Caveat Lector

So here’s the deal. I may be able to sneak into next week’s Project Bamboo meeting in Chicago, but I am not doing so at the behest of MPOW, and so I’ve got to dig up my own accommodations. Which is, um, expensive.

Is someone going who might be willing to split a room with me? Or is there someone who lives within public transport of the University of Chicago who might let me crash next Thursday and Friday nights?

Email me if you can help; all my email addresses are currently functional last I checked. I will be eternally grateful!

So while I’ve been on my moviemaking-induced blog semi-hiatus, a lot of things have been happening in open access:

• We have a new Open Access Directory wiki, with real institutional backing (doesn’t surprise me that it’s Simmons, either; they’re good people there) and real wiki gardeners. I’m mildly worried about the edit-access policies being a tad restrictive, but we’ll see. This is a good and valuable thing, and when I get out from under this summer’s over-busyness, I’ll set aside some time to contribute.
• Harvard Law followed in the footsteps of Harvard FAS, unanimously approving a permissions mandate. Good for them, of course. If this keeps up, though, I may end up buying the drinks. I’m not sure it’s fair to count Harvard and Harvard Law as separate institutions, and thank goodness I thought to restrict myself to the United States or I’d have lost this bet already. I think I still have a fair chance of coming out financially unscathed—but the University of California system could sink me in a stroke. I’d love to see ’em do it. And I probably owe Willinsky an apology; I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew what was cooking at Harvard when he wrote that.
• Mike Rossner of Rockefeller UP continues his astounding streak of win and awesome, returning copyright on journal articles to authors on condition they make the content OA, and putting CC licenses on published articles going forward. Do we have an award we can give him? He deserves a big shiny meter-tall trophy or something of that nature.

Cheers all ’round!

One small onion to the NIH, which is refusing to budge from its somebody-else’s-problem stance on recalcitrant publishers. I still think this one’s going to bite them, and it may turn out to bite us, too. We’ll see. Nobody will be happier if I’m wrong than I.

I’d like to welcome my good colleague Shane Beers to the biblioblogosphere. Shane took over my duties at George Mason, and has done a lot better with them than I ever did. I’m happy to see other repository managers blogging, and thrice happy to see Shane.

He brings up something that I’ve heard from other people as well: annoyance at my insistence on the phrase “repository-rat” to refer to librarians who manage institutional repositories. Some of that is me, and some of it is deliberate and calculated rhetorical strategy. It seems worth picking apart.

The “me” part, I confess, is of a piece with my steadfast refusal to take myself and what I do too seriously. Back in the day, I called myself a conversion peasant. Now I’m a repository-rat. I’m stubborn about this, and I don’t anticipate changing it… but I also recognize that it leaks into how I refer to other repository managers, as well as the specialty as a whole, and I see how that can feel like disdain.

It isn’t. It takes quite a bit of dedication to stick with IRs, and an impressive array of skills to manage one well. (I’m not saying I do, mind. Not for me to say. But I’m steeped in this field, I know whom I respect, and I know what they are capable of.) Moreover, these dedicated, skilled people have to persevere in the face of widespread ignorance, apathy, and even opprobrium directed at them, never mind lousy software and badly-stacked odds.

Which leads me to the rhetorical-strategy bit. I feel like a rat in the wainscoting, ignored and despised and isolated. Why shouldn’t I? Why should I be any prouder of what I do than my employer (which has partially defunded my service), my profession (which barely acknowledges I exist and makes no effort to support me), or the open-access movement (which openly insults me when it doesn’t ignore me)? Why should I pretend to support and respect I don’t actually have?

And why is it uniquely my responsibility to redress these issues? If the institution I work for, the profession I have joined, or the open-access movement I am part of would like me to stop referring to myself as a rodent, howsabout they toss me a bone so I can move up the animal taxonomy a bit?

Like the immortal archy, I see things from the under side. There’s use in that, I maintain, just as there’s use in colleagues such as Shane asserting themselves to raise the profile of our work and the esteem in which it is held. I’m on their side, I truly am—I just approach the work from a different angle.

insects are not always
going to be bullied
by humanity
some day they will revolt
i am already organizing
a revolutionary society to be
known as the worms turnverein

—Don Marquis

A courteous interface is a marvelous thing. It gets out of the way. It intuits what you want, squeezing every tiny bit of information possible out of whatever tidbits you feed it. It doesn’t bother you with its nasty little internal troubles. It’s Jeeves, there with a pick-me-up when you’ve got a drink-fueled headache.

