Caveat Lector

We had meant to find some lunch in Montreal before heading to the airport, but by the time the meeting ended, one of us had already had his flight cancelled, so we decided not to pass Go or collect $200.

“We’ll put you on the 3:30 flight to Chicago,” the nice agent at the counter with the American accent said. “It’s already posting a delay to 6 pm.” Left unsaid: who knew when or even whether my scheduled 5:35 flight would take off?

As usual, I got the Total Security Treatment. Bag search, patdown, whole nine yards. Could someone please tell me what profile I fit so I can figure out how to stop fitting it? I will swear blue in the face if you like that I have never, ever, ever meant any harm to anyone or anything on an airplane. I’m scared of airplanes. Why on earth would I want to make those rattletrap baling-wire-and-duct-tape contraptions any less safe than they already are?

Things must have gotten better at Chicago during the afternoon, because my new flight took off a few minutes after 5. Got to Chicago a bit before 6 (remember the time change!), and then had a decision to make. I was in plenty of time to catch my 9:00 flight to Madison. I could also zip down to the Bus-Shuttle Center and pick up a 7:00 bus that would get me home at 10 or 10:30 or thereabouts.

Hm. Clean, uncrowded, utterly reliable bus, or three hours’ wait in a very crowded and noisy O’Hare with no guarantee the (sorta scuzzy, possibly crowded) plane would take off on time, or indeed at all, though if it did take off on time, I’d be home maybe a half-hour or so earlier.

No contest. Bus.

And as it turned out, my hazy memory of the bus schedule was wrong, and I made a bus that left at 6:30. Debarked at the Union promptly at 9:32, and for once I met the 6 bus toward home, which I usually don’t quite manage to do—and best of all, David happened to be on that bus, and I got to watch his face light up when he saw me.

Lest you worry on behalf of my client over my profligate spending habits, let me hasten to assure you that a cab to my house from the Madison airport costs just as much as the bus ticket home from O’Hare. Trust me, it’s a wash.

It was a good trip, I must say, on the whole better than ACRL. Exhausting though it is to sit in a small conference room for eight-plus hours debating encryption standards and whatnot (”okay, so we make a table in the authentication object with the various appropriate public keys and then the symmetric key for the book encrypted with that public key—hey, maybe you should patent this!”), I’d forgotten how walking into a roomful of standards geeks feels like coming home. I don’t have that sense of ease with librarians yet.

Doesn’t hurt to understand what I now understand about encryption and certificates and digital signatures and the like, either.

And no guarantees, but I picked up a couple of hot job tips. Y’all can’t have ’em this time; they’re mine-all-mine. Like I said, I get along pretty well with standards geeks.

I don’t know when I’ll get home. The weather in Montreal is horrid, though planes are moving, but the weather in Chicago is apparently worse.

If I can just get to Chicago before, say, midnight, I know I can get home no matter the further delays. That’s what the bus is for.

If I can’t get to Chicago, though, I’m very much stuck. I don’t want to be stuck. But I get there when I get there.

My day wading through DRM issues can be summed up with this quotable: “Hate spending so much time on something that nobody actually wants.”

The closest I ever come to the mind-freedom of meditation is during travel. While Sita Dulip’s Method comes highly recommended, I have never tried it; I don’t know that I even need it. I’ve gotten very good at letting go frustration in one long sigh and reminding myself that I get there when I get there, not one moment sooner.

I’m the traveller angry passengers hate and airline agents love, the one who can walk up to the counter after the flight-cancellation announcement, smile calmly, and say sincere thanks when the interaction is over, even when the result is an extra night away from home (as it all too often is; some day I will break myself of the habit of booking the last flight out, but that day is not this).

Today I got to the Madison airport far earlier than I needed to, which gave me leisure to grin when a security agent recognized the Silver Surfer logo taped to the Silver Surfer’s silvery surface. (Say that three times fast.) I re-buckled my shoes, settled into a seat with Midori Snyder’s Innamorati (highly recommended; I must read more by this woman) and let the time take care of itself.

