Caveat Lector

An IM conversation between Adrian and me, piquant owing to today’s earlier posting:

Dorothea: Grrr. Argh. Paper jams!
Skaarjj: deary me…. what kinda printer?
Dorothea: a Xerox SOHO multifunction laser printer
Dorothea: normally it’s quite well-behaved
Dorothea: but it KNOWS that this is the last bloody search problem-set, so it’s barfing just to be annoying
Skaarjj: is it clearable?
Dorothea: of course
Dorothea: after you open three panels so that the damn thing looks like a swiss army knife
Dorothea: *eyeroll*
Dorothea: this is just not my day for technology
Skaarjj: seen worse, believe you me
Skaarjj: just remember not to yank the paper but to pull it from the rollers in a slow but firm, steady motion
Dorothea: okay, we’re all fixed and printed
Dorothea: and now my fricking STAPLER doesn’t want to function
Dorothea: don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here in the corner with a stone tablet, hammer, and chisel
***Skaarjj slips an arm about your shoulders and watches before he scoots off to class
Dorothea: heh
Dorothea: *bang bang bang*
Dorothea: dammit, chisel slipped
Dorothea: this technology, it’s all bunk
Dorothea: oral history is the wave of the future, man
Skaarjj: should have been more of *tick tick tick thump*
Skaarjj: :)
Dorothea: bah
Dorothea: no sympathy, no sympathy whatever

The library blogsphere has been buzzing about a pair of posts condemning library technophilia. Other people have talked about how appropriate use of technology is generally a good thing; I don’t have to.

What I want to know is, where are these librarian tech fiends everybody keeps talking about? Where are the librarians who jones uncritically for anything and everything as long as it’s leet and kewl? (Where are the libraries that have the money, never mind the staff, to do that?) And while I’m at it, where are the librarians who hate print? Who see no value in controlled vocabularies or Boolean searches?

I think they’re phantoms, spectres, the latest Homo stramineus. I don’t think they exist. I think they’re an excuse, a dodge, and I must say the dodge is getting sadder and lamer by the day.

The tip-off in ChrisChuck’s (sorry about that; eyesight obviously off today) posts, to my mind, is the dearth of actual examples of poorly-considered technologies, or technologies implemented too hastily. (It’s not like they’re not out there. I’m hearing lots of conflicting reports about RFID, for example.) Just yelling “XML! RSS!” doesn’t cut it; I need to see how XML and RSS are a bad thing. Those who have responded to Chuck, conversely, have been very careful to illustrate their points. Nor does Chuck articulate what he would consider a better response to technological change, which as far as I’m concerned leaves his posts in the “empty complaint” category.

I hate to do this, partly because I’m going to get in dutch for it, partly because I hate to add fuel to an already-bright fire, but I must point out that Michael Gorman trots out these rhetorical gambits pretty regularly—whack “technology” as a monolithic concept, fail to provide specific examples of how technology has been misused, and deny the need to create solid, practical, articulate responses to replace the supposedly ill-considered behaviors he’s criticizing.

Compare this to Walt Crawford, who goes after specific technologies that he thinks are wrongheaded, always has clear and well-articulated reasons for his dislike, offers alternatives when appropriate, and is always willing to engage in discussion and even change his mind.

That I respect, and even try to emulate.

I do not respect using the word “technology” as an all-purpose curse.

I do not respect unwillingness to engage with novelty, or categorical refusal to admit, examine, and learn from what’s good and useful (as well as what’s problematic) about whatever is new.

I do not respect seizing gleefully on technological failures while ignoring technological successes—some experiments will always fail, and a new technology by itself isn’t always the cause of failure. Nor is potential failure always a credible reason not to try something new.

I do not respect the common misreading and condemnation of enthusiasm for specific novelties as uncritical novelty-chasing.

