Caveat Lector

I’m taking a break from the weeding (got the CDs weeded; hope to finish with books, clothes and shoes by the end of the day, leaving only papers) because of a couple of people who emailed me about the burnout story out of the blue.

That’s nothing unusual, of course; I average one such email a month, though they do tend to arrive in clumps of two to five for some reason. What struck me about these, though, was the worried query figuring prominently in both, “What are you doing now? Are you okay?”

I think the burnout story is incomplete as it stands. My desired audience, people in grad school and hating it as well as people who have left it, genuinely needs to know the epilogue.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to sugarcoat it for them. What earthly use would that be? I’m no Horatio Alger, and I’ve got nothing invested in pretending otherwise—nor do I think that a soft-focus “inspirational” tale is what these people need. I’ve had my ups and my downs—and several of the ups were pure serendipity, and most of the downs were my own stupid fault.

The point isn’t that life outside academe is beautiful, though it is. The point, as dearly-departed Academy Girl would say, is that “Academia isn’t the only game in town.” And the other games can often be more welcoming, more flexible, and more forgiving.

I’ll let y’all know when I’m done writing.

For those who always wondered what newly-minted librarians look like, check out SLIS’s catalog of graduation photos.

I don’t think any of them are me (which suits me fine), but I’m still going through them.

On the soppy sentimentalism front, I bought a couple-three pictures from the mob graduation at the Kohl Center. The one of me shaking Tammy Baldwin’s hand is purely for me, but they caught another good one at some point (I’m not sure when) that I got a few copies of for parents and work-display and whatnot.

ETA: Spoke too soon. There is indeed one of me in there, the crowd shots I’m part of aside. Gosh, these are fun to look at, though! Big silly grin surfacing again.

ETA part deux: Two of me. Well, I didn’t have a picture of the magisterial regalia from the back before now, so I guess I’m reconciled. I am such an elephant, though.

ETA and this better be the last time: Three of me. The third is remarkably good. I’ll add these to the Seekrit Graduation Piccy Stash, for those of you who have asked for access. (And if you asked and didn’t get it—I’ve been dropping email left and right lately; send another ping.)

Some plans made, at least. I think we’re going to use these guys for the Moving of Stuff, as their modus operandi matches our carlessness (“e” left out intentionally) really quite neatly. The price seems reasonable, all in all—and fortunately, it seems I shall have a relocation allowance.

The Goths will fly down with us as carry-on luggage, so I made a vet appointment to get the health certificate that the airlines demand. I’m taking recommendations (and anti-recommendations) on soft-sided carriers, noting only that the airlines simply cannot be serious about the 8-inch height restriction.

I’ve made a list of what has to get done to make the house salable. It’s distressingly long, but much of it will get farmed out because I don’t have the energy (or, in some cases, the skill). Today, though, my plan is to get and install a new bathroom fan, and over a few days I’ll repaint the bathroom ceiling, which needs it.

One real-estate-agent visit is scheduled, and I’ll schedule the other Tuesday.

Our apartment-hunting visit is set for June 18–22. I’ll have to find somebody to look after the Goths, and (if we’re super-lucky) someone to chauffeur us around Perdóndaris looking at apartments. I ordered a Perdóndaris map and a recommended moving guide from abebooks yesterday.

I spent part of yesterday weeding books, stopping at two and a half bags. I don’t think there’s too much more weeding on my end of the bookshelves to do, though. Clothes and papers, on the other hand… I’ll have some stuff to give away, too, some of it pretty decent; locals might want to keep an eye on my LJ for that.

I’ve got presents for half my dutiful recommenders, and I’m pondering what to get the others. Only one delivered as yet, but there’s time still.

Maybe I’m supposed to be all weepy about leaving Madison, my home for nearly eleven years—but I’m not, at least not yet. I’m appalled at all the work I have to do in the next six to eight weeks. I’m excited about the new job, very much in the “I want to do this… and I want to do that… and that looks like a good idea too… and I wonder if they’ll let me get away with this other thing?” mode.

Maybe I’ll regret Madison after I leave it—but honestly, I don’t see where I’ll find the time.

I free up all this marvelous brainspace that had been allocated to the job search… and now I’ve got to spend it on moving.

Eh, well. I signed up for USAA’s moving service online yesterday. They called me back in 45 minutes, and inside 90 I had an appointment with a real-estate agent and a list of questions to ask. USAA rules.