DSpace’s administrative and item-submission interfaces are more like the temporary Jeeves replacement Bertie got stuck with once, the guy who snarled all the time and snaffled socks. It is about as courteous as a New York cabdriver in heavy traffic. As a result, it wastes incredible amounts of human time—my time, my sysadmin’s time, my submitters’ time, the time of dozens of admins just like me. I promised to talk about that, so I will.

For example. Just this morning I got an unhappy email from a submitter who didn’t have access to all the collections in a given community. The said collections are two or three levels deep because of intervening subcommunities—and while I’m talking about wasted time, I’ll spend a few words on wasted cognitive capacity, because I have yet to meet anyone for whom the DSpace distinction between communities and collections is intuitive or useful. My submitters expect to be able to submit items to communities. They do not understand why some items on the sitemap (which is how they think of the communities-and-collections page) are bold and others aren’t. I hate wasting time and effort explaining this stupid and essentially otiose distinction.

Right. Back to my submitter and her problem. I had to click open every single collection in order to click again to check its submitter list. For those collections she didn’t have submit access to, adding it was a four-click process and could have been more: click to open the eperson list, click to go to the last page, click to select her address (she’s late in the alphabet), click to update the submitter group. Wasted. Time.

And don’t get me started on DSpace’s repo-rat–hostile habit of building impenetrable names for otherwise-unnamed submitter groups. COLLECTION_27_SUBMIT. Yeah, that makes all kinds of sense in my little rat brain, how about yours? (If you’re wondering, the number is the collection’s database identifier, which is almost impossible to figure out from the DSpace UI. Real friendly, DSpace.) And these names proliferate like rats, because there’s no way to tell DSpace “use the people I just told you about, plzkthx” without going through the added hassle of creating and naming an actual group, and no way to tell DSpace “use the standard access rules for this community” or “use the access rules for this other collection.”

So then I needed to set up a new collection for her. Could DSpace pick up on the submitter-selection work I’d already wasted a bunch of time doing? Could it hell. I had to go through the same clickety-clickety process all over again. There’s no access templating in DSpace; every single collection in every single community is sui generis. Just imagine how much time I get to waste when someone leaves the university and someone else takes over their DSpace deposit duties! Woo-hoo! Because obviously I don’t have anything important to do with my time.

Which brings us to the DSpace deposit interface. To be clear, I’m working from 1.4.2 here, not 1.5—but let’s be clear about something else too, namely that 1.5 doesn’t fix all of these warts, though the Configurable Submission system is indeed a step forward. So let’s waste some time, everybody!

You start your submission from a collection page, or you start from My DSpace, in which case it asks you to pick a collection. What does it do with this collection information? It determines whether you have deposit access, duh, and if your friendly neighborhood repository-rat has spent time customizing a metadata form for that collection, it uses that form. (Does DSpace ask on collection creation which metadata forms to use? It does not. That’s configured via a file called input-forms.xml on the server. Mm-hm, that’s right, I have nothing better to do with my time than seek out and edit—twice, because I keep a version in source control—bitsy little XML files DSpace leaves all over creation.) Anything else? Like surveying existing items in that collection for commonalities in order to prepopulate metadata fields? Nah. Machine learning would save a human being’s time or something. Can’t have that.

Next you run into this screen, which I loathe with a white-hot loathing neutron stars might envy:

The top question is just goofy. In my experience, this is true for less than one-tenth of one percent of submissions. The Québécois might have a use for that checkbox, but how many DSpace installations does Québéc have exactly, and why exactly wouldn’t a Québécois installation just put in dc.title.alternative by default? So why is every submitter into every DSpace installation forced to cope with that moronic checkbox for every single submission? Because DSpace doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about anybody’s time or cognitive load, that’s why. The default is correct, at least, but that’s decidedly small comfort.

(I suspect there’s a librarian at the bottom of this interface wart somewhere. What about MARC 246, someone must have screamed. Guess what? I don’t care about MARC 246. I care about efficient use of person-hours, which that checkbox unquestionably isn’t. I love my fellow librarians, except when I hate them. I hate them when they gleefully glomp every iota of patron time and effort they can get their little mitts on.)

The middle question is difficult to understand (for my submitters, anyway; more of them get it wrong than right), and DSpace doesn’t explain why you have to answer it. I get a lot of questions from submitters about putting in publication dates and citations, because my submitters don’t mentally connect those fields with that checkbox. But that’s what that checkbox does when checked: it adds fields to the next metadata screen for dc.date.issued, dc.publisher, and dc.identifier.citation. (How many repository-rats running DSpace just learned something? Don’t be embarrassed. It was months before I figured it out, too, and I had to go in and read code before I had it sussed.)

But it gets better (for “worse” values of “better”). Imagine Ulysses Acqua for a moment, trying to be nice to Dr. Troia and the little open-access basketology journal she wants to archive. He uses the input-forms.xml file to make a custom metadata form that puts basic citation information for the basketology journal in dc.identifier.citation so Dr. Troia doesn’t have to retype it every time. When Dr. Troia submits her first article, she doesn’t think to tick the middle checkbox, and DSpace doesn’t tick it for her. What happens?

SHE GETS AN ERROR MESSAGE. I kid you not. AN ERROR MESSAGE. It reads “You’ve indicated that your submission has not been published or publicly distributed before, but you’ve already entered an issue date, publisher and/or citation. If you proceed, this information will be removed, and DSpace will assign an issue date.”

I—I—I honestly have no words. Do I need them? Maybe I do. The Jeeves interface never, ever, EVER threatens to discard information Bertie has provided it. It’s hard enough to pry useful information out of Bertie as it is! And talk about your bizarrely opaque, unhelpful, and inappropriately finger-wagging error messages! (How does Dr. Troia fix the problem, if she wants to keep her citation information or date or whatever? The message doesn’t even say.) I am just agog that this grotesque interaction exists in a production software system.

(Yes, of course I’ve triggered it. How do you think I figured out it exists? I don’t go looking for smelly garbage like this, I assure you.)

But it even gets worse than that. Weird interactions between input-forms.xml and the deposit code can make checkboxes on this page disappear when they shouldn’t. I haven’t dug into how this happens—but it bit me hard, such that I had to be unhelpful and take a date.issued out of a thesis metadata form in input-forms.xml. Because hey, troubleshooting DSpace’s sclerotic deposit system is such a productive use of my time!

Returning to our initial screen once more: there is absolutely no need whatever to ask the submitter about multiple files. None. Simply assume that submissions may have more than one file! Asking submitters to think about it up-front instead of at upload is wasted time.

So there we have it. An entire wasted screen, multiplied by untold numbers of DSpace submissions. There’s plenty more in there, the licensing system not least; Jeeves interface, not so much.

EPrints, as a rule, is a much better gentleperson’s personal gentleperson than DSpace. EPrints, for example, asks for item type up front, and configures its deposit screens to match, without the intervention of either submitter or repository-rat. Who knows, this politeness may have something to do with developer attitude. The last time I waxed profane on matters repository-interface-ish, Les Carr was in my inbox less than a day later asking eagerly, “is this what you mean? would this solution I just came up with work for you?” Whereas DSpace gets on my case for being negative. I’m just sayin’ here.

No. No, I’m not just sayin’. It runs deeper than that. I’ve occasionally seen a few nods in the DSpace developer community toward EPrints interface accomplishments. Unfortunately, the feel of the discourse I’ve seen is “look at all the shiny AJAX! we want that!”

This is not about shiny AJAX, people. It’s not about shiny at all. This is about DSpace not wasting my time. There’s a ton of work DSpace could do with the aim of removing time-wasters before anyone writes a single line of Javascript or de-uglifies a single line of CSS. To do so, though, DSpace developers will have to learn to give a damn about my time and the amount of it DSpace has wasted and continues to waste. I see next to zero evidence of that learning taking place. (Tim gets it, which is why I say “next to zero” rather than just plain zero.)

Stop. Wasting. My. Time. That’s far and away the most important interface-development priority DSpace should adopt. For values of “me” that include “all repository-rats and willing depositors,” of course. DSpace’s interface needs to sit down at its mama’s knee and learn some courtesy.

If I’ve sounded stressed the last few weeks, it’s only because I have been. I really, really needed a good day off… and today I had one.

We did a weekend rent-a-car thing, as we have taken to doing every now and again, and after yesterday’s dutiful errand-running, today we drove up to Horicon Marsh. It was a perfect driving day: clear and bright and not too much traffic even on the Beltline.

We arrived at Blue Heron Landing in time for a leisurely al fresco lunch before the afternoon pontoon-boat tour. A small flock of egrets flew by across the road from us, and the first great blue heron of many sailed past over the river. “Marc” presided over the boat tour with aplomb, pointing out cormorants, a bunch more herons, painted turtles, some just-hatched goslings, and a showoffy yellow warbler. The wind kicked up a bit, but in the sunny stern of the boat, it wasn’t bad at all.

After the boat pulled up at the landing, we drove to the north end of the marsh to go for a walk. It’s still very early spring here; the trees are just budding, and the cattails are still winter-dry and rattly. The frogs are in full chorus over the deep-green grass, though, and the trails are rain-springy and moss-covered.

At length we reached the boardwalks into the marsh. Two pairs of blue-winged teal dabbled placidly among the coots and Canada geese. David gleefully watched a pair of muskrats grooming each other atop their lodge. A goose guarded her nest atop another lodge, while rough-winged and barn swallows swooped and chattered and chased each other about.

We took a return path that led us through a couple of copses, in which we saw palm and myrtle warblers as well as pretty white lilies and asters. Something chattered at us while we were taking a break on a fallen log, but we never did see what it was. We went on over dragonfly-dappled meadows, and at an overlook where our binoculars barely made out some redhead ducks, a sandhill crane floated past, serenely alone.

As we ambled down the last gentle slope before the parking lot, a beautiful lilt of song made me stop and look. If there’s anything made of purer happy than a meadowlark singing, I don’t know what it is.

We took a circuitous route back into Madison, because I wanted to try Monty’s Blue Plate Diner and I wasn’t sure where on Atwood it was. Found it, though, and had a ginormous and very tasty meal.

There should be more days like this. Just perfect.

So, I promised a look at the latest beating-things-with-rocks project. Voilà tout.

This took me a heck of a lot of time, considerable beating things with rocks, and of course I’m not completely happy with it—but for a first try at video making, it’s not half bad.

Next time, I’ll turn up the gain on the video-camera microphone, figure out why the hell Keynote adds about three seconds of extra time before some slide transitions but not others and make it stop, and figure out why on earth iMovie made my poor little video pixellate at one-second intervals.

If you’re going to do this: Fanfic and vidding have the concept of a “beta,” somebody who looks at what you’ve done and points out the stupid bits so you can fix them before they’re inflicted on the world. YOU WANT ONE. I showed my Twitter friends a preview yesterday. I had managed to fsck up the affiliation of one of my interviewees. One of my Twitter friends noted it, and I was able to fix it and redo the vid before I made a complete jackass of myself. Major thanks to her, and she knows who she is.

So y’all remember what was making me cranky a year ago? Proof’s in the pudding, and the author copies are in my hot little hands:

Now my mom can quit bugging me to go write a book already. Okay, okay, so I really only wrote slightly less than half of one. My name is on the cover. Dayenu.

This book is what you buy if you have K-12 (or maybe even undergraduate) students who would like to write book reports on an author they might, you know, actually like. There are also some readers-advisory bits that I think came out pretty well (and I say this having opposed some of them pretty strenuously at the time): if-you-liked pullouts on some authors and subgenre listings in back. It’s a pretty good mix of authors if I do say so myself; we pulled off a couple of fairly daring tricks, such as including three or four graphic-novel authors as well as several YA authors, and openly acknowledging the female half of male-female writing partnerships. (Yes, I know, the latter shouldn’t be daring, but find me another reference book that does it properly, I dare you.)

If I had it to do over, I’d make much more of a point of expanding coverage of writers of color, who regularly get shafted in what turns into a self-reinforcing cycle: they don’t get read because readers-advisory books don’t include them, and then readers-advisory books don’t include them because their readerships aren’t large. I did make a total pest of myself to keep a couple-three excellent, less-known-than-they-oughta-be writers of color in our readalike lists, and I’m not sorry about that at all, just sorry it had to come to that.

But for now—Jen’s and my book, let me show you it.

Michael Stephens started it, and I’d hate to miss a chance to evangelize the awesomeness of Flickr’s wealth of Creative Commons material, so:

Image ganked from here, and found via the slick and useful Flickr Storm search engine.

Nothing particularly gnomic about this utterance, so I won’t insult intelligences by explaining it; I’ll just point and shut up.

By the end of next week, I’ll have another beating-things-with-rocks project to show all y’all. I’m quite proud of it.

I inadvertently let the textartisan.com domain expire. I’ve renewed it, but until DNS catches up, my regular email address is nicely hosed. If it has to get to me, use dorothea dot salo at gmail dot com.

Yeah, don’t start, okay? It’s been a bad week.

We had a lovely presentation at MPOW today, by a well-known academic in the messy intersection of science and education, about a new open-access journal he’s helping launch. The presentation has been advertised for a week, sent out to the big library listserv at MPOW at least twice, and put up on the daily events calendar at the main library.

Fewer than ten librarians attended.

Just a datapoint. If I say any more I’ll dunk myself in the soup.