Caveat Lector

So today I find out that Michael Gorman himself is due to hit campus in April. Himself. Not in effigy.

I want an “I am Blog People” T-shirt eftsoons and right speedily, of course, but other non-evil suggestions would be most welcome.

ETA: “Bochinche.” That is definitely le mot juste. Maybe that’s what I should put on the T-shirt…

“Soylent Blogs Is People?” I dunno.

ETalsoA: I’m diggin’ the “Gormanghast” monicker. Shame the Peake art is still under copyright, or I’d be all over having an outline of, say, Bellgrove on the T-shirt.

Got me another fish on the line. On-campus interview, sometime within the next few weeks. (I floated Spring Break as a possibility. I really mustn’t miss any more search labs if I can possibly help it.) We’ll call this one Rohan, shall we, then?

I’m not by any means dissing Ruritania here—but I will say I think it’ll be good to have something to compare it to. It should hold up remarkably well, mind you, but it’s still never a good idea to make life-changing decisions in isolation.

ETA: And fish number four has been calling around for references. Let’s call this fish Oz. Know what? Maybe I’ll have a job at the end of all this after all.

Thank-you notes have been duly written and dispatched. The one to the dean includes an important bit I had every intention of mentioning during the exit interview but didn’t, because I was so wiped at that point I’m lucky I remembered my own name. Eh, well, putting it in writing isn’t so bad an idea.

Got my search homework done and dispatched to my search-lab partner, who is an excellent person to work with. It would have been nice to get the systems-analysis project schedule into software, but I can live with not having done it yet; I should have time before class on Wednesday.

Even with the Intro to XML talk I’m reprising for Information Architecture on Tuesday. Oh, crud. At least I didn’t forget.

Anyway, this post is a bit of a thank-you note to all the lovely people who have wished me luck on their blogs or in email, and let me know they were thinking of me while I was gone. That kind of thing built my confidence in a decidedly nervous situation, and I’m terribly grateful for it.

This article on the GPO’s move to digitalia vis-a-vis federal depository libraries has been making the rounds of the library blogsphere, but I’ll add a link anyway, because it’s just that important—as a cautionary tale to us digitizers, if nothing else.

Golly gosh, leave town for three days and miss out on Michael Gorman maybe hating your weblog.

Which as far as I’m concerned, he’s quite welcome to do; if I were he, I’d probably hate it. The rough, aw-shucks style, the calls to library-geeky action, the mixing of library work with non-work, the places where I actually call him out on something or other or use him as a proxy for library anti-high-techism… ugh.

Now, I’m being cavalier (and covertly amused) about this for a few different reasons, the most important being that Mr. Finkelstein and the Student Librarian are spinning a mighty thin thread there. Chances are Michael Gorman doesn’t know Caveat Lector from a hole in the stacks.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume for a moment that they’re right. I’m struck by the logical and strategic errors in that case:

• generalizing negatively from one library-school student (student! not even practicing librarian!) to the entire library blogsphere
• as has been pointed out on the library listservs, insulting the people rather than the tool or even the writing genre
• as has also been pointed out, not citing the sources of his onus, such that every library blogger who’s ever mentioned him (and he’s ALA president-elect, so that’s a lot of bloggers) feels attacked
• weird backpedaling later, once a vocal minority started calling for his head—wouldn’t it have been easier to hold Caveat Lector up to scorn?

Funny, how most of those errors still hold up as errors even if (as I believe to be the case) CavLec isn’t the original target. Eh, well. We all make mistakes. It’s what we do afterwards that’s usually more indicative of our quality.

Oh, right, right… never mind, then.

As for the vocal minority—I’m glad to see they’ve gotten a grip, because, really. Yes, it’s embarrassing. No, it’s not the image of librarianship we want to present to large swathes of the wider world. But, honestly, what genuine impact is this going to have on libraries, librarians (including librarian bloggers) and their offerings and practices? Almost none. Almost none.