I do not respect the accusation that those who embrace the new must hate what preceded it; nor do I respect the accusation that those who point out advantages of the new over the old must hate the old, must want or expect it to vanish. I do not respect the creation of Homo stramineus in any of his many guises.

And while I can and do respect some people who are given to these behaviors now and then—we’re all human—I admit it does take some work on my part… and a few people who engage in nearly all of them, I fear I can’t manage to respect at all. Even if they’re librarians.

Nichole points out another librarian-shortage believer (and I love her wry, understated response to it).

Jogged something in my brain. The elephant in the basement of this whole librarian-shortage thing, the great big white elephant nobody is talking about, is to my mind the extremely real possibility that yeah, librarians are going to retire—and their jobs will simply vanish into thin air, swallowed up by shrinking budgets and shrinking respect for what librarians can do.

I’d be a very happy camper indeed—I’d stop carping about this entirely—if the ALA would move the effort it’s putting into recruitment toward preservation of positions once librarians retire.

Because, look, we all know this is what happened to the Ph.Ds, Bowen notwithstanding. Sure, people retired—and got replaced by adjuncts, who are cheaper and easier to abuse. If we want to avoid such a scenario in librarianship, recruitment is not the way to do it. All extra recruitment accomplishes is creating a ready-made MLS underclass, analogous to Ph.D adjuncts.

Personally, I think that’s exactly what is going to happen. If it hasn’t already.

When Rohan’s offer came, I sent a polite email to Avalon explaining that I had an offer and asking where they were in their process.

Didn’t get an answer until today. They’ve been interviewing People Who Weren’t Me, and expect to recommend one of them to the provost shortly. In other words, I didn’t pass the phone interview. And the isle of Avalon recedes into the mists…

Have I mentioned lately that I don’t like this process?

I meant to mention another thought that lodged itself in my head during the ACRL institutional-repository preconference, but it slipped my mind until just now. Executive summary: IRs are springing up like mushrooms on an old log, and I’m not at all sure the market is going to bear that many.

I believe the University of Wisconsin is ahead of its time in this; as I understand things, its just-launched IR is intended to serve the entire UW system, not just the Madison campus. I don’t think they’re actually having much luck with that at present—awareness of the new service is low enough in Madison, never mind River Falls or Stout. I do think, though, that the folks in charge have thought this through and concluded that campus-specific IRs involve too much redundant effort.

As always, I could be wrong. It’s possible that IRs will become a standard academic-library service, as ingrained as interlibrary loan. Truly, though, I don’t think so.

The central reason I don’t think so actually came up during the preconference: someone mentioned that faculty tend to identify more with their disciplines than their institutions. They may switch jobs, but they’ll always be anthropologists or film scholars or mathematicians or whatever. As they search for outlets for their materials, they’ll look first to discipline-specific outlets. What is a journal, after all, if not a discipline-specific publication outlet? What faculty member seriously publishes in a journal specific to her institution?

So institution-based IRs have an uphill climb to persuade faculty that they’re useful. Compare that needed effort to something like arXiv, which every physicist worth the name knows about. Now, that’s immediately, obviously useful, both to faculty-as-researchers and faculty-as-publishers. Even the UW’s system-wide IR can’t possibly be as attractive to faculty as something arising within their discipline and publicized in discipline-specific arenas.

Campus IRs are fighting the tides in several ways; this D-Lib article especially impressed me with its faculty-centric approach to attracting content. Such an approach, however, creates a dilemma for libraries contemplating IRs: most IRs (as I understand matters) want only the finished products of faculty research, whereas faculty most need librarians’ help coping with half-finished work and grey literature. So do we uphold our standards and refuse everything but the final outcome, or do we spend effort becoming (in essence) publishing and production partners with faculty?

I lean toward the latter approach, myself. Where do we get off claiming the end result if we take no responsibility for helping produce it? Why shouldn’t research production be a research-library service? But then, we all know I’m a text artisan; production is baked into my bones. Every IR will have to make its own decision.

