Caveat Lector

I have a low, vile, groundling sense of humor, so The Blogga Song hit me right on the funny bone. Ow. There should be a warning on it: Do Not Click If You Have A Presentation In Two Hours And Mustn’t Smear Your Makeup With Tears Of Laughter. (The picture of M-ch–l G-rm-n knocked me on the floor.)

It’s a distinct honor to have been included, by the way. Awards, yeah, fine, whatever. What’s an A-list and why do I care about it? I know I’ve arrived (whatever that means), though, when I make it into The Blogga Song.

I get all nervous about CavLec sometimes, because it’s getting quoted in places I never really expected or intended it to be quoted in. The dominant style I’ve settled into here is fine on its own surrounded by itself, but take a snippet outside the sandbox and it’s all too likely to sound more flippant, confrontational, or angry than I meant. This is not a plea or an accusation; it’s just something I’m going to have to learn to live with one way or another.

That by and large my intemperate language is taken in good part is evidenced by my presence in The Blogga Song. It’s a reassuring thing to know.

And speaking of intemperate language…

This is Rachel Singer Gordon. And this is Rachel Singer Gordon getting it right about librarianship as a profession. We’re gaily eating our young now, and we need to stop it immediately if not sooner.

That said, an LIS student’s squib from Michael Stephens’s survey progress report (and if you’re a librarian and you haven’t taken the survey, please do) disturbed me slightly:

I see people like Michael Stephens, Jenny Levine, and Stephen Abrams making the professional circuit at this conference and that but…what about us? What about your future colleagues? Why aren’t you people talking to LIS students?

Goes two ways, chela. There’s nothing stopping you from talking to us. Walt Crawford and I were happily sparring long before I graduated library school. Pick your favorite guru and send an email. Won’t kill you. Likely to make you stronger. If you have a mind for pop-management books, call it an “informational interview.”

Also, find out which of your favorite bloggers or IMers or whatever live in your area, then ask your professors to invite them as guest speakers. I’m doing a guest-speaking gig up in College Park next month. I’m always happy for another chance to run my mouth about stuff that matters to me, and I’m also happy to help mint more repository rats and digital librarians.

The reason that snippet bothered me is that I see a thread in the “improve library schools now!” blog conversation that also bothers me. Library schools are not and cannot be one-stop shops for every single conceivable skill that’s useful in a library. Every library-school student should expect to pick up more skills, should expect to continue learning. Your library school is not for spoon-feeding. Root, hog, or die.

Those of us (and I include myself) who think that curricula in library schools need to be expanded have a duty to discuss also where they should contract. This is a lot harder to talk about, because we’ll inevitably step on toes. But it’s absolutely necessary, and the honorable thing to do, because a two-year (at most) program is all about curricular compromise.

So I don’t recommend just tossing off “they need to teach databases!” without talking about what they’re teaching now that they can reasonably dispense with. If that means coming head to head with M-ch–l G-rm-n and his cataloguing kick, so be it.

Even if he goes on like the stone-cold blogga-hata he is.

I’m sure there’s no good way to find out that your cat has hurled on your favorite chair.

Some ways, however, are worse than others. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Got another email today from a soon-to-be ex-grad-student. She sounds like she’s going to be okay, and I do not just say that because I like it when people tell me that reading my story helped them. Some of the people I hear from, I worry about—not that there’s a whole lot I can do for them. Her, I am not so much with the worrying.

Last week at work, a colleague stopped by my cube and was kind enough to examine the Wall O’ Diplomas (for which I thoughtfully designated the wall that someone coming into my cube is least likely to look at). He asked me about my history, and I used one of my usual terms for my first try at grad school: “crapping out.” When my colleague looked dubious, I amplified to “crashed and burned.”

“So there wasn’t any problem with the department?” he asked.

“Oh, the department was hell,” I said.

“Then it wasn’t you just crashing and burning,” he said, in the tone of one who is settling the question.

Gotta love that. There isn’t enough of it.