Ousting Gorman over something like this is narrow-minded one-issue thinking. We’re smarter than that. What’s more, who didn’t know about Gorman’s attitudes toward digital librarianship and digitalia in general when he was elected? I did. I voted for him anyway, admittedly with some reluctance. So attacking Gorman over this makes us look stupid and short-sighted; if it mattered that much, we shouldn’t have elected him to begin with.

We also missed an opportunity, a “teachable moment,” for which shame on us. We had a chance to bring the ALA President into the library blogsphere, and we squandered it. If we’d even just laughed it off and gone about our business, we’d have made Gorman look pretty small; as it is, we look (dare I say it) hysterical.

Like it or not, Gorman is representative of the attitudes of a large band of librarians. It’s not even his election to the ALA presidency that demonstrates that… one needn’t go further than one or two of the ALA’s own listservs, or the nearest library school, to figure it out. I think that, rather than any library-blog clannishness, is why the reactions got so heated—but that doesn’t excuse us, not in the slightest. We could have made things better. I think we’ve made them worse.

So almost nobody gets points here. Certainly not me. Certainly not Gorman. The calmer voices on the listservs, perhaps. Again, though, this teapot-tempest doesn’t matter. For good or ill, libraries still straddle the digital-analog divide. Gorman can’t change that—I don’t think he can even block it as much as he’d like to.

Why worry, then? Heck, why not invite the opprobrium? It provides the library blogsphere with visibility, hands Gorman a harmless windmill to tilt at, and leaves digital librarians of various stripes free to do their thing unassailed while Gorman’s badmouthing the blogs. Who loses? Really, who loses?

I’m home again, after flights so blessedly uneventful that there’s nothing to say about them. (My favorite kind, believe me.)

I blurted a great sleep-logged welter of stories (how did I pick up so many stories in two short days?), descriptions, impressions, observations, and half-made plans to David while he patiently put me to bed for a nap. He looked me over judiciously once I was finally down. “You look… more alive, more enthusiastic, than I’ve seen you in a while.”

“I do? I feel headachy and exhausted.”

“Well, that too,” he admitted. “But… I’m impressed.”

I have a lot to consider before St. Patrick’s Day (which is, I am told, roughly when I can expect to hear news, good or bad). Most of the consideration will perforce take place offline, so if I’m quiet for the next few whatevers, you know what I’m up to.

But I will say this: I do think I’m still in the running, grass-greenness and all, because I didn’t embarrass myself and I definitely didn’t pick the wrong job to apply for. I also think that it would be nice to be able to put myself through a timewarp and magically come up with five years’ experience doing some of the things they want to do—but I could manage without it, on the whole, if they’ll take me on faith that some of the things I happen not to have done yet, I can actually do.

And if they’ll give me a hand when I need it, which I would. But I think they’d be all right with that. I complimented the library dean in the exit interview on the organization he’s leading, and I meant every word I said. My gut (which, as I may have remarked, is wiser than I am) is leaning back comfortably, remarking on what a fine group of people that is—and my gut is fairly chary with recommendations that warm.

Not to make you all endure the entire story, my already-late-night flight to Ruritania got delayed two hours owing to engine trouble, so I arrived at my first day of interviewing more than a little punchy. (And y’all can just guess which toe my carryon decided to slip out of my hands and fall on. Just guess. It’s taped and doing fine, even with the new shoes, which is a minor miracle.)

The gentleman I mentioned in yesterday’s post was actually at the airport to pick me up despite my after-midnight arrival. Now that is above and beyond.

I’m not even going to speculate on how well things went today. I did my little dog-and-pony show (In Which Dorothea Proves She Can’t Stick To Written Notes, More’s The Pity), talked to lots of very nice people, got a sense of the library and the atmosphere, and ate much too much at dinner. (So did everybody else; I wasn’t being a pig, honest.)

Without a sense of the competition, I don’t have enough information to guess, really. (Which is how I’ve been on this all along, nothing new there.) I do think that whoever gets and accepts this job is a very lucky person. It’s definitely a “big” job, a job with lots of scope and lots of room to maneuver. It’s big enough that it makes me feel a little small, though I think some of that is garden-variety new-librarian jitters, and rather more of it is being used to taking small jobs and making them big jobs, rather than being presented with a big job at the get-go.

