Caveat Lector

I’m not quite sure what it means when doing my homework feels like writing a blog post.

I finished and sent in my first assignment for my virtual-collections class today. We were asked to find and critique something digital-library–related in the journal literature. I chose the June 2003 issue of Computers in Libraries, because the theme was digitization projects.

(My second choice was a truly nifty Roy Tennant article in Library Journal on tools for searching multiple databases. I want these tools to mature. Quickly. Because the current situation with regard to database-searching is a total crock.)

What I found to say will sound quite familiar to CavLec readers. I talked about Stupid Publisher Tricks. I talked about SGML and XML. I talked about why open standards are a good thing and librarians ought to pay more attention to them. I did not, strongly tempted though I was, talk about how much PDF sucks.

If it gets a halfway decent grade, I’ll post it here.

I found the job I want. Here it is. I can’t have it, of course, because I have a ways to go for my MLS… but I am telling you, that is my job right there. We wants it, precious, we wants it, we does!

(As long as they’ll let me use Python instead of Perl. Perl gives me the blue creevles.)

I’m tempted to try to make contact with the Michigan people, just to get my name in front of ’em. Anybody know anybody there?

Update: Oh, and thanks, Patrick, for sending me the notice. Bad me for not recognizing you up-front.

In reference class yesterday, one of the school’s doctoral candidates gave a cute talk about “rotary-wheel” reference-book holders. (Imagine a seven-foot-across, two- or three-tier lazy susan with books on it. Cool, huh? To heck with reference, I want one for my house!)

And she got to talking about the job market for info-sci Ph.Ds (pretty good, apparently), and about all the research that isn’t getting done, and the tenure-track academic-librarian system, and… well, you guys know the siren song.

I listened. Some days swimmer’s ear just isn’t enough, I guess. And the thought I can do this, if I want to soaked right through me, head to toe.

I did an hour of homework-related SLIS-library-combing before I went off to work, still thoughtful. Not even four and a half hours of mind-dulling data entry could stop the siren-webs spinning in my head.

After work I went back to SLIS to give my HTML-n00bs talk. I thought I’d get a go-home-free card, as I did with my second MadCat talk, because nobody was showing—until someone did. So I talked it through with her. Turned out she wanted a full-on web-based calendaring system, which requires a good deal more than HTML knowledge. So not a wasted hour exactly, but not the most productive one either. Cross-purposes. It happens. What’s frustrating, though, is that I’ll never have the chance to follow up with her; she’s not in a class, she was just there for an hour, and now she’s gone.

I just missed my bus home, and had to wait twenty minutes for a different bus that leaves me twenty minutes’ walk from home. It’s starting to get chilly in the evening; the breeze carrying the rainshower that caught me on my walk home ran cold through my hair as I sat in the bus shelter.

I considered the talk ruefully. That’s what academic-reference teaching work is like, I thought. You have ’em for an hour, not enough time to get anything important or complex across to them, and then they go away and you never see them again. I can do that kind of work—I’m good at presenting, I’m good with n00bs—but where’s the fun in it, aside from the sheer performance art? Where’s the now-and-again meeting of minds that was what I liked best about teaching?

And I got to thinking about the other things the doctoral candidate and our reference prof said about academic librarianship. The whole tenure thing. Publish-or-perish. Apparently at Texas A&M they’re so demanding about publications that the librarians have to ride each other’s coattails, grabbing second-author slots whenever they can. I bet a lot of pretty pointless so-called research comes out of environments like that.

(I have to say, I’ve read a few recent articles by profs in this department—whom I shan’t name for obvious reasons—and been kinda, um, how shall I say this, less than bowled over by the articles’ brilliance or practical application. Of course one article doesn’t define a person or his/her career, however.)

Oh, yeah. Right. Er. Forgot some things, in the grip of the siren-song. All the things that gave me the blue creevles the first time I looked an academic career in the face. They haven’t gone anywhere. Not even in librarianship, a field that fits me better than medievalism or linguistics ever did. And academic librarianship, as opposed to being a lib-school professor—look, from what I hear the Real Prof types treat librarians like garbage; most don’t even realize that librarianship requires grad-level training. Have I not had my fill and more of disdain and disrespect from people like that?

By the time the bus came for me, the rain-wind had done away with my mental cobwebs. Sure, I can do that. I don’t want to. Not even as a salve for battered pride.

I want to make e-text work. Maybe I’ll do that in library digitization projects. Maybe the free-access-scholarship folks can find room for me; I’d like that. Maybe I’ll work on e-text cataloguing schemes; that seems to be a problem area. (I seem to be practically the only person in SLIS who actively looks forward to taking cataloguing.) Maybe I’ll build and maintain servers and systems. Maybe I’ll find some way to start whacking publishers with clue-by-fours. I don’t know how that’ll play out.

