Caveat Lector

Another reason I’ve been quiet lately is that if I’d been noisy, CavLec would have become an endless round of fretting about the house sale. Which, thank $DEITY, closed today and is over and done with and the check is in the mail (and I have to figure out what to do with the darn thing once I get it, but that’s another story altogether).

The City of Madison decided to rip up the street in front of my house just in time for the sale. Thanks a ton, Madison. Wasn’t sure I’d ever sell it.

Add to that my entrenched position as a housing bear—I think housing is in for a slide, be that via rapid price crash or a decade of zero appreciation—and you have one very nervous Dorothea.

I cut my price. I cut my price hard and fast. It was the right thing to do (no, I really don’t care that I’ve messed up my neighbors’ comps—they can just bug the city for lower property taxes), and it’s turning out fine. Sure, that extra mumble-thousand would have been nice, but we can live without it. The eventual price we settled on with our buyers was twenty thousand more than one vulture-carcass investor offered us, so I’m going to call it a win, you know what I mean?

And I think the buyers will emerge whole from this, too, despite my bearishness on housing. They’ll have some equity from the start, and they don’t seem to be in a crazy sleaze-loan. This makes me happy, because I loved my little house in Madison and I don’t want its next owners to hate it.

(Definition of “crazy sleaze-loan:” Any loan with “interest-only” or “option” in its name, and most ARMs, too. Any loan involving negative amortization, certainly. If you’ve got one of these, you’re crazy, the person who got you the loan is a sleaze, and you need to get out now. If you have to sell the house to get out, sell. Better than being upside-down on a loan in a bear housing market.)

So this post is my big sigh of relief. We’re out of the house, we’re completely out of debt (gosh, yeah, that feels good), and we’re solvent and liquid. These are all very good things.

Grrr. Argh. My solution to the bazillions-of-error-messages DSpace bug seemed to have cut off access to all items in the repository earlier today. Error message made a great deal of no sense whatsoever, so I went to plan B, which is backing slowly away from any recent changes to the install. I backed out the Browse.java file, and everything was fine.

So I trot over to my staging server to track down the problem, only to find that Apache had gone down hard enough to require a server reboot. Sigh. Reboot server. Pray. Rejoice; Apache came back up. Email boss, because Apache has done this before on the staging server, and I don’t think either of us knows why. (Well, I know I don’t.)

So I bring the staging server’s DSpace install up-to-date, then drop in the file that appeared to cause the problem on the repository—and everything works just fine and dandy, thank you. No sign of the bug. Which makes sense, because I really did test the heck out of the patch before I applied it on the repository server! I am an idiot, but not that much of an idiot.

Stupid bloody Heisenbugs. Grrr. Argh. Tomorrow morning early I’ll put the change back in on the main server, see if anything breaks.

Naps are not always a good idea. Sometimes they just mean less sleep at night.

But some days are just made for closing the window-curtains and curling up under flannel sheets and a down comforter and a quilt on top just for swank, and sleeping safely without dreams until it’s time to get up and make dinner.

Today was one of those days.

If I went to every conference about which someone said to me, “Hey, are you going to that conference?” I’d rack up platinum frequent-flyer miles in a month.

Don’t ask me that question, please. If I haven’t announced the conference here, I’m not going to it. For the next several months, I’m going to DASER and I’m going to JCDL and that’s it.

Did I go to Internet Librarian? No, because I don’t really belong there. The stuff I do tends to be on the web but not of it. If someday in the misty future I end up a webby librarian (which I could; in the course of MPOW’s search for one, I learned that I really do have mad phat webby-librarian skillz), things’ll be different.

Am I going to ALA? No, because megaconferences honestly don’t thrill me. The talks tend to be watered-down and over-general, the crowding is wearisome, and (unlike some) I don’t want to treat a conference as a vacation, so exotic locales don’t entice me. The only upside to megaconferences is seeing people I don’t otherwise get to see, like the folks from Ruritania. While that’s nice, it doesn’t make up for the disadvantages.

(Speaking of Ruritania, I got an email from them congratulating me on my new job. They’re a class act, and you won’t ever hear me say different.)

Will I ever go back to Extreme Markup? Well… *sigh*… probably not any time soon. Markup Tech/XML ’99 changed my life. Extreme 2004 was fun. Truth is, though, I’m not a markup geek any more… and the real truth is, I never was a markup-theory geek. I just pushed bits around until they became markup. Honestly, that’s all I ever did. There’s nothing wrong with that (somebody’s gotta do it!), but at Extreme I’m an interloper. I don’t have anything to contribute, and what gets discussed is mostly at such a high level that I don’t really take a whole lot home, either.

It’s a great conference. It’s just not a great conference for me.

I don’t get invitations to keynote. Doubt I ever will; I’m not pretty and what I do is important rather than attention-grabbing. (Don’t get me wrong—wouldn’t have it any other way. I did attention-grabbing but futile back in the ebook days, and a taste of that was quite quite enough.)

I’ve been known to get some of my expenses paid by way of offering tutorials, but it’ll be a while before I’m solid enough in my new career to pick up those gigs again. While the conference support I get from work is decent enough, it’s not generous by any stretch of the imagination; it’s lucky my folks live near JCDL, because a lot of that’s coming right out of my own pocket.

I have to ration my time, my strength, my money, and my travel-tolerance. I can’t go to conferences just to glad-hand; I have to get something out of them. So if I haven’t said I’m going—I’m not.

Laura Smart of California State Polytechnic sent me a link to the Educause “missing the train” article that everybody’s been chin-wagging about. I hadn’t bothered reading it previously, because library tech angst crosses my radar so often I’ve quit paying attention unless the author is someone I respect or the buzz sounds genuinely novel.

Laura showed me the repository language:

In response to the Web, many libraries, individually and/or collectively, have started to create their own information hubs—digital repositories—using the intellectual content of their institutions. Unfortunately, many of these repositories are built on traditional methods of information organization rather than on the new information-dissemination models evolving on the Web. Potential contributors to and users of these repositories are finding the organization and metadata tag systems imposed by libraries far too cumbersome. Moreover, in designing many of these new digital repositories, libraries have largely ignored the important role that people play. Most library digital repository initiatives are designed to serve only as gateways to documents and artifacts. Few are designed to serve as true information hubs, providing users access to both relevant information and experts.

Aren’t we librarians just awful. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

Well, I can tell you one thing right off the bat about article author Paul B. Gandel—he’s never deposited anything to a DSpace repository. I whinge a lot about DSpace usability, and rightly so, but the bare fact is that even given DSpace’s usability problems, submitting an item through the web interface is brain-dead simple to do. What’s more, it’s going to get simpler and more customizable to individual content types over time—I’m on the DSpace dev list and I pay attention to what’s coming.

Complex library metadata my foot—DSpace uses Dublin Core, for heaven’s sake, the brain-dead simplest and stupidest metadata set in creation! Filling out the metadata forms for a DSpace submission takes about as much time as writing up a cite for a journal article with all the proper punctuation. (Of course, lots of Certified Smart People can’t do that, either, but they don’t generally blame their incapacity on draconian journal editors.) I’m honestly not sure what Mr. Gandel wants us to do.

Maybe what’s being sought is tags, folksonomies, whatever you want to call them. Okay, fair cop. Give me a minute.

As for ignoring people—which people, pray? Submitters or consumers? I maintain stoutly that we’ve done pretty well by submitters. Sure, we’ve made them think about some things they don’t want to think about (e.g. preservation issues), but somebody’s got to. Nobody wants to be saddled with repositories-full of dead material in fifteen years.

Consumers—well, I’m going to argue that we aren’t doing what Gandel thinks we’re doing. I don’t think I’m in the content-discovery business, except indirectly. What’s more, that’s not a business I want to be in, because Google and Scopus and ISI and OAIster will kick me to the curb and steal my lunch money. What’s more, it’s really rather wasteful for all us repository-rats to deploy sophisticated discovery systems; most of what we collect isn’t self-contained, and benefits from cross-repository aggregation. Hardly anyone is going to find everything they could possibly want in the repository I maintain. Not that it couldn’t happen; some of the special-collections stuff that’ll be going up soon works as a unit. Even so, better that content consumers should search and discover on a larger scale.

So what I and my fellow repository-rats do instead is put our data out there for other people to build discovery services from. That’s what OAI-PMH is all about. No, I don’t anticipate DSpace building a tagging system any day soon, but that doesn’t stop CiteULike or Connotea or whomever from doing it on top of OAI-PMH data. That’s webby content discovery, whatever Mr. Gandel says: inviting network effects to take hold and bear fruit.

In sum, we repository-rats are only part of the larger picture. Our mission is to solicit digital content from submitters, do all the quasi-legal work to ensure we can display and preserve it (and let me tell you, this aspect of my job is looming far larger than I ever thought it would!), and put the content in shape for future generations via intelligent preservation and metadata practice.

Mr. Gandel’s FUD? Isn’t helping. This repository-rat wishes he’d sit down with us and figure out how to help, instead of misunderstanding our role and giving our faculty yet more lame excuses to ignore us.

Joy had a presentation that went well, not that that surprises me.

I only wanted to add a Point the Fourth to her three: you should present at a conference while you’re an LIS graduate student. Presentation is a vitally important job skill, and getting your name and face out in front of people never, ever hurts.

Frankly, I find presenting far easier than a lot of the other stuff that comes under the heading of “networking,” and it works just about as well, as far as I can tell.

So do it. Present. It won’t kill you, and it’ll make you stronger.

By the way, I know it’s been quiet around here lately. Combination of work weirdness (that very definitely needs to stay off-blog, but it’s nothing that directly harms me, so nobody should worry on my account) and work for a TAG client eating up huge chunks of my time at home.

I don’t disagree that there’s an overstock of librarians, but surely our value hasn’t gone down quite this far:

Grabbed off a Blogdigger page aggregating conference blogposts from Internet Librarian 2005.

The seven-spice tea looks nice, though…

Phooey on those librarians who say you never use the stuff they teach you in library school.

I whiled away an hour or two writing some big ugly hairy SQL queries on the repository database, because one of our communities wanted to know what keywords they were using on a per-collection basis. Well, first I have to know how the database references Dublin Core subjects (and because of DC qualifiers, there are several possibilities), and then I have to figure out which items I’m looking at and divide them up by collection, and then go fetch the actual keywords out of the items table… it gets complicated.

What I came up with is probably sub-optimal in sixteen different ways—but by gosh, it works. And I didn’t know a word of SQL until I learned it in library school.

My cubie at work is unmistakably a geek’s cubie. The Huge Shelf o’ Computer Books is a dead giveaway, of course. (I am slowly corrupting my colleagues in the liaison office—let one borrow my copy of Google Hacks the other day. They’ll come over to the Geek Side yet.)

The equipment is even geekier-looking, though. Trogool Itself is geek-drool material, but what really draws the eye is my sleek black Kinesis keyboard with its depressed key-bowls and freaky thumb-keys. I have a regular Mac keyboard handy for when my boss drops by to look at something with me—quite a neat setup, really; we can both type at once. I don’t use the thing myself, though. Kinesis all the way.

Nobody seems quite to understand that I don’t have the Kinesis keyboard because I’m a geek. I have it because I’m a gimp. Pain is bad. I don’t like pain. The Kinesis keeps a lot of pain away. QED.

The adjustable keyboard tray in my cubie (which I quite like; some of my colleagues hate theirs, but I’m happy as a clam about mine) has a pull-out mouse drawer that’s been driving me crazy. It’s lower than the keyboard, so putting the tray at the right height for keying means I have to bend my wrist in exactly the wrong way to mouse. It’s also too far out from the keyboard, which means more bad wrist-twisting.

So I bought myself a Logitech Trackman and brought it in to work today. Still getting used to it, but I can tell it’ll be a huge improvement.

What’s fascinating is how easy it really is (for me, at least) to change input devices. I’ve used horizontal mice, vertical mice, and a couple different trackball designs. I can type on ordinary keyboards (much though I hate it) as well as my Kinesis. I never did cotton on to foot-pedals, but it could just be I’ve got big clunky feet. Otherwise, I adjust—though clicking-and-dragging with a thumbed trackball is going to take some practice.

I logged on to the credit union I used in Madison to gaze unhappily at the dwindling balance there (I’ve been using that account for the house bills; Hallo-”Close Date”-ween can’t come soon enough).

Somehow, the balance seemed to have dwindled just a wee bit too far—and then I suddenly saw why. I cut off our phone and DSL service effective the day after we moved, but TDS Metrocom was still auto-debiting us.

Yeah. Er. Not so good. So I hopped onto their website and alerted them to the issue, and what do you know, I didn’t have to argue with them. They immediately apologized and are fixing it.

Go TDS! After the hell that was Verizon DSL, it’s nice to deal with a phone company in possession of a clue.