Whichever decision it makes, however, that still doesn’t help the problem of institutional versus disciplinary resource aggregation. To my mind, the solution there is brilliantly simple: libraries should ally with scholarly societies to build discipline-specific IRs. Obviously each library should pick disciplines its host institution is strong in; equally obviously, there’ll have to be partnerships and consortia and general shakedowns, as IRs try to claim the same disciplinary spaces. In the long run, though, I think that gets us the best bang for the library buck—faculty will be naturally attracted, the research gets saved and preserved, and only those IRs that need to exist, will.

From a technical standpoint, this analysis argues strongly for both open-source IR solutions and a well-considered data-migration strategy for existing IRs. An institutional IR that can’t move its content into appropriate discipline-specific repositories without data loss risks making an awful mess on the large scale. An IR should even be able to dissolve completely, moving all its materials elsewhere, without loss.

Vendor lock-in is just not on. Any library considering a proprietary IR system (and I see now that ProQuest is not the only player in this field) had better beat its vendor over the head with data-migration needs, and refuse outright any so-called solution that doesn’t migrate. Use DSpace or eprints or Fedora instead; proprietary polish is simply not worth migration agony.

Well, that didn’t take as long as I thought…

Another on-campus interview. May 9. Neither Avalon, nor Oz, nor Gont… we shall baptize this place Perdondaris, I think.

(And they have an internal weblog! That gets them cool points. More cool points for developing for Mac OS X. And I think I shall say no more lest I give them away.)

I feel better already.

Never let it be said that cats aren’t helpful around the house:

This is Dream’s best effort at turning himself into a round black furry throw pillow. He practices this transformation often, and we think he’s gotten pretty good at it.

I got a lot of “go you!” in the email inbox yesterday, and I appreciate it more than I can say. As badly as I want this job search to be over, I’m not happy at opening my hand and letting the bird go.

One thought I can’t get rid of reminds me that if I weren’t so damn picky about my supervisory situations, I’d be a better and doubtless happier (and employed!) person. Yesterday’s “no” had quite a bit to do with signs I saw of situations I’ve been in before and not (to put it mildly) relished. Or done well in. And maybe, yes, that’s them—but maybe it’s me. Time I grew up, or something.

I have, actually, compared to the little greenhorn of five years past. If I hadn’t, I daresay I wouldn’t have seen the signs I did. If I’d said yes to the job, I’d at least have been doing so with open eyes. That’s something. Wish it felt like enough.

To add insult to injury, I realized that one of the apps I sent out last week was a waste of time, as it went to a Christian college that won’t employ anyone who isn’t—and I’m very not. My fault for relying on the short description and not clicking through to their HR site, which explains everything in uncompromising terms.

Nothing in weeks from either Avalon or Oz; I’m guessing they’ve passed on me. Which puts me squarely in square one. Bah. Hate this.

Yesterday was a wretchedly stressful day on the job-hunt front. Rohan made me an offer.

I heard this on my answering machine after I got back from class, and it threw me into a daylong tizzy. To make a long story short, I called them this morning and declined (I hope) politely.

The best I can do in a public forum is boil it down to the elusive, irrefutable matter of “fit.” I might have been a reasonable fit for Rohan, but they were a dicey enough fit for me that I’m not sure I would have stayed very long, and they deserve better than someone with a weather eye out for the next opportunity.

But it took me a lot of ugly soul-searching to decide, I will tell you that. And I dearly hope I don’t regret this in six months. And I hope I don’t have to do this thanks-but-no-thanks business again. It just shreds what’s left of my nerves.

I thought my meeting was this week, which is when my calendar says it is, and panicked when I saw that my airline tickets were for next week.

Tickets right. Calendar wrong. Meeting next week. Very impressed (and annoyed) with this example of complete and utter flakiness on my part.

Just as well, though. I need the time this weekend to get homework done; I really do. And another week can’t hurt the weather in Montreal, I’m sure.