I do know that I won’t work where I’m not respected. And I won’t publish a damned thing unless and until I’ve got something to say—and when I do, ain’t no journal editor or disgruntled peer-reviewer going to stop me, because I don’t have or want any skin in the publications game.

I know, I know, none of this is anything I haven’t said or at least hinted at before. But the sirens sing quite powerfully, they do, and every now and again I have to wake up my heart’s voice to sing them down.

I’d almost forgotten the energy surge from doing the right things. Not “right” in any cosmic sense—though cosmic rightness can certainly be part of it—but in the sense of learning and doing what’s valuable, what fits with one’s particular cast of mind, what works.

I had it through substantial parts of undergrad, lost it utterly in grad school, reclaimed it for a while at my first post-grad-school job, lost it again—and now here it is. My brain is buzzing so fast it’s hard to blog about, even.

Work first, I suppose. The director of the place I work called me Friday to say that they’re bidding on a survey to be conducted in Puerto Rico, and would I be interested in being go-to programmer for it—it probably involves travel.

I said yes, as saying yes commits me to nothing at this point, but I have serious reservations. The director seemed to be under the misapprehension that I would blow off classes whenever travel beckoned. If this project becomes any realer than it is now, I will correct that misapprehension in no uncertain terms. Info-sci is my new life. This job is what is paying for me to train myself for my new life.

This isn’t to say that something can’t be worked out. I can do long-weekend travel already, as I have no Friday classes. This is not, to my understanding, an atypical schedule. But class comes first. That’s just how it is.

I’m also not sure he quite understands how much I don’t understand about their survey-programming gizmo, an ancient DOS-based monstrosity that has grown out of all sense. I have messed about in it, sure, but I am by no means proficient, and I heard nothing about any actual training. So they fly me to Puerto Rico, and I do—what?

So we’ll see. It’s not exactly the worst dilemma I could possibly be having right now, you know?

Back to the library… I have my slideshow ready for my HTML-n00bs talk tonight. (“Teach HTML in an hour!” they said. “Riiiiiiiiiight,” I said.) This weekend I have to put together its companion for CSS.

(That slideshow link isn’t for wide dissemination, please—not that it’s worth that in any case. The show will either disappear or move, guaranteed. If you want a good tutorial, I like Simon Jessey’s.)

And I took my first baby steps toward my virtual-collections accessibility project. I went through the Memorial Library database listings for every one they listed that was free-access. I found a lot more than I expected, which means I may have to put some thought into how to winnow the list.

Then again… if I can manage to automate the checking, maybe I can handle the larger universe. And it’s bloody about time I learned some of the web-related Python libraries anyway. I can’t, unfortunately, use Bobby for this as I originally wanted to, because Bobby’s TOS totally forbids it. I’m looking for alternatives, because I really don’t want to do all the checking by hand. (Yes, I’m aware I’ll have to check a lot of stuff by hand anyway. “A lot” is quite a different thing from “everything,” however.) This list looks useful, and WAVE appears to be the best Bobby-replacement thus far (though I find its graphical feedback utterly infuriating).

Eh, well. Baby steps. I’ll figure this sucker out somehow, not least because if I do a half-decent job I think it’s publishable.

Okay, by request I have added a full-text RSS feed to this weblog. You can find it the same place as my usual feeds, only its filename is index_fulltext.xml. The Feed Validator says it checks out.

I shan’t be linking to it in my sidebar, nor do I expect to mention it again here. I have a mildly negative reaction to the idea of full-text feeds. It isn’t the copyright hysteria the rest of the world seems to go on about; CavLec is still (you heard me!) public domain.

It’s that CavLec feels like my virtual home, and I like the idea of inviting people into it. Full-text feeds feel like street preaching. I know, I know—nobody has to subscribe to my feed who doesn’t want to. But even so.

Still… it’s there, so use it if you want it.

I’ve said before that academia was the natural market for ebooks, and cupidity combined with stupidity is what made most ebook people ignore that. I’m more convinced than ever that I was right.

See, we’ve got this gizmo called “electronic reserves…” I go to a (crappily designed, unfortunately) university portal page, hit the tab marked “academic,” and see a list of my classes. To the right of each class name is a “library/reserves” link. When I click on one, I go to an electronic coursepack (coursepacks, remember those? go to the local copy shop, pick up a xeroxed packet of readings?).