(In passing—and I am certainly in passing, typing this 35,000 feet above ground and hurtling toward Montreal at some hideous rate of speed—I wonder if anyone has named the fantasy subgenre that essentially consists of reinventing existing semi-historical, semi-literary genres? Innamorati is a fine example of the type, part commedia, part Boccaccio, part straight-up Italy; and so are Kij Johnson’s brilliantly-revamped Japanese pillow-books. I find that I love these dearly and want to read more of them. If I got ambitious, I’d even write one, set of course in Spain, the country that is still the imaginative terrain of my heart despite everything graduate school did to me. But the Spain of brave wandering Egeria? Or the Arcipreste de Hita? The Cid? Or the doomed Spain breathing through the Abencerraje? I don’t know. Such gorgeous Spains they all are.)

My flight to Chicago, as you might have gathered from all this prating about patience, was late.

Air travel shares one trait with investing: sometimes keeping too-close track of things creates nothing more than pointless frustration. I wasn’t sure what time my flight to Montreal left, only that I had a fairly hefty layover, so I simply didn’t worry. I even laughed when the flight attendant announced my connecting gate and I realized I’d have to walk most of the length and breadth of Terminal 3. I did, however, grimace a bit (even my travel-hardened patience has limits) walking off the plane, when I checked the departure screens to find that my flight left at 5:36 and was listed as on-time. My faithful clip-watch said 5:01, you see, and I really needed to stop at the little artisans’ room.

Nothing to do but hoof it, so I did, weaving past janitors with a creaky-wheeled dumpster, oblivious knee-high children, and the usual raft of people grafted to cell phones. I arrived panting at the gate to see the door still open, but nothing showing on the announcement screen save the name and number of the flight. Bad sign.

The gate agent’s time was taken up with some yahoo (see, patience worn thin) who needed to be at another gate entirely, but still insisted on finding out why his plane wasn’t departing on time. “I’m guessing I’m late,” I said ruefully when he finally left, sliding my boarding pass across the counter.

She glanced at it. “No, you’re fine,” she said, though it was five-twenty-something by then. “We’ll start boarding in about twenty minutes.” Never been so glad to hear a plane was late, I tell you what.

When I flew into Montreal last August for Extreme Markup, customs was an unbelievable four-hour nightmare ordeal, something about a work slowdown by customs officials. I’ve no notion whether that’s been resolved.

I’m not worrying about it, though. I get there when I get there.

And once again, my shiny crystal ball peering into the future turns up… existing reality.

A fellow librarian was kind enough to point out that New York is already working on a multi-institution repository. Well, good for them; I approve of that and expect we’ll see more of it.

Eh, well, I suppose it’s good that my crystal ball isn’t flat-out wrong about these things.

I think possibly the other end-run around annoying journal restrictions is creating OAIster-ish research aggregators that themselves are discipline-specific. That’ll take work; we don’t yet have enough disciplinary-descriptive vocabulary or authority control in place to find appropriate pieces automagically. But it’d give us the best of both worlds: authors can deposit in their local institution (getting whatever production and metadata help they need to do so), with the assurance that their work will be indexed in the discipline-specific repository that they as researchers consult. Worth a try, anyway.

I’m so glad I don’t work for journal publishers (the for-profit variety) any more, I couldn’t begin to tell you. They’re smart little buggers, though; I have to give them that. They thought of the logic behind discipline-specific repositories long before I did, and guarded against it. Per Peter Suber:

A more specific reason is that a growing number of journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in institutional but not disciplinary repositories. Even though this is an almost arbitrary distinction, institutions without repositories will leave some of their faculty stranded with no way to provide OA to their work.

Well, doesn’t that just take the biscuit. I didn’t know it, but I surely do believe it. Typical.

Yes, it’s still harder to attract faculty to an IR than it would be to a discipline-specific repository. Just means we have to work harder, that’s all. (The journals obviously think we can’t do it. More fools they.)

I withdraw most of my objections to institutional repositories. I now think everybody ought to have (access to) one. Go ye forth and spawn IRs; let the eventual (inevitable, in my opinion) consolidation thereof take care of itself.