I find myself re-evaluating what stance toward academia I can take that would be most helpful for the people I care about—and to be perfectly clear for those who aren’t already trying to straighten out ears I’ve bent on the subject, that’s people who are trying to disentangle themselves from graduate school struggling with feelings of failure and hopelessness. I don’t give the tiniest wraith of an echo of a damn for the institution of graduate school. I want to limit the damage done to attriters, is all.

(I have been mistaken for a reformer. I’m not one. I actually despair of reform.)

Pretending nothing happened to me is pointless. No, harmful; the email I get announces with force and clarity that people in those straits value a story that feels like theirs. And even as the damage is healed and the worst of the memories recede, it would be foolish of me to rewrite my life story to minimize or obscure those four and a half years and their aftermath. Everything changed about me because of them, so much that I have trouble imagining what I might have been otherwise.

I like to jostle people out of their notions about attriters. I use the terms I do about my experience partly because they’re the bare truth, but also because I can say them with a great big cognitive-dissonance-causing grin. This is good for people in the middle of the maelstrom who can’t imagine ever smiling about it. It’s also good for people who sneer at everyone who’s been battered by the rapids. It’s a lot harder to sneer at someone who refuses to look appropriately shamefaced.

But dangers lurk on the other side of the equation, too. As I start settling into my new career, getting comfortable, picking up a few successes (and I landed a conference proposal and a book chapter last week, so I’m doing okay here), I can imagine being slotted into the “rule-proving exception” cubby. You know. The person who succeeds despite not playing by the advancement rules. The one they whisper about… “well, you know, she didn’t finish grad school; isn’t it great she got so far?”

At its worst, this constructs me as the baby with the caul, the charmed life. Either I’d be thought of as too good to fail (unlike your ordinary schmo, who’d better hustle through that dissertation), or it’d only be a lucky accident that I am where I am.

I don’t hold with either of those constructions of my story, because they’re flatly untrue, and they’re just not useful. Nothing charmed about me (and certainly nothing charming), and I’m nobody’s notion of genius aflower, either. And the people I want to reach don’t need a fairy-godparented orphan girl or a pedestaled hero; they need a scabby-kneed urchin with a gap-toothed grin to look them in the eye and invite them into the street to play.

It’s a weird road to walk sometimes. I don’t always do it with grace, which should surprise no one, as I can’t achieve grace consistently, or often at all. I do find that it helps to know why I construct it the way I do, though.

Did my taxes today, with the able assistance of TurboTax Online, which has basically hooked me for life. This was an ugly complicated tax year, what with the move and the new job and the house sale and the business taxes and the everything else. I was done in about three hours. That’s impressive. Would have taken me three days on paper.

I had to hop over to my ex-mortgage company’s website because I couldn’t find my interest statement. (My fault. I know they sent it to me; I remember seeing it.) “Paid in full,” announced the account page as soon as I logged in.

Paid. In. Full. If that hasn’t got the nicest ring to it.

Housing prices in this area continue to bear zero resemblance to reason. Walking up from campus to meet David for his birthday dinner, I snagged flyers from two townhouses on the market less than a block apart. $434K on one, $660K on the other, which has an extra bedroom and a garage but is otherwise quite similar. Are a bedroom and garage worth nearly two hundred thousand dollars? I sure as heck don’t think so.

Even better, there’s another one a few doors down from the $434K one, identical square footage and beds/baths… for $549K. Been on the market a couple-three months, that one has. Can’t imagine why it hasn’t sold.

Bah. Glad to be renting, meeting my rent without difficulty, out of debt, and staying way the heck away from this crazy nutjob housing market.

I’m wrong so often that every once in a while I like to point out when the clock stops at my part of the dial.

So.

I said this about the Google digitization project. And then additional evidence emerged.

And now Jessamyn confirms it with a link over here.

I’ll be blunt. The digital files that Google is going to produce are crap, not ebooks. They’re not one-tenth as readable as even a bare-bones Project Gutenberg ASCII. They substitute for a properly-designed ebook (never mind a print book) in roughly the same way that a moldy bottle of off-brand spaghetti sauce substitutes for a six-course meal at a five-star Italian restaurant.

Could publishers please grow the you-know-what up now? And perhaps develop a wee bit of appreciation for text artisanry?

My new adaptor got here finally. I plugged it in, booted Nova, and chewed my fingernails until I could finally look at the little power icon in the top right corner.

Which showed a cute little plug, indicating charging action. Yay!

I am doubly relieved because when I got home today the Silver Surfer had what my grandmother calls a “senior moment,” refusing to find grub and get going on loading an operating system. Eventually the Surfer decided to fsck itself, quarantined some bad sectors, and was fine afterwards, so I daresay the hard drive’s nearing the end of the line.

Gosh, I’m glad to have Nova back.

Open Access News spread the word today that the first Report on the NIH Public Access Policy (’ware really intensely grotty PDF) is out.

Compliance rate? A desperately pathetic 3.8%. Three point eight percent of the literature that was eligible for archiving under this policy actually got archived.

You begin to see what repository rats are up against? The NIH did its level best to communicate the policy to researchers, and they’re decently competent at outreach. As far as I know, publishers didn’t spread much FUD among researchers. Even so, a big fat nothing happened, because the policy had no teeth and researchers don’t understand and don’t care about the economics or socioinformatics of publishing.

I part ways with Stevan Harnad on a lot, but he’s dead right about one thing at least: if researchers don’t have to provide open access, they mostly won’t. I can cajole and jolly and educate and reason with them all I want, but I won’t have nearly the impact of a policy with teeth. We can’t coddle researchers on this; it’s tantamount to coddling Elseviley Verlag.

Fortunately, it looks as though the NIH policy is likely to sprout teeth. Because of that, I’m actually not at all saddened that this particular spaghetti-strand didn’t stick when thrown at the wall. We now have cogent evidence that “voluntary” open-access policies aren’t worth spit. That removes a fairly big pillar that Elseviley Verlag likes to hide behind.

It’s official; I’m going to Computers in Libraries 2006. Yay for local conferences, and getting in on MPOW’s group rate.

I may pop in and out depending on how much work I have to do (and a dumptruck just stopped at my desk), but I’ll try to make as many sessions as possible involving fellow bloggers. And may I say that whoever put the Content Management, Digital Libraries, and Digital Planning tracks against each other needs to be taken out for summary execution?

Faute de mieux, I am currently marshaling the bibliobloggers’ dinners. I thought plural would be a good idea, as CiL should attract a hefty complement of bloggers. If you’re coming, please go write your name on the wiki, so I can call restaurants and arrange reservations. And if you’re willing to take over arrangements for one or more dinners (especially Thursday’s), please go say so on the wiki! I will be your friend for life.

I had a post half-done on some good stuff out of the latest Serials Librarian, but my browser ate it. I’d redo it on Nova the PowerBook, which is back from the shop, except that my AC adaptor was causing the problem to begin with and is still non-functional, which means another few days’ wait until I get a new one.

I’d tell y’all about the triumphs of today’s meetings except there weren’t any; and I’d rattle on about Valentine’s Day except my husband is going off to Persian class, and, well…

… the truth is I’m in such a filthy mood (and for no good reason, either, which only makes it filthier) that I’m going to settle back with the chocolates my husband kindly left for me and pretend the rest of y’all don’t actually exist for a while.

You don’t, right? Because you’re all virtual and stuff. Well, I hope all of you virtual peeps are in a better mood than I am.

Joe Duemer wants to know if I have any images of famous people in my workspace.

I have my graduation picture in my cube, and that’s got Tammy Baldwin in it. That’s, um, it for real people.

If we add famous fictional characters, I do a little better. The Don and Sancho are present, as is Mighty Plush Cthulhu. Aragorn stares moodily from a Banned Books Week bookmark, and Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon strides out of another library-themed bookmark.

Other than that, I’ve got a tiger and a lot of penguins on some posters, which I put up to keep people from ragging me about how bare of decoration my work cube is. If I had my druthers, I’d have an orangutan, just to remind myself to be humble and keep a sense of humor, but I haven’t found an orang poster I like yet. Eventually I believe I’ll have a Bibliomedusa, but the artist from whom I have commissioned same is still plugging away at his rendition thereof.

Was that edifying?