Caveat Lector

Would you believe I’ve been at MPOW six months? A whole half-year? Yes, well, I’m not entirely sure I do.

How have I done so far? Well, let’s see:

• Learning my job’s technical component: A−. I can sling the Java pretty good now, and ascent up the learning curve continues. I can do darn near anything with psql if you give me long enough to suss it out. I’m not happy with what I still don’t know about OSX Server, Apache, and Tomcat, nor am I completely confident in my command of DSpace back-end architecture and administration.
• Initial redesign of the DSpace UI: A. I did a solid job with this, within my limitations. It’s been heavily beaten on since, and is holding up fine.
• Outreach: B− for effort, D+ for results. I hope I put the idea in a few brains, and I think the upcoming six months will be more productive than the last six now that I’ve tried and discarded a bunch of things that don’t work… but still. I could and should have done more and better.
• Professional development: B. One conference attended, two conference proposals out, a co-writing proposal in progress, a guest-speaker gig upcoming at one of the local library schools. Couple of committee appointments, couple of local presentations. Not bad. Could be better.
• Collegiality: B+. I haven’t to my knowledge made any serious enemies, though I seem to have a mutual arms-length thing going with one or two people. I have a few solid backers. No major social missteps so far. My boss basically trusts me, as I do him; when stuff happens, neither of us has any problem bugging the other one about it, and it gets solved. Life is pretty good.

Overall, a solid B, which isn’t too bad for right out of the starting gate.

I popped in a proposal at HigherEdBlogCon, in the track moderated by the biblioblogosphere’s own Meredith Farkas. And no, this post is not meant to be some kind of insurance that Meredith will accept the proposal; if I get rejection-egg on my face, I’ll live.

(The proposal is, in fact, something I’ve been trying to make myself write for months. With luck, this time I’ll actually do it.)

Since I prefer my chair on the ground as opposed to crammed inside a tin can thirty thousand feet above it, virtual conferences are a natural for me, and I’d like to see more of them. Y’all don’t need to see my ugly mug to benefit from my dubious wisdom; in fact, not seeing it is a positive advantage, trust me. Not to mention that it’s cheaper for all concerned.

Despite its (mildly unfortunate) name, HigherEdBlogCon isn’t about blogging. Well, it’s partly about blogging. But it’s mostly about the constellation of stuff that represents technological progress (with all the strictures and caveats that term implies) in higher education.

Libraries and librarians have been given a whole track of their own—so where, I ask you, is the high-falutin’ Library 2.0 crowd? Oh, right, right, blogs and IM and podcasts and suchlike are what librarians hold their noses and use to communicate with patrons. We use other, better methods to talk to each other, except when résumé-puffing is involved. (And that, in a nutshell, is what I think of “Library 2.0,” which is why I haven’t been blogging about it. My sole hope is that when it goes down in flames along with its buzzword predecessors, it doesn’t take the important stuff—like getting library data out of impregnable silos—down with it.)

Come on, now, academic librarians. We can poke our noses out of ALA long enough to compare notes with the rest of the folks involved in the higher-education enterprise. Can’t we?

Eh, well. Perhaps the con’ll just be us peasants, down on the threshing floor getting stuff done instead of nattering about it. Fine with me. Pass the pitchfork.

This area is so built-up and tame that it’s really quite wonderful when mom nature gets her licks in.

She’s certainly doing that tonight, with screaming winds that knocked the power out briefly a couple of times and spooked the cats.

So we’ve got candles burning just in case, I made a big pot of hot chocolate, and we’re cuddling the Goths when they’ll let us. When power permits, we’re watching The Magnificent Seven on PBS, for the sake of the Dogs in the Vineyard campaign I just joined.

I’m still not rejoining ALA. But I gotta admit, I like this and I’m gonna buy a few.

So like all the rest of us, I’m oohing and aahing over NCSU’s new OPAC. Which is definitely an improvement over what we’ve got. I truly, truly dig the LCC browse. Excellent, not least because it’s passive inculcation of the LCC system.

Now watch me rip on it.

Type in an author name. (“Andrew Pace” works.) Oops, did you remember to change from keyword to author search? Because if you didn’t, the catalog doesn’t realize that’s what you were doing, and the narrow-your-search sidebar won’t be the same. I can imagine that tripping up many, many an undergraduate. RedLightGreen knows when you’ve searched for an author’s name as a keyword (though it’s not at its best with this particular search either; try it). So should this.

