheless delivered a short talk on the tides and the thousands of star-shaped steel barbs called “Czech hedgehogs” that the Germans had dropped just offshore to wreck landing crafts.

The map Burwell and others were using for this top-level briefing was spectacular: a one-of-kind, three-dimensional model of Utah Beach, the code name for beaches near Pouppeville, La Madeleine, and Manche, France. The top-secret model, made of rubber on two 4×4 sections, depicted the beach and the interior pastures sectioned off by those hedgerows, a geographic feature that obstructed lines of sight and created conditions for deadly, close-quarter combat. Later that night, Burwell took the model aboard transport ships, showing the commanders and troops the same raised maps of the terrain they would see for the first time in a few hours.

[usnatarchives]

In honor of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we’re going behind-the-scenes with Billy Wade, Kelsey Noel, and Kevin Quinn of the Still Pictures Branch at the National Archives in College Park, MD. They’ll be sharing original photographs related to D-Day and Operation Overload. Tune in at noon EDT on June 6 for this special Facebook Live. 

[librariansofshield]

The Incredible Process Archivists Use to Save Damaged War Film

The biggest problem with old film? Shrinkage.

Ever wonder how old and damaged film is converted into digital files ready for restoration? For the scoop, we asked Criss Austin, a motion picture preservation specialist with the National Archives and Records Administration who transferred all 15 hours of William Wyler’s 16mm Memphis Belle film footage to 4K for the World War II documentary The Cold Blue, which premieres June 6 on HBO.

[librariansofshield]

There to save, not to kill: U.S. survivor recalls D-Day bloodshed

Seventy-five years ago, 19-year-old Charles Shay leapt off a U.S. landing boat a...

On June 6, 1944, he was in France not to kill but to rescue. As a medical technician, he was to treat the wounded as the world’s largest ever seaborne invasion unfolded.

One of 175 Native Americans who landed in Normandy that day, he ran across the beach dozens of times, dragging men out of the surf and patching up their wounds under heavy fire — actions for which he was awarded a Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, and France’s Legion d’Honneur.

[librariansofshield]

In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, the Veterans History Project (VHP) at the Library of Congress today launched an interactive online experience that features unique journeys of veterans who were part of the invasion.

The digital efforts include an interactive Story Map, “D-Day Journeys: Personal Geographies of D-Day,” and a new online website feature, “D-Day: 75th Anniversary.”

The Story Map draws from VHP collections, and chronicles the individual journeys of four veterans who took part in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944: Preston Earl Bagent, Robert Harlan Horr, John William Boehne III and Edward Duncan Cameron.

It combines text, images and multimedia content in an online application for an immersive user experience that allows map-based discovery through geographic information system technology, commonly referred to as GIS. This Story Map includes archival source materials ranging from ticket stubs to sketches, military orders, diaries, memoirs and photographs.

[deckerlibrary]

Remembering the Howard University Librarian Who Decolonized the Way Books Were Catalogued

Dorothy Porter challenged the racial bias in the Dewey Decimal System, putting black scholars alongside white colleagues

[librariansofshield]

An “initial development of a satisfactory classification scheme,” writes Battle, was first undertaken by four women on the staff of the Howard University Library: Lula V. Allen, Edith Brown, Lula E. Conner and Rosa C. Hershaw. The idea was to prioritize the scholarly and intellectual significance and coherence of materials that had been marginalized by Eurocentric conceptions of knowledge and knowledge production. These women paved the way for Dorothy Porter’s new system, which departed from the prevailing catalog classifications in important ways.

All of the libraries that Porter consulted for guidance relied on the Dewey Decimal Classification. “Now in [that] system, they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization,” she explained in her oral history. In many “white libraries,” she continued, “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”