Steven Van Impe

There are two inescapable facts in the world: 1. Every day, there are more new, in-demand books in the world. 2. Every library's shelf space is finite. How do librarians reconcile these facts? They weed their collections, amongst other strategies. And then people freak out on social media. 🗃️📚

Begging faculty to be professional and collegial enough to believe that librarians are competent and to save their outrage for all of the shitty things we have in common (lack of funding, understaffing, bad admin behavior, etc.) instead of undercutting us when we try to do our jobs

Due to an expected outage of the KU Leuven application tool over the weekend, the deadline to apply for a PhD position with FitMA was extended until 5 November. If you check most boxes of the profile below, you could be the right candidate! #philosophysky #medievalsky www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

please sterilise your cat

Bonjour, nous faisons face actuellement à une intensification massive du moissonnage des contenus de Gallica par des robots IA, qui dégrade le service à nos utilisateurs humains. Nous travaillons à mettre en place les mesures correctives dans les meilleurs délais.

📢Early Modern Hellenism Colloquium (VIII) @hlamers.bsky.social & I will be hosting Elisa Bianchi (The Warburg Institute) ✨From Manuscript Architectures to the Printed Page – the Making of Trincavelli’s Hesiod (Venice, 1537) 📆Thurs 29 Oct. 15:00–16:00 CET, Online Information to register, below 👇

The digital library of the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France), Gallica, is currently facing "a massive intensification in the harvesting of content by AI bots, which is degrading the service provided to our human users." What a dumb dystopia 😅

Thunderbirds did it first.

Webinaire – Mmmonk School 2026. Free webinars on medieval books by international experts rmblf.be/2026/10/28/w...

This is not just a manuscript. This is the printer's copy of the Pegasides Pleyn, a collection of Dutch poems by Jan Baptist Houwaert, printed by the Plantin Press in Antwerp in 1582-1583. #bookhistory #rarebooks #earlymodern 💙📚📜

Attention: Our rare book team is hiring a full-time book photographer. Details at the link. No calls or walk-ins, please. If you call or walk in asking about it your inattention to detail will be noted. www.capitolhillbooks-dc.com/hiring.php

BookSky! I'm curious about water-resistant books. Did you know Charles Goodyear had some of the plates in his book about rubber printed on... rubber? & there's La Naïade, a "journal des baigneurs," on paper that survives a warm bath. I haven't found copies of either, though. Leads, examples?

Spotted in the printing room @theulspeccoll.bsky.social

Léon Spilliaert, Self-Portrait in the Mirror, 1908, India ink, watercolor, and pastel on paper, 48 x 63 cm (Mu.Zee, Oostende) 💀

Look, I know all the reasons we got here, but we really need to start seriously thinking about what we do in a world where The Markets punish whole countries for voting for decency, compassion, and fairness. We must stop pretending the capitalist machine is an objective, value neutral force.

👁️👄👁️

What are the odds that in one week I would find two different ways of saying "he who smelt it dealt it" in the seventeenth-century?

Nee, je hoeft me niet te aaien, ik ben niet zielig, je hoeft niet te bidden dat ik beter word en als ik hulp nodig heb, vraag ik het zelf. Regel jij dan dat de stationsliften het doen en de stoep vrij is? #rolstoel #validisme #jekomternietin

Graffiti artists together for digital access to journals.

Me to my cat who hasn't accepted Daylight Saving Time: "Instead of dwelling on what is beyond your control, you can choose to focus on the things you can change."

Irgendwas mache ich falsch 🤔

Bluesky has four kinds of users [Jan Steen, Rhetoricians at a Window (Orator, Poet, Critic, Jester), 1662-66, Oil on canvas, 74 x 59 cm, Museum of Art, Philadelphia]

Michael Atiyah 🇪🇬: Fields Medal 1966 (also Abel Prize 2004), for K-theory. Ahmed Zewail 🇪🇬: Nobel for Chemistry 1999, for his work on femtochemistry. Omar M. Yaghi 🇯🇴: Wolf Prize 2018, Nobel for Chemistry 2025, for his work on reticular chemistry Naguib Mahfouz 🇪🇬: Nobel for literature 1988

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

Thanks to a unique cooperation by the National Geographic Institute, the Royal Library, the State Archives and the Royal Museum for Central Africa the most beautiful plans, maps and aerial photographs of Belgium and Central Africa were put online. #siteoftheweek

Kid's Allright by Bettie Serveert (1993). www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgpV...