Caveat Lector

Karen G. Schneider asks two provocative questions:

• Provocative questions #1: are women less willing to do what it takes to get to a conference, get recognized, get published? As a group, are we shy about being Shameless Hussies?
• Provocative questions #2: are they-what-does-the-pickin’ less likely to recognize women for their ability to contribute to current issues? Is the bar set higher for women? (Note how I didn’t single out one gender here.)

I tell y’all what, I never expected to apply these two CavLec categories to the same post. Going into a woman-dominated profession, woo-hoo! Surely that’s an escape from the tech-boy locker room!

Yeah. Not so much.

It doesn’t help to be in a profession with a deep-rooted distrust of technology, to begin with. Like it or not, this profession attracts a lot of technophobes, and they tend to be pretty shrill about it, and they’re not unlikely to be in positions of power (hello, Mr. G-rm-n). A friend of mine at JCDL who came to librarianship from IT had an appallingly hard time finding work. She’s smart, capable, and trained, so what happened? Distrust, if you ask me. Technogeeks aren’t real librarians, don’t you know; we’re there to be targets for the aggro that everyone else displaces from the machines on their desks.

I’ve seen the weirdest and silliest jealousy from professional colleagues (not all female, I should say). I told the thirty-second version of my career story (”crapped out of grad school, worked in e-publishing and typesetting for a while, went to library school, am a librarian”) to some professional colleagues some time ago. “Going to library school? Not your smartest decision ever,” said one frankly.

Maybe not. But I knew what I was getting into, and I chose it, and for me it was the right choice. I didn’t say that, because I didn’t feel right questioning what my colleague felt about the field. I just said “Too late now,” and shrugged off the idea advanced by another colleague that I could have had a much more lucrative career in IT. (The hell I could. Non-IT people have very strange notions about what it takes to have an IT career—beating things with rocks doesn’t cut it, folks—not to mention how much an IT career actually pays these days.)

So there isn’t just a glass ceiling in librarianship (and there is a well-documented glass ceiling; this profession is majority female, but its administrators are majority male). There’s a glass wall, between women and systems librarianship. Subtle and not-so-subtle peer pressure telling us that them geeks, they’re Not Us.

Yeah, and how ’bout those geek guys, huh? Huh?

I’m going to pick on #code4lib, because there’s some vague hope they’ll forgive me. I’m not picking on them because they’re bad people. I’m picking on them because I think the story is illustrative of some dark corners in tech librarianship. #code4lib is an IRC channel for people who do things with computer code in libraries. It isn’t all MLS-holding librarians; it includes some straight-up coders sans MLS. It isn’t all men, either, though I can count female regulars (on the channel, at any rate; the affiliated mailing list has more female participation) on one hand.

So the #code4libbers decided ’round about last November or December or thereabouts that they were going to whomp up a little ol’ conference for themselves. In February. It happened, and the organizers were all very proud of themselves. Approximate ratio of men to women attendees, last I heard, was eight or nine to one. For a tech conference, not so bad, believe it or not. For a librarian conference, abysmal.

It doesn’t take active malice to marginalize women; simple thoughtlessness is often enough. I hope and believe spur-of-the-moment con organization isn’t widespread practice, because it’s a practice that excludes women. Like it or not, women generally have more household responsibilities than men, and are significantly less able to drop everything for a spur-of-the-moment con. (I can, mind you, but I’m childfree. My husband is more than competent to take care of himself and the Goths.) Librarianship can’t fix what goes on in librarians’ homes, but librarianship can and should work around it. That means plenty of notice for cons.

But hey, it gets better. I have the chat transcript for the episode I’m about to recount, though I don’t mean to share it unless I am accused of lying. (Which has been known to happen to other bloggers in similar circumstances.)

In the course of conference planning, a thoughtlessly sexist joke headline went up on the conference web page. It was called to the attention of a male code4libber by his female boss. He came to the IRC channel to complain, and to do him credit, he was honestly unhappy for reasons other than having been embarrassed in front of her.

He was stonewalled. Pushed back at, hard. “So what, they aren’t letting you go anyway.” (I couldn’t make that one up if I tried.) “I think it’s in how you look at it.” (Um, yeah.) “I don’t think personally it is that extreme.” (Someone’s boss did. But she’s a woman, so, um, what, she doesn’t count?) “Umm, are you on drugs, dude?” (Again with the I couldn’t make this up.)

And I was there for the whole thing, and I spoke up briefly in support of the guy complaining, and nobody paid me two hoots’ worth of attention. The headline was, however, changed. Under protest.

So that’s what we deal with, you know what I’m saying? I left code4lib not long after that. I had a long, angry CavLec post all ready for the ether, but I held it until after the con because my loyalties were divided—hell yeah I am a feminist, and hell yeah I will say so; but I am also a library technologist, and I thought that con was an important step, and I wanted to see it succeed. I was torn.

My absence was noticed. People emailed me about it. I was pretty frank. Eventually, I was enticed back, and for the most part, people have cut out the crap (that being hardly the first instance of random sexist stupidity I’d witnessed there). So the post’s sat in my draft queue ever since. Trust me, this version? Is highly condensed and bowdlerized.

Yeah. So my answer to Karen’s question one is: hell yes we are unwilling to put up with this garbage if it’s the price of visibility. And that’s our problem? I think not. We need to move the focus off women’s behavior (which is generally damn logical and reasonable, you ask me) and onto the environments that women are not finding congenial.

I am not a shameless hussy. I damn well shouldn’t have to be, either.

Question two is a good one, and thanks to Karen for asking it and to Jane for seconding it louder than a whisper. Rather than answer it, I’d rather focus on what we can do about it. Call it a good old-fashioned consciousness-raising.

I’m on the programming committee for the next code4libcon. First thing on the to-do list was lining up potential keynoters. So what’d I do? I stacked the deck, hell yes I did—of thirteen candidates, seven are women. Did it work? Of the current top three vote-getters, one is a woman (and yeah, she was one of my nominees). We’re looking at two, maybe three keynotes, so the odds look good.

We can stack the odds. If we care, we have to, because damn straight these geek guys aren’t gonna do it for us. If you’re shy, you don’t even have to put yourself forward. We can talk each other up. We should. And we need to resist every temptation to cut each other down; “united we stand” and all that fun stuff.

The other thing we need to do is get over this “I’m not techie enough!” fixation that a lot of us have (and yeah, I’m prone to it too). One of my good friends won’t go anywhere near #code4lib—not because I’ve complained about the atmosphere, but because “I’m not techie enough.” C’mon. Techies are just people. Just librarians, some of ’em. If we don’t knock the rough edges off ’em, who’s going to? If we don’t learn from them, where will we learn? If we don’t join them, who will?

So. There’s my story, and there are my thoughts, and there are my recommendations. How about yours?

My husband knows what to get for his geeky wife. Full first season of Babylon 5 on DVD, squee!

“How’d you know I wanted that?” I asked him.

He laid a finger beside his nose. “Psi-Corps training,” he said.

Heh. That’s my man, that is.

I took the day off from work in hopes of hitting a few museums downtown, or perhaps the zoo, but since the sudden transfer of the Pantanal to the eastern seaboard created a tremendous transit mess in DC today, better I should stay home and pontificate a bit.

I’ve been thinking about my adventures with whuffie. I don’t have as much as I once did, which in itself is a lesson: whuffie is context-dependent, and if the context disintegrates, you can’t always transfer its whuffie to another context. Nobody in libraryland actually cares that I used to be a content and standards developer for ebooks. That’s just the way it goes, with whuffie. Clinging to stale, outdated whuffie only makes you look outdated (and dumb enough to be unaware of it) yourself.

You can also outgrow old whuffie. I took a freelance job that was offered me based on my old ebook whuffie; I said “no” to it several times because that just wasn’t where my heart was any more… but finally I said yes (being nervous about the whole no-job-yet thing), and I shouldn’t have, and it hasn’t worked out well for reasons having nothing to do with them and everything to do with me. The last few pieces of the experience have been so disheartening that I have an invoice for them that’s been hanging fire for months because I don’t have the cojones to send it.

A lesson I should have learned faster than I did is that while being sought out for your whuffie is nifty and flattering, it isn’t always salubrious. I shouldn’t have taken the job Steve Potash offered me; it was offered solely on the basis of my ebook whuffie. Steve didn’t have any plans for me—he didn’t even really know me—and I didn’t have any (practicable) plans for OverDrive. While the whole trainwreck had a lot less to do with