Didi is apparently of the opinion that I’ve been doing too much traveling lately. This:

Is a very “just where do you think you’re going, housemonkey?” kind of look.

I don’t actually disagree with her very much, to tell you the truth.

Got my presentation topic for Perdóndaris. (They answer fast, always a pleasant thing.) Very different from the last two I did, both of which were fairly techie. This one is all about the systems analysis, project management, and people-wrangling.

Isn’t it lucky I’m just finishing a systems-analysis class. Isn’t it just. (And that ACRL preconference is turning out to be worth its weight in gold, too.)

I tell you what, I would have been scared to death of this topic coming into library school. Looking at it now, though, my problem is more getting all my ideas out of my brain through my fingers before I forget them.

This should be good. This should be very good. I can knock this one out of the ballpark. And what’s even better than that, in my opinion, is that Perdóndaris is treating this as a chance to engage with real challenges they (and the person they hire) will face. I’m not trumping up some PowerPoint this time just so they can see that I’m not subject to stage fright. What I say to them will matter, even if I don’t end up the lucky stiff they actually hire.

I like that vein of pragmatism. I like it a lot. I feel a bit like Goldilocks, truthfully. Fine places though they both were, Ruritania felt a bit too hot for me, and Rohan a bit too cold. Keeping in mind that I really mustn’t get too attached to a job I may not get—Perdóndaris is starting to feel just right.

First bit of advice: If you’re applying to a school with “Saint” or the name of a famous theologian in its name, do check the school’s website for orthodoxy requirements. I applied last week for something I shouldn’t have. (By the same token, I wish schools with orthodoxy requirements would put them in the job descriptions exported to job websites. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have wasted everyone’s time applying.)

Second bit of advice: This one’s for HR. If you’re putting out a job ad that requires a master’s degree, kindly don’t include “Able to read, write, spell, do basic math, speak and understand English” in the requirements section. That’s just insulting. Your best candidates will roll their eyes and move on. (As I have, though I don’t mean to imply that I’m necessarily their best candidate. The point is, they don’t get to find out.)

Third bit of advice: Another one for HR. I have to send a résumé and references, and then I’ll get an application? That had better be one heck of a job, boys and girls.

And by way of helping my fellow librarians, a list of my job sources:

• The Association for Research Libraries job page. (Just click on the “All Announcements” button to see the most recent ads.)
• The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s library jobs feed. (Job-hunt with Bloglines! Yes, it is cool.)
• The RSS feed from LISjobs.com.
• An ongoing email search for “libraries” on HigherEdJobs. (You make a “job agent” and it emails you. Annoying to set up, but nice to have. Subscribing through Bloglines is a fine idea.)
• IFLANET’s libjobs mailing list. (Subscribe through Bloglines, again. Makes life simpler.)

This net is pretty wide; I haven’t missed much, as far as I can tell from talking to people and watching the job ads that SLIS forwards. The nice thing about it, too, is that except for the ARL database it’s entirely passive; the jobs march right past me via Bloglines, and I apply for the ones that look interesting and pass on the ones that don’t.

Hope this helps someone else.

If I don’t back up my brain it’ll segfault…

• Pack for the Montreal trip. (Includes locating passport and leftover Canadian money, as well as advance checkin and printing my itinerary so I don’t forget it.)
• Figure out where the hell the meeting hotel is, and how best to get there from Dorval, er, I mean Trudeau Airport.
• Print my library-renovation talk notes for tomorrow.
• Clear out the week’s backlog of to-be-applied-for jobs.
• Make sure David gets to his meeting with DCG tomorrow.
• Politely bug Perdóndaris to confirm the visit date and get me a presentation topic.
• Put in another order for a SLIS T-shirt. (Red! I want a red one! ’Cuz they’re so cool!)
• Clean up for Wednesday houseguest.

And while I’m there:

• Remember to check and announce the results on the graduation-speaker survey Friday. (I already know who’s going to win, but we have to be fair about this.)
• Get some work done on my last two assignments (search term project and networking RFP; everything else is DONE, do you hear me, DONE!).

I think that’s it. I can handle that much, anyway.