I can’t say too much more that’s specific without accidentally identifying Ruritania, which I still think would be unfair to them so I won’t do it. I will say that it’s a lovely place, both the campus and the surroundings, with a library I was taking lots of mental notes about—there’s not a single sensible trend from the last ten years or so that they haven’t picked up on. (Well, maybe one or two. But it’s truly a stunning library.)

But however this goes—whether they make me an offer or not, whether I accept or not—I’ll never regret having come. I’ve met some great people I hope will become colleagues no matter what happens with this particular process, I’ve had a lovely time, and I really couldn’t be more pleased.

I have about an hour to grab something resembling lunch before I hit the road. Or the skies. Whatever.

In case the gentleman supposed to meet me at the Ruritania airport is reading—don’t worry, I am hard to miss. Tall woman, glasses, long brown hair, in a voluminous black fleece cape over a dress in shades of green and blue-green with gold-thread accents. Trust me, you’ll know me when you see me.

Y’all be good while I’m gone. I’ll check in here if there’s time.

Oh, and there’s another cute bit in ITAL, about a small library using server-side includes to avoid having to make the same updates to umpteen database pathfinders. This, ladies and gentlemen? Is exactly what I mean by a HACK. It’s a kludge that’s quick to set up, simple to use, and isn’t perfect, but saves gobs of time over doing something by hand.

It just amuses me to death that a simple, basic hack (I’ve got a similar one running on Textartisan) gets reported in a flagship journal.

I’m irked at the Post Office for tearing the cover of my copy of the latest Information Technology and Libraries (23:4, December 2004, and yes, it seems a bit late to me too), because I actually want to keep this one, and I don’t normally keep periodicals. (Storage space. You know how it is. The library’s got it; that’s good enough for me.)

There’s a poorly-written but fascinating article on whether computer anxiety and library anxiety correlate. (Don’t miss the last few paragraphs. Some surprises there, at least for me.) A well-written and well-argued piece on the problems of information architecture for library websites had me cheering aloud, if nothing else for the way the authors were framing the issues. (Loved the bit on ILL. Loved it. Yes, yes, yes, send the cite to ILL automagically!) The Lessig Free Culture review by Karen Coyle was chatty, thoughtful, and smart.

And, OPAC fans and non-, there’s “The Impact of Web Search Engines on Subject Searching in OPAC,” which in addition to the yumminess of the subject matter (me and my OPAC thing, yeah, I know) has a very tasty bibliography of things I simply must get and read now.

I’ve only got time to skim the rest at the moment—packing and other things to do still—but I expect it’ll come with me on the plane tomorrow. Very good stuff. Dorothea-Bob says check it out.

This was supposed to be my easy semester of library school, and Mondays were supposed to be easier than Mondays have previously been, seeing as how I usually managed to pull down an evening class on Monday and this semester I get out of class at the clement hour of 5 pm.

Yes, well, so much for “easy,” on both counts.

But I’m up-to-date on homework, having just printed tomorrow’s assignment for search class. And except for the Monster Table and the inevitable parse-and-fix round, I’m done with the TEI for the Ireland Land Law book. (And, to tell the truth, I’m more than tempted to tell them that the Monster Table needs to be art. We’ll see what I think once I take another look at it.)

I ordered my hood and gown for graduation today. That felt good. All I gotta do now is finish earning ’em.

I solved a few blog-tool problems for a friend of mine this weekend, and I didn’t have to get out industrial-strength boulders to bash his system with in order to do it, and these things are always good. (Moral of story, though: If a Movable Type plugin doesn’t work, check its UNIX permissions. 640 doesn’t cut it.)

I think I really did do something unsavory to the interior anatomy of my left smallest toe, since two weeks later it’s not healed. It’s manageable, though—bugs me for an hour or so after I put shoes on, then shuts up—so I think I am counting my blessings. Likewise, I’m having a bit of an RSI relapse at the moment, but as pain goes, it’s quite minor and I am grateful for that.

Still a few last-minute things to pack. They can wait until tomorrow.