Caveat Lector

At a work meeting yesterday, I was told of this site, which was held up as an Object of Scorn. Whatever the other folks attending the meeting want (and that’s still up in the air), it’s Not That.

Looking at the site this morning, I saw why. It’s not that the content is bad; the content seems excellent. What’s bad? The total lack of information architecture.

The organization is bad. The navigation is bad. The search is bad (this site is crying out for fielded limit searching). The visual design is bad. The labelling is beyond abysmal. I would never send anyone here to find a resource; it’d be like asking them to find a specific snowflake in an avalanche. Honestly, I didn’t think professional sites with information architecture this bad still existed.

Hints of better site structure peek out from the piled-high badness avalanche; the “virtual bookshelves” aren’t a bad notion at all. But the whole is just bad, bad, bad, so bad I can’t even start taking it apart because I’m not sure what to rant about first.

Moral of the story: Spend some grant money on an information architect (or a librarian! or a librarian information architect!) in addition to your JSP coders, won’t you? Your users will bless you for it, and your competitors will have one less way to cut you out of the picture.

(Bet you thought I’d never post to this category again, huh?)

Glory hallelujah, my alma mater redesigned its website, finally. Type’s a bit small, layout isn’t liquid, and I wish the colored hover in the navigation was all-over hot-clickable (hint: put display:block on your a tag and use span as needed inside), but it’s still pretty darn good.

It was embarrassingly ugly during my tenure there. We (the student LITA group, that is) made some noises about redoing it, but I and others got distracted and the politics got byzantine, and… well, it never happened.

Glad it’s happened now.

Hidden assumptions about workflow are typically a Bad Thing. Moreover, more metadata is a Good Thing.

Which really makes me wonder why on earth DSpace only lets submitters describe bitstreams if there’s more than one bitstream in the item. This is just goofy. The most obvious objection: it’s got one bitstream now; will it have no others in future?

I take that back. That’s not the most obvious objection. The most obvious objection is: if somebody wants to describe their file, why on earth not let them?

Fortunately, the fix for this one is relatively easy. As of DSpace 1.3.2, pop a copy of /jsp/submit/choose-file.jsp into your /jsp/local folder. Then, in the /jsp/local version, comment out lines 119-122 and 138-140.

I get the sense it may be possible to do away with the “more than one item” ticky-box entirely; just always treat a submission as though it may contain multiple bitstreams. Not sure yet, though, because I haven’t been all the way through the code, so don’t quote me.

Doing bitstream descriptions via the batch importer, though—that’s going to be a hack. I need to do it, though, and honestly I don’t understand why it hasn’t already been done—anything you’re importing through the batch importer is bloody likely to have multiple bitstreams per item, innit?

Hey, all you librarians, in need of a favor here. Has anybody out there submitted a successful proposal to Joint Conference on Digital Libraries? I could use some tips, pointers or guidelines, because the conference website’s got fat nothin’.

I’m thinking a workshop, if that helps any.

Last week, I committed to doing a DSpace upgrade on the production server this morning. A couple hours later, I found out I’d be in meetings for a large part of today.

So I was a wee bit nervous coming in to work this morning. (I also walked, because the bus system was on a “modified weekday schedule” due to Columbus Day, which meant my usual morning bus wasn’t running. Good walk, though—40 minutes door-to-door, which was less time than I thought, through pleasant neighborhoods with geese and herons migrating overhead. I may do this more often.)

Inside of fifteen minutes, I had the upgrade up and running, and for my next trick, I finally got up the courage to get rid of the amateurish-looking redirect that had been in front of the repository’s main page. Total downtime: two minutes, maybe, in three short outages spread over maybe eight minutes.

Mua-hahaha. I so rule.

And just to spread the love a little, DSpace’s new cleaner markup makes my re-hack load on upgrade much, much lighter. All I have to hack now are substantive changes, not quote marks. I appreciate it, quite a bit.

I had an idea for a fractured fairy tale some time ago, but I don’t write those things, so I’ll toss it out for those who do. I think it’d be publishable, done right; I’ve seen similar in best-of fantasy anthologies. Though I don’t have the patience to do it right, it’s nagging at my brain, and I wish somebody would write it. So.

The young emperor inherits (along with his empire) his predecessor’s old clothier, who is the narrator of the story. This clothier, he knows his stuffs. One blindfolded touch of a new fabric, and he can tell you its precise fiber content, how it was woven and by whom, and what process was used to dye it. (Sometimes even the color.) It’s not magic. He was taught by the best, and he’s learned all his life long, learned from his work as he did it.

(Here would be space for some satire on court fashion. I’ll leave it to a real writer to pull that off.)