And it rocks. It just rocks. I love it, and from what I hear in the halls of SLIS I am far from alone in loving it. Not that it’s perfect. The readings are arranged alphabetically by author instead of by theme or course-week. Half of what’s there is PDFed TIFF scans that are huge downloads and a pain to read onscreen. Some of it is badly OCRed PDFs, which make my ex-typesetter soul wince. The good stuff is in HTML. But were the xeroxes so great, I ask you? Of course they weren’t. And they cost money and took up shelf space. And if you happened to leave one at home when you meant to take it to campus to read it, you were out of luck.

I have to suspect that the copyright-clearance people love e-reserves too, because librarians are far more to be relied upon than copy-shop ops.

The only thing that’s missing, damn it, is a little iPoddish gadget for me to download this stuff to so I can carry it around. Gee. Sound like an ebook reader to you? It does me. So here we all are, the perfect ebook-reader audience, and no ebook readers. Bah.

I have copied a few things down to the Silver Surfer, but I don’t carry the Silver Surfer around much (though it’s coming with me to the SLIS library tomorrow because I have a lot of things to type up based on journal readings and because I promised the SLIS librarian I’d play with fourth-floor wireless access, to give her an idea where it does and doesn’t work). I’ve actually quit saving downloads; I have always-on net access at home, so what’s the point? I can always fire up Firebird, go to the reserves page, and reread something.

(Though the library pages are dog-slow this weekend. Dunno why. It isn’t my connection; other pages load fine.)

Would every student take to this? Of course not. My reference class has a couple-three vocal e-text detractors, though I swear to you I heard one of them praising e-reserves last week. The ugly, unvarnished WebCT experience is turning a few people in my virtual-collections course off reading online. (Which annoys me, because they’re unfairly generalizing WebCT’s unbelievably crappy design to the entire Web.) But enough will—enough are—to make a nice little market, I should think.

Argh, the missed opportunities here just make me hurt!

But, hey, I’ve finished all my readings for next week (except Jonscher, which I still bloody can’t find and will have to read on reserve again), so…

There is an asteroid named Dorothea. It is asteroid number 339, and was discovered in 1892 by one M. F. Wolf.

I know nothing else about this asteroid, nor indeed do I know why asteroids have both names and numbers.

But, hey, that’s what the reference section of the library is for.

I dunno’s I’m exactly thrilled to share my name with an asteroid, though. Some of the names those things have!

Ashcroft doesn’t know when he’s licked, apparently. That’s okay. Plenty of librarians around to keep up the roundhouses.

One of them, I am proud to say, runs my very own SLIS, Louise S. Robbins. Wearing her other hat as head of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, she told Ashcroft where to go in quite definite and certain terms.

All I have to add is—hysteric? That’s “depressive,” Mr. Ashcroft; I’ll thank you very kindly to get my mental health problems correct.

If you follow the above link, do click over a post or two to see Michael Moore’s comment on librarians, whence cometh this post title. It’s definitely giggleworthy.

This is truly annoying. It’s next door to impossible to find out anything about EAD online without going through the Library of Congress website, and as best I can tell from its constant downtime the Library of Congress website is being run by a heedless eight-year-old on a Banana Jr. in somebody’s basement.

Don’t tell me this is all about Isabel, either. I’ve been trying for several days. Geesh, all I want is your frickin’ DTD and tag library, people!

Well. Think it’s that easy to get rid of me, eh? Not on your life.

This list of implementations will keep me busy for a while, at least.

Update: Go go Google cache. You know, this EAD thing isn’t really all that hard (with the caveat that I don’t know beans about cataloging and description). Give me a few examples, and I could be up and running with it in no time.

Maybe conversion from other records to EAD is a service Text Artisan Guild could offer, one of these days.

The difference a few years and a new department makes…

I had a graduate adviser for two and a half years who never managed to learn my name, despite my acquitting myself moderately well in the two semesters of medieval lit I took from him. I never once managed to walk into his office and have him recognize me.

My intro course this semester has ninety-some-odd people in it, and has met only twice. I ran into the chap teaching it as I walked to the bus stop Tuesday. He doesn’t know my name either—I don’t see how he could—but he sure as shootin’ recognized me and said hi. (Looking, truth be told, slightly uncomfortable that he didn’t know my name. I wish I’d had time to reassure him that was okay. I had enough trouble remembering fifty students—I understand the difficulty!)

Now, there’s something in my physical self that people remember. I’m not quite sure what it is, because this has been the case all my life despite sundry changes in my appearance. I stick out in a crowd; I don’t know why.

Even so. It’s ever so nice to be recognized and greeted, to have a face and an identity.