Weeknote #45: Outage

I'm feeling very old this week as the boy turned 17 (SEVENTEEN). We spent time looking back at family photos and leaning in to fuzzy childhood memories. Growing up is hard, but watching people grow up might be harder.

What happened this week?

Some focussed conversations on areas where teams are under significant pressure, asking what we can stop, maintain, and prioritize.

Further thinking about how we define Membership for the Library aiming to simplify the user offer, align internal categories between systems and rationalise shared terminology. This also surfaced questions of ownership and decision-making, with teams interacting with different parts of the full service. Ash Mann once again published a well-timed post on Five Types of Ownership. Birthday celebrations prevented me from catching up with him and other folk at Great Digital for Good 2026 in London.

On Thursday morning I completed my Carbon Literacy Training which was fast-paced and raised some challenging questions on individual and group actions to reduce emissions.

I then jumped into a Bodleian Library online session with Elena Trowsdale presenting on AI use in the library and museum workplace – including insights from her placement with reading room staff at NLS.

For various reasons, our SharePoint instance is known as 'Biscuit' – an acronym everyone has forgotten and a reference to the original Library endowment of £100k from Sir Alexander Grant, managing director of the Scottish biscuit maker McVitie & Price. Anyway... the "Biscuit group" convened this week to consider the unpalatable topics of file management, retention labels and folder permissions across SharePoint i.e. the things that inevitably fall to bottom of everyone's list. This included a discussion of how to set the right security settings to enable a controlled roll-out of Co-Pilot agents.

With impeccable timing, Friday was overtaken by the Microsoft outage affecting Outlook and other services. My day was spent working out the best way of communicating to staff, with the core message of "wait and see", and "work offline where possible". I'm sure there'll be multiple thought pieces on digital sovereignty and redundancy for critical services.

Some nice Library-sector responses spotted from Buckinghamshire Archives, Leeds Library, and Orkney Library and Archive.

Interesting things

• ImpactOpen – a useful list of AI for Good grants.
• Key takeaways from Stanford's 2026 AI100 Report, focussing on scaling, speed, disruption, governance and cyber security. Important takeaway: "This report will be out of date by the time you read it."
• A user-friendly staff demo of AllMaps using Yale Library's digital collections (with some useful context from Jonathan Manton)
• Daniel van Strien continues to post about the improvements in the speed and costs of open AI models for OCR outputs. An initial take after testing with the latest LightOn model.
• Defra builds an AI tool – to answer staff questions about AI.
• More reporting on bots scraping university library websites, providing disincentives to make parts of collections available online.
• Ross Ferguson on month three as Head of Digital Transformation at the Scottish Parliament. Lots to learn here about embedding a new delivery model across multiple systems and teams.

Watching, listening, reading, doing

📖 I bumped into a colleague in Blackwells as we both tried to get hold of the Booker-winner, The End of Everything. 'Sold out everywhere' was the message.

🎄With all our family birthdays taking place over the next three weeks, I get grumpy with any Christmas stuff before mid-December. The John Lewis ad didn't really land for me, and I'm trying not to think too hard about the internal logic of Aldi's campaign where animated carrots (who are carrots) own a dog made of cauliflower (who is both a vegetable and an animal).

📺 Also in ad-land, I keep encountering the same terrible adverts on rotation, including 'Beddie and Snusan', insufferable animated mattresses from Dreams. This AI-heavy ad for visiting Dubai makes me never want to visit Dubai.

🎞️ I have booked cinema tickets to You Can See Everything as a birthday treat.