He is unceremoniously dumped from his high position when a pair of new clothiers come to town, promising marvels. As word of them filters back to him, he knows immediately that they’re charlatans. They make hash of weave, cut, color, weight, technique, and everything else the old clothier spent a lifetime’s education and experience learning. He doesn’t even need to hear about the magic, the ferreting-out of fools and so forth. Just what those two windbags say about clothing is enough, to one who knows.

What stings at first is that the emperor didn’t even bother to consult him; he wouldn’t have minded sharing his position nearly as much as he minds the emperor’s eventual disgrace, which he can see no way to forestall. At length, the old clothier reflects that perhaps he ought to have expected no different. Why should the emperor respect skill or experience? He has none, has worked for none; he gained his empire by dint of being the son of his father. He’s been surrounded all his life by fawning toadies looking for advantage, and would-be Machiavellis weaving spider-schemes in corners; how should he have learned to value honesty?

When the promises become dangerous, the old clothier tries to make himself heard. No one believes him, of course; he is only the jealous loser. Not an iota of the evidence he can muster arrives at the emperor’s ear; when he challenges the charlatans, he is dismissed with uneasy laughter.

Heartsick, the old clothier stays home for the emperor’s disgraceful promenade… and I’m not quite sure how the story ends, really.

As I said, I’ve had this rattling around in my head for some time. It started screaming for escape right around the time of the Miers nomination, of course.

I was re-hacking some of my hacks into the latest DSpace release when I came upon this pair of Java comments. The first one belongs to the program code; the second is (obviously) mine.

// First column is date
// DS: Horsepuckey. Who cares about the date? It's last, as $DEITY intended.

I must have been having a really, really bad DSpace day when I wrote that.

I’m a bit late to the party, but nonetheless: there’s an opening for a job very like mine at the University of Maryland. Application deadline is the end of the month.

The job ad misspells the repository’s software platform, but a look gives it away. Unless someone’s willing to hack the living you-know-what out of DSpace, installs do tend to look alike; the little arrows in the sidebar navigation are a dead giveaway.

(My install looks a bit different because I did the hacking, but in my case the wording of the navigation gives it away. Eh, well. Someday I get brave and change it.)

As much as I whinge about DSpace, I do enjoy forcing it to submit to my imperious will working with it, and I have high hopes for its future. It’d be nice to have another DSpace librarian in the general area, so apply!

So I was writing an email, and I wanted the title of that book. You know? The book by those folks at Cornell about managing technology change in libraries. Where they talk about how some folks are on the bleeding edge, and that’s fine, but eventually technological change has to broaden its base so that more people feel ownership in it and more people are skilled enough to handle it. That book. You remember that book?

Well, I do. But I surely couldn’t remember the title or the editor, and I wasn’t sure whether Cornell University Press had published it, or if the Cornell librarians had published it elsewhere.

I tried a subject-keyword OPAC search. No soap; too many relevant subject headings, not enough time to go through them all. I can’t force the OPAC to disgorge a scannable list of books from the last five years having something to do with library technology.

So I said, “screw it” quietly to myself, and typed “cornell library technology book” (sans quotes) into Google.

And there it was. Becoming a Digital Library, edited by Susan J. Barnes. That’s the book; I didn’t even have to refine that extremely ugly search. I typed the title happily into my email.

I hate OPACs. I hate them more every day. This is why.

It’s an excellent book, by the way. I recommend it, and mean to model my behavior on its suggestions.

… Lipstick Librarian, forsooth.

Today was the first presentation of the repository to the faculty-at-large. So I wore a nice dress and a bit of makeup, neither of which is ordinarily a feature of my self-presentation. (Well, that’s not true. I do wear nice dresses to work. But not so much with the makeup.)

I didn’t wear makeup to do my presentation for the liaisons (though I did dress up), not because I don’t respect or value them, but because they know me and they know perfectly well what I do and don’t wear. Makeup would have been a distraction.

When I do wear it, though, I tend to go for, shall we say, vivid colors. What’s the point, otherwise? So they noticed, and I have a new nickname, with all appropriate apologies.

I’m all gleeful and tickled about how things went with the presentation. I met an Extremely Strategic Person, signed three faculty members on, have a date to talk to an Extremely Strategic Department in November, have an almost-commitment to do a talk for another Extremely Strategic Department, and generally seem to have made a good impression. Oh, and I went to the lawyers on Monday and got the license looked over, so that’s all right.

I’m not so much tickled at finding another bug I caused in DSpace (fixed temporarily; better fix pending), and yet another bug that wasn’t my fault (also fixed; stupid stupid OSX permissions issues!). There’s another DSpace upgrade out that I shall be installing shortly, and frankly, I almost dread it, despite the improved markup it brings.

Eh, well, life on the bleeding edge. I’m too happy about the presentation to care about bugfixes. And if anybody wants to look at the slides (though I don’t know why you would; it’s very local), somebody asked me for them, so I promptly ate my own dog food and posted them to the repository.