Okay, now do the same search again, making sure that you select “Keyword in Author,” and look at that sidebar. Question one: why are authors stuck way at the bottom of the sidebar, when you’ve gone and told the machine that’s what you were looking for? Question two: why doesn’t Andrew Pace appear in the list as an author? Question three: why is the sidebar not smart enough to distinguish between human and corporate-body authorship, when even MARC is? (Does your typical patron even think of corporate bodies as authors? Why even show them, and for heaven’s sake, why mix them up with human bodies both here and in the results display?)

The answer to some of the above questions is that Andrew Pace wasn’t in the “author” MARC field—he was in one of the MARC 700 fields, or in the table of contents, or something. The problem is that a patron can look at some of these records and not understand why they came up in the search. That’s bad. Whenever possible, this should be made obvious; if you have to pull up 7xx fields as “Contributor” or whatever, do it (and big brownie points to your cataloguers if you can distinguish editors from translators from contributors et cetera). Or do what Pandora does, and offer an AJAXy “Why am I seeing this record?” gizmo.

All authors in results lists should be links, leading to catalog search results for that author. If I can do it for DSpace (and I just did, this morning; patch imminent), Endeca can do it. That’s basic Ranganathan-style “save the time of the reader” usability. That’s “More Like This” functionality, which users love.

“Subject: Topic”? Gah, don’t do that. Jargon is so Library 1.0. Sure, we know that MARC has different kinds of subjects; the patron doesn’t know and shouldn’t have to wonder. This should be “Subject” or “Topic,” and “Subject: Genre” should just be… well, actually, I don’t like “Genre,” so let’s try “Publication Type.” And while you’re at it, change “Browse by:” at the top of the results page to “Browse results by:” lest students think they’re browsing the entire catalog.

Instead of “Send search to:” I would recommend “Widen search to:” The patron doesn’t care that the underlying catalogue is shooting a query elsewhere; the patron cares that he can get more results this way. “Send” doesn’t indicate that, and additionally has an email-ish connotation that’s just wrong in this context.

Bottom line: get ye to an information architect, NCSU, to get your labels properly labeled. (Although I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they’re still doing usability testing. If so, good.)

I notice that this interface is tuned for cutting down on results glut. It’s not good at all for pearl-growing or broadening searches. This is a thorny information-architecture problem—patrons need to be able to narrow and broaden and go off in different directions—and I’m not at all sure how best to solve it… but I do want to see it solved. I noticed in my own playing-around that I occasionally clicked on a sidebar link expecting it to search the whole catalog for what I clicked on. Oops.

Okay, now for the results themselves. I like the stacks directions. I do not like that they’re separated from the library name, which is the other half of the same piece of information (“where’s the book?”) from the point of view of the patron. This should be an easy fix, and ought to have been an obvious one.

If the format is “eBook,” the word “eBook” should link to the ebook. Yes, I know MARC doesn’t work that way. That’s just too darn bad; this “Online:” line is completely unnecessary and should be abolished with extreme prejudice.

Lest someone think I hate the effort, here are some things I delight in:

• Combo box for search-options much reduced. I still don’t like combo boxen, but NCSU sensibly reduced the options to the bare useful minimum.
• Title-search passes the I can’t remember the name of my own darn book test. (Nota bene, though: I first typed in “columbia electronic publishing” and got nothing. eBay has a neat trick where they retry a low- or no-results search with different term combinations. I’d like to see that here.)
• Last-name-first, first-name-last, doesn’t matter. Article in title, no article in title, doesn’t matter. Yay!
• No intermediate-results lists. I asked for books by Andrew Pace, that’s what I got—I didn’t get a list of authors with Andrew Pace’s name in the middle. (DySirnixsi, I am so glaring at you right now.)
• Sidebar sensibly goes away when there’s not enough information to put in it.

Overall, this is a marvelous advance over the current state of the OPAC. Most of what I’ve suggested are little tuning tweaks, which of course means that the interesting changes are the other ones. More OPACs like this, please!

It’s not exactly the Spanish Inquisition, but a six-hour meeting is as close as I want to come, thanks. At that, I’m more patient than most people seem to be; Allen Renear and the OEBF PubStruct group trained me up real good for marathon meetings.

Still. Brain fried now. With a side of cole slaw.

On the upside, I got a second patch accepted to DSpace today. This was the millions of emailed error messages bug, and apparently my band-aid fix was good enough.

For my next trick, I’m gonna turn author names in item pages into browse-by-author links. Yep. Shouldn’t be all that hard (famous last words). I was thinking about doing that for subject, too, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort, given the meagre collections in your average repository—there’s just not enough subject duplication to lead people to anything useful.

(Pre-coordinate vs. post-coordinate vocabularies for IR metadata. Discuss. I’m for post-coordinate, myself, but I’ve never been all that convinced of the value of pre-coordination away from card catalogs. Heresy, I know; the LCSH Posse can burn me later.)

A link to an OAIster search or federated-search-tool search by subject, now… that might be interesting. Hmmm…

I was listening to my chorus CDs tonight by way of teaching myself next week’s music (bloody polyrhythms! I even prefer Holst and his trademark headache-inducing 5/4 drumbeat to losing the beat entirely every two bars), and not only did I nail that low F I’d thought forever lost, I sang along with the next tenor solo line and took it all the way down to a low D. Soprano, hah! Alto I am and alto I stay.

Though maybe not. I hit a high B-flat by mistake, looking for the G underneath it. It wasn’t a good high B-flat by any means, but even so—since when did I even have a high B-flat? You couldn’t have goosed that note out of me in high school or college.

If anyone’s curious, you can read the concert schedule yourself; I’ll be in the Ravel (ugh) and Cathedral Echoes (yay! Pange Lingua is an old friend of mine) concerts.

Y’all come. Even if you don’t like Holst or Duruflé (and anybody who doesn’t like Duruflé is certifiable), the Chilcott set is lovely and unusual, and our encore piece (Martin, “The Awakening”) is a bit of purest ham-and-cheeseball faux uplift that I guarandamntee you will bring the house down.

I’m not going to code4lib 2006. I’m too lazy and I hate flying too much, that’s all there is to it.

But this schedule is astoundingly hard to resist. How often do conference-talk titles make you spit the beverage of your choice all over your keyboard? (No, I didn’t ruin my Kinesis, thanks to a swift and well-executed shove of my chair across my cube. But thanks a lot, Mr. Jim Robertson!) And they say techies have no sense of humor.

The conference will be structured much like DASER, and I quite liked the way DASER worked. If you’re an academic-library techie, I think you ought to give code4lib 2006 serious consideration.

I’m regretting not going. I really am. And I don’t often say that about conferences.

I caught a little flak in the comments to this post at Blue Skunk Blog for rudely thumbing my nose at ALA.

So let’s just burn a couple of homines straminei (erm, genitive plural… hominum stramineorum? that doesn’t seem quite right, somehow) before I go on.

ALA may not realize this and certainly has no incentive to acknowledge it, but they aren’t the only game in town for a professionally-active librarian. They’re not even an especially desirable organization to join for librarians with a techie bent, LITA or no LITA. Me, I’ll be happy to produce my nice new ASIST and VLA cards on request. (And before anybody asks, VLA is on trial. If they seem to be worth my money, I’ll stay a member. ASIST hooked me fair and square with DASER.)

I also write my congresscritters (CURES Act, do you hear me? it is a good thing; write your congresscritter now!) and funnel odd bits of money in the direction of Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both of whom do political work that is relevant to my professional interests. So I’m not over-pleased with the insinuation that I’m a professional and activist slacker merely because I told ALA to take a long walk off a short pier.

Let me fire that smelly fish back, shall I, then? In my experience, there is a not-insubstantial subset (mark me well, a subset: I don’t need piles of angry “but I’m not like that!” email) of ALA members who are essentially serving time. They need something to put in the “professional involvement” section of their résumé. They need conferences to go to, and aren’t any too picky about the subject matter. They need committees to serve on, and the less work they actually have to do, the better. They are passionless, uninteresting drifters, and (again, in my experience), ALA has got a lot of ’em.

It’s a turnoff. I could volunteer for a committee, but how do I know I won’t be stuck with a passel of drifters? How do I know the committee isn’t just make-work to begin with? If it isn’t, is the larger organization going to get out of the committee’s way, or in it? Are presenters doing a given conference because they’ve got something they’re dying to tell the rest of us, or because they’re coming up for review in six months and need conference cred?

(Curiously, the preconference tutorial I went to at ACRL vastly outshone any of the actual talks I saw there. Perhaps an artifact of the amount of work it takes to put together a three-hour tutorial versus a twenty-minute talk? If you’re a résumé padder, of course you try for the talk. I admit to a certain amount of bias here, though; I’m an odd duck in that I vastly prefer creating and delivering tutorials to talks. Not that I don’t like to run my mouth on any excuse, of course.)

I don’t blame ALA for attracting drifters. As the default, faute-de-mieux professional association for librarians, they could hardly do otherwise. But the drifters’ presence is another reason to hunt for other (likely smaller and more specialized) professional venues.

Doug Johnson of Blue Skunk Blog asked me in email what ALA could do to win me back. Fair question. Here’s a start toward some answers:

• A huge financial audit, specifically one that speaks to organizational efficiency. I saw Meredith’s numbers, and so did you. I want an explanation, and additional comparisons to similar organizations. (No, Walt, “lobbyists” is not answer enough; Meredith’s comparison organization has lobbyists too.)
• An organizational assessment, or whatever they’re calling it these days when you don your hip-waders and start digging around the organization to find and eliminate blockages and excess. ALA’s too big for its britches, as Meredith’s figures demonstrate.
• More multiplicity of voices, fewer bully pulpits. If Gorman’s vile and disgusting hip-hop comment had met with vociferous opposition (dare I say, actual censure?), I would feel much less jaundiced about ALA. Certain tentative steps in this direction are happening, but a tentative step is not exactly a stride.

• More concern for librarians, many of whom (lest we forget) do not work in libraries. That, or more openness about the organization’s aims. I know it’s the American Library (rather than Librarian) Association, but let’s face it—there’s a conflict of interest there. When librarian interests conflict with library interests (e.g. over salaries, librarian deprofessionalization, coddling vendors, or entry-level librarianship), I know whom the ALA sides with, and it ain’t me.

  If library schools stay fat and sassy despite a lack of jobs for graduates, and library administrators pay lousy salaries because even with lousy salaries they’re beating off applicants with sticks—ALA seems perfectly content. Well, I’m not.

  The flap over treatment of conference speakers speaks to this point also. I think I can be forgiven for thinking that ALA runs conferences and prints publications in order to siphon off yet more money from librarians and libraries to itself—not least because, as I said, their finances are bloated and opaque. And speaking of publications…

• Open access to ALA journals. Now. Immediately. I’m shocked and disgusted by ALA dragging its feet on this. They should have been first on the bandwagon; it’s their duty to set an example for other scholarly and professional societies to follow! (C&RL, which is going OA, is a start, but it’s not near enough.) Book publishing is a different animal altogether, and I don’t have a problem with paid writing staying paid, so I’m not calling for open access to books at this juncture. Unpaid writing in journals, though? Should be open-access. What better use could ALA put its money to?
• Noticeably less hostility to computers and the librarians and patrons who use, program, and value them. Gorman’s got a posse, you better believe. I’d prefer “no hostility,” of course, but I’m realistic.

That’s my answer. I invite fellow ALA defectors to offer other and better answers of their own.

Another thing, though, as long as I’m in rant-mode. I don’t buy the “I pay dues so that I’ve got the right to kvetch” argument, at least where ALA is concerned. ALA listens to dollars, not librarians; the response on the Council list to the speakers’ flap (detailed over at Meredith’s) says that loud and clear. Continuing to write them checks despite serious qualms about them positively deafens their ears to your words. It’s a speech act whose perlocutionary force is “ALA right or wrong!”

The eminently logical response from ALA? “Sure, they whine, but where they gonna go? They can whine all they want as long as the checks clear.”

Talk with your wallet and your feet instead. I have. If ALA wants me back, they’ll have to earn me.

Okay, LazyWeb, I need a Tomcat-over-OSX expert.

I have the same problem this guy posts about. I cannot for the life of me cut JBoss out of my OSX servers’ technology stack, much though I do not need it and wish it would go away and die quietly in a corner. Telling ServerAdmin not to use JBoss does absolutely nothing.

Is there something about configuring Apache or Tomcat that would solve this problem that I’m missing?