The LazyWeb came through in fine style indeed; I had three offers of help and one “don’t use XSLT! use this!” message.
Turns out my stylesheet wasn’t the cow; 4XSLT was. The cure, as the doctor said to the patient, is “don’t do that.”
So I’m grabbing Python bindings to Saxon and Xalan and whathaveyou, and I’ll take care of business that way.
A heads-up to my systems-librarian readers: My boss is working on a hack to pull new-book RSS feeds out of Voyager. I think this is an endlessly cool trick (and if you think I’m saying that just because my boss is my boss, you really don’t know me very well), have come up with six different ideas for making it useful already, and hope other people will play with the notion too.
Yes, yes, I know. My first real Java project is going to be cajoling DSpace into disgorging RSS feeds, I promise…
The best blogging on library-as-workplace these days is happening over at Rochelle’s. If she keeps it up, I’ll just have to hang up my keyboard—on this topic, at any rate.
The latest installment discusses the often-fraught relationship between academic librarians and the teaching and research faculty who represent one of their constituencies as well as—possibly, anyway—their colleagues.
I won’t bother summarizing her argument, because I want everybody to go read her post. (The article she links to is good stuff also.) All I want to do is point out that while she and I come from remarkably similar backgrounds vis-à-vis academia, we’ve definitely come to dissimilar conclusions about how we care to relate to faculty.
Which isn’t to say either of us is right, wrong, brilliant, delusional, or anything of that nature. A lot of this is situational, for one thing. I’m not in a tenure-track librarian job, so in a very real sense, I don’t have to show I’m somehow the equal of a faculty member. If I’d been offered the job in Ruritania, things would be different.
I could not repress, however, an entirely cynical response to this:
We want the teaching faculty (and by this I mean anyone from the rank of associate professor on up) to see us as their equals, as comrades-in-arms in the daily battle to produce good scholarship, excellent graduates, and better the general welfare of our shared institution and Knowledge in general. We want a standing invitation to the faculty club. We don’t want to be seen as the help.
With all due respect, I don’t think the problem there is us. The problem there is faculty: to be specific, a large (though not, of course, all-encompassing) faction among faculty who simply cannot respect any path but theirs. They can’t imagine that librarians are highly educated, because in their rarefied world, all the highly-educated people are faculty. They can’t imagine that librarians are smart, ditto. Nor can they admit that anyone but they has a stake in the business of information.
We’re not going to change that by going through we’re-faculty-too rituals, because of this same stubborn snob cadre. It doesn’t matter what we know, what we publish, or what we teach. We are not faculty, therefore we count for nothing. (Anybody noticing a similar dynamic in the librarian-parapro wars gets a gold star. We librarians have our own snob cadre, undoubtedly.)
One of the worst systemic problems in academia, in my highly biased and unreliable opinion, is that it selects for the snob cadre. If you’re not darn near monomaniacal, you don’t make it through grad school. If you’re not darn near tunnel-visioned, you don’t want to make it through grad school. If you’re not darn near totally convinced that academia is a holy calling to which only the select ascend, you don’t darn near kill yourself getting tenure.
(In passing—and I am very carefully not naming names here—I notice that several blog-academicians who objected vociferously to my anti-academia stance back in the day are now contemplating leaving academia themselves, or are already gone. The plural of anecdote is not data, admittedly. I do think, though, that blog-academicians tend not to be part of the snob cadre; the snob cadre is full of Ivan Tribble and his ilk. And the non-snob-cadre is more likely to have professional crises, and far more likely to see the wider world as potentially attractive, which boils down to “more likely to leave.”)
Frankly, I don’t want to be equal to the snob cadre. I don’t want to be in their club. So much so that, yes, in my eyes the snob cadre has poisoned the rest of the well. I’ve got absolutely zero interest in being “one of the pack with these people,” as Rochelle puts it. I’ve nothing invested in their opinion of my scholarly pursuits or intellectual capacity. If I’m merely “the help” to the snob cadre, I’m in company whose excellence far surpasses anything the snob cadre can muster. (Who wants to be pals with Ivan Tribble? Seriously. Even on a workplace level of palliness.)
What do I want? To do my job. Like Rochelle, I believe I can do my job best when faculty are receptive to what I have to offer. Unlike Rochelle, I don’t think the I’m-just-like-you-really card is the only, or the best, card in my hand.
I’ll play that card, if it’s expedient. Sure, why not? My ΦΒΚ certificate is hanging in my cube (mostly because that frees up the closet space in our apartment!). I’ve also got my tassel and a couple of library-school graduation pictures in my cube, though those are mostly for my own morale. Eventually I’ll get my other academic detritus framed and hung in the cube too. It can all live there along with Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Mighty Plush Cthulhu, and the shoggoth.
But if it’s more effective to baffle ’em with tech-talk, that’s what I’ll do. If an allied-expert stance gets a better response than playing faculty-manqué (and in my specific situation, I incline to think it will), then I’ll act all consultant-like. If they’ll give work to “the help” that they wouldn’t give to a perceived equal, I’ll happily reinforce whatever expectations they have of “the help.” I don’t care, as long as the job gets done.
What I won’t do is hide my history, despite my strong sense thus far that academic librarianship would like me to—when I talk about my first grad-school experience with my work colleagues, the fidgety nervousness and edgy laughter are all but palpable. Of course I don’t make a point of mentioning that I’m a dropout, but if it comes up in conversation, it comes up. If snob-cadre faculty want to think worse of me because I washed out, fine. I truly don’t care; I have a job to be getting on with, and any faculty who won’t deal with me because of my chequered academic history would probably have found some other excuse not to anyway.
I’m also concerned about creating a spurious separation between librarians who can play with the faculty on the faculty’s terms and librarians who can’t. Not all academic librarians have extra sheepskins lying around. The last thing we want to do is train faculty to respect only those who do. That’s professional mass suicide, is what that is.
That’s really the only serious objection I have to other librarians employing I’m-just-like-you-really tactics, though. If it works, it works. I just recommend some clarity about it (let’s not ever do it just to massage our egos; Rochelle’s clearly too big for that, thank goodness), and some thought toward developing additional alternatives. We’re librarians. We are to be worshipped. We don’t have to see the inside of the Faculty Club door just to kick informational butt.
If an XSLT guru out there would be willing to take a look at a stylesheet I’m working on with a view toward explaining to me why it runs like a dyspeptic cow on Valium, please let me know. Bonus points if you are familiar with 4Suite, which is what I’m using to do the transform (because at some point I expect to roll it into a Python workflow).
I’m trying to cobble together something workable out of two different EAD to HTML transforms. I’ve got something that works (more or less—output needs minor tweakage), but oh my gosh does it run slooooooow, and I’m not XSLT-savvy enough to understand why.
Help?
There’s a dead easy way to prove that the discipline imposed by XHTML doesn’t automatically lead to good HTML practices.
Just read XSLT stylesheets whose intended target is HTML. Ugh.
A couple of weeks ago, David had to invade Mr. Batley’s habitat (while Mr. Batley was absent from it, naturally) to get a cracked glass pane in a storm window out so that we could sort out how to replace it.
(Yes, we are responsible for the crack, and yes, we will replace the pane. Only right.)
Mr. Batley does not appreciate having his habitat invaded. Just opening the window to clean out the sash shooed him away for a few days soon after we moved in, so we knew this was a hazard—but he’d come back last time, so we thought he’d get used to it.
Not this time, though. No Mr. Batley hanging from our screen to wave at us with his spindly little five-toed feet in the morning. No Mr. Batley yawning and stretching and grooming his fur around sunset in preparation for dinner. (He likes to be well-groomed for dinner, does our Mr. Batley.) No thumping around in the window at bedtime, as Mr. Batley returned from his meal.
We missed him.
This morning, though, I walked into the office looking for the checkbook, and there he was, hanging out in the window. He’d even chosen the window-quadrant we were most likely to see. We are, apparently, forgiven.
As long as we don’t do it again.
In a 2001 publication from the National Research Council was this little gem, on changes in scholarly communication:
New automated systems, and perhaps new intermediary institutions for searching and authenticating information, will develop to provide these services, much as libraries and scholarly publications served these roles in the past.
Psst. Hey. Poindexter. Libraries? Are still very much in the thick of all this, and we’d appreciate that being acknowledged, thank you.
Yes, I know, 2001. In 2001 institutional repositories were barely a gleam in the eye. Even so, I just hate seeing self and colleagues cavalierly dismissed in this fashion.
As much as I whine and complain about DSpace around here, I owe them props when they do something right.
There’s a new beta of the next minor release out, and what do you know, they fixed the markup to XHTML 1! Go them!
(Because now I won’t embarrass myself causing server errors because regular expressions put quotation marks where they aren’t supposed to be…)
I’m not going to upgrade to a mere beta (give me a break—I just rolled out a new design last week!), but I do look forward to the actual release.
Dream is still limping, and David’s been sick as a dog for a week. I don’t think I came down with whatever he’s got, but I will admit to having been tired lately. Ergo the distinct lack of bloggage.
Of course, it might just be the creeping despair that’s going around. I’ve still got a hefty case of that.
In the meantime, I keep working; the local uni-library consortium finally got around to admitting that I’m MPOW’s repository person, so I get to add five meetings to my fall schedule. With the rollout all rolled out, I shall be turning my attention to (ugh) policy and procedures development.
Still no sale on the house. Anybody who needs a sweet, energy-efficient, convenient little pad in Madison really ought to give us a buzz.
And for now, that’s the story. With luck, something’ll come up next week that I can get bloggy about.
Rolled out the new design yesterday. Went quite smoothly, all things considered—which of course meant I found three more bugs today, two of which were my stupid fault. Squashed ’em all; haven’t found any others. Yet.
And I entered six new items into the repository today, which makes me happy. For lo, I am useful. (Not to mention that lo! whatever I borked on the staging server that broke the batch importer never got borked on the main server, so I had no trouble at all. Y’all have no idea how happy I am about that.)
I’m also finding all kinds of new things to loathe about the DSpace interface. “Policies for Item 1920/235 (ID=243),” proclaims a set-permissions page. Well, excuse me for breathing, but I can’t remember all the handle numbers, never mind the database keys! Would it kill to title the page something recognizable?
Tomorrow I head out to one of the satellite campuses to introduce the project and myself and (I hope) generate some interest. Several of the departments out there sit squarely in my sights as likely to generate some early adopters. I’m considering starting a community specifically for early adopters, in fact, the first people in their departments to submit stuff to the repository. A little extra notoriety for them, easier recruitment for me (since I can go after individuals instead of having to convince an entire department to sign on), a good thing all around.
And of course I’m going to call them “MARS Pathfinders,” because really, how can I not?
Yes, I’ve got Mars images festooned all over my presentations, not least because NASA has given so many stunning images to the public domain. I didn’t extend the theme to the actual repository design, because making the repository feel like an integral part of the university was far more important than indulging my juvenile taste for puns, but presentations are fair game.
In other news, I hit my first Java class last night; fortunately, it didn’t hit back very hard. I’ll learn some things about GUI programming that should serve me well.