I think the plan is going to be tripping down to Perdóndaris in mid- to late June to find an apartment, which we’ll live in long enough to get the house sold and suss out where in the area we actually want to buy something. The question in my mind is whether to move our stuff and store it there, or store it here; I’m leaning toward just getting it all moved and sort it when we get there, but there may be ramifications to the decision that I’m not considering.

The move itself should be fairly straightforward, except for the Goth-kitties. Shall have to ponder how they move.

I’ve gotten really astonishing amounts of love in the last few weeks, and I haven’t given nearly enough back. So here’s a shout out to everybody (I hope—if I missed you out, it’s either because I don’t know your actual name, or I’m an ungrateful idiot) who’s been so nice.

Deep breath…

Adrian, AKMA, Alisa, Bill, Bjørn, Carol, Cory, Dave, Denise, Elaine, Fiona, Gwen, James, Jenica, Joy, Krista, Laura, Li, Lisle, Liz, Mark, Meredith, Nichole, Norm, Pascale, Rana, Rick, Rikhei, Rochelle, Steve, Tish, and Walt.

And all my LiveJournal peeps too. They know who they are.

Y’all are the greatest ever. Ever ever. My best thanks to each and every one of you. And I will stop now before this turns into a pale (but no less embarrassing for all that) imitation of an Oscar-night speech.

So I’m trying to be polite here and get in touch with the two other fish I have on the line. One of them is supposed to call me Tuesday, and I thought it’d be nice not to waste their time.

I. Cannot. Find. Contact information. ANYWHERE. On these people’s website. I had to dig like a badger just to find the human-resources page! And of course the job I applied for has aged off their listings page, so I can’t find the description.

Worst of all? They required a homegrown electronic application, so I have no paper or email trail for them. Nothing. I don’t even know who’ll be calling me; they never said.

It’s not anywhere near as bad as Meredith’s story, but honestly, who needs this?

Nothing is official until the last piece of paper is signed, which will be sometime late next week. (Holiday weekend and all that.) For that reason, I’m still not revealing who Perdóndaris is.

But I’ll reveal that they called me today to extend a job offer, which I have accepted. And I’ll reveal that I’m beyond words thrilled with what I’ll be doing and the people I’ll be doing it with. I could not possibly ask for a better job.

(Well, okay. Expensive area of the country, and housing is going to be Not Fun. But I’m starting at the bottom salary rung of their ladder, for all the obvious reasons; things will get better.)

I spent the day sitting on my hands (which isn’t good for them) waiting for a call announced to me yesterday via email. Feeling no pain now, though! Too happy.

My shredded feet were enough recovered for me to walk wincingly down to the bookstore and the post office. (Those fixed-rate Priority Mail gizmos are bigger than I thought. If I’d known, I would have sent more stuff. But oh well.) I got new insoles for my Munros, too; they’d just better work better than the ones I’m forthwith pitching out.

Thing is, I slept wrong a couple of nights ago and now my right shoulder is killing me.

Is it too much to ask for one thing to heal before the next thing breaks?

I heard good things about my job hunt today, but I won’t jump the gun on them. Tomorrow I should have more information, for better or worse.

A month or so ago, the incredibly nifty Digital Medievalist launched its new journal, RSS feeds and all.

(In passing, I love journal-TOC RSS feeds. They’re the greatest thing ever, like having your very own pull service or academic librarian. I’m glad the Digital Medievalists were so forward-thinking. That said—folks? Fix your URLs, please. I guarantee you won’t be using Cold Fusion forever, and the sooner you make Cold Fusion emit futureproof URLs, the less hair-tearing you’ll have to do when you move off it.)

I ripped through the whole first issue as soon as I heard about it—and yes, I also am proof (if any more were needed) that medieval studies spawns more text geeks per capita than any other discipline there is. How does one not love an article on digital paleography?

Because I’m an armchair accessibility wonk, I also very much appreciated the article on ensuring accessibility of digitized medieval collections. Nothing earthshaking about the techniques or the methods, just a good, solid reminder that accessibility needs attention. Worth perusal, especially for digitization librarians.

The article that grabbed me by the throat and shook, however, talked about digital critical editions and why they’re going away. I really felt for the author; I’ve seen the Ivory Tower shoot down digital-edition projects again and again. Not to mention that I’ve now and again ranted on the subject of markup tools and why they’re horrible.

The story-in-brief here is that the article’s author, desirous of creating digital critical editions of various and sundry works, got frozen out by prestigious print publishers, when they discovered “that electronic editions cost no less than print editions to produce and require staff to be educated in the new possibilities.” (I might add that the revenue stream of such a work is uncertain at best.) He then built himself an academic fiefdom to put out such editions; he says he’s been moderately successful, but he’s not satisfied.

He blames the unwillingness of scholars to grant due professional credit to the authors of electronic editions (isn’t it just bloody funny how academia is falling all over itself to use digital resources, but doesn’t in the least want to produce them?) and the appalling state of production tools and workflows. (I have no quarrel with that last point, of course, but I confess to a mild amount of bogglement that he thinks T_EX is somehow easier than your average XML editor.)

What I want to know is, where the seven hells are this guy’s librarians?

Of course no for-profit or even cost-recovery publisher is going to touch digital editions. Too much expense, not enough audience. Of course spare-bedroom fiefdoms can’t pick up the slack; nothing can that lives only as long as a spare bedroom.

But academic libraries are doing these jobs by the metric tonne. We know things about TEI that people who wrote the Guidelines don’t. (Such as, TEI-Lite is unusable because it doesn’t allow both <head> and <label> at the beginning of a text division. What blockhead decided that, pray?) A lot of us have humanities backgrounds, even humanities-computing backgrounds; I really wasn’t kidding about ex-medievalist text geeks.

And neither publishers nor fiefdoms tend to pay any attention at all to the long-term survival of the result. Libraries are different. Long-term survival of knowledge is our business.

There’s a lot of buzz buzzing about how to extend open-access into the humanities space. I submit that journals aren’t the place to start. Open-access journals, institutional repositories, and so forth didn’t get any legs until the current system started getting too messy for the sci-tech-med folks. To extend those gains, we academic digitization librarians need to keep an eye out for areas where the current publishing system breaks down for humanities scholars. This is one. So let’s get cracking.

I’ve actually been hideously lazy lately, which is why CavLec has also been slow. Have gotten a few things done (Alisa and Li, you have Spam Karma working again), but have mostly been frowsting with books or DVDs.

Today, though, is our wedding anniversary, so we took off for the zoo. The strip of Wingra Marsh we walk through on our way there boasted the usual pack of goldfinches, a hairy woodpecker, and a number of different spring warblers (I leave warbler identification to the truly insane among birders; “it’s a warbler” is just peachy-keen-fine with me). The turtles weren’t sunning themselves owing to a distinct lack of sun, but they did swim about and poke their little black noses up above the surface.

No ducklings today, but plenty of very young goslings.

The highlight of the zoo was the five young lions sunning themselves on rocks. Four of them were sprawled across the big rock when we walked up, the fifth sitting in the shade looking rather woebegone. David suggested that he try out the rock next door, and he apparently heard, because he got up and after a wistful look at his siblings climbed up and made himself perfectly at home. By the time we moved on, he’d figured out that having his own rock meant he could sprawl however he chose.

We saw a giraffe get up from a nap, an impressively quick operation given how gangly the poor creatures are. A white-crested cockatoo seemed to find us agreeable company, bowing and displaying its crest to us, and screaming horribly to bring us back when we left.

A white pelican came within arm’s length of us, regarding us patiently and (largely) fearlessly; we discovered why when a keeper came by to dump a bunch of minnows in a bowl for its lunch. It had considerable trouble eating the things; it could pick them up perfectly well with the tip of its very long bill, but getting them from the tip of the bill to the gullet presented quite some difficulty. The flamingos appreciated the pelican’s messy feeding; I confess I don’t see how pelicans survive in the wild without better eating skills than that, though.

After our trip through the aviary (which is still horribly designed, I’m afraid), we swung back past the lions and were treated to a glorious display of playful stalking and chasing and mauling. (Biting someone else’s tail appears to be a foul. Everything else is fair game.)

My feet are ripped to shreds, unfortunately; I must get new insoles for my workhorse Munros. I won’t be doing any serious walking for the next day or two if I can possibly help it; blisters on the bottom of a toe really hurt. But it was worth it.

If you read between the lines over the past year of CavLec, you know that David and I haven’t had the best year ever. I think that’ll pass; part of it is the usual way academia imposes on personal relationships (his department, not mine!), and part of it is the entire job-hunt thing, which still can’t end soon enough for my taste.

No, I haven’t heard from Perdóndaris yet, but since they just met the Other Candidate last Friday, I’m sure they’re still mulling over their decision. The bad thing is that I can’t get up the energy to send out other applications while this is hanging in the balance, though I have edited my résumé to add awards and (happily!) take away the “Expected May 2005″ from my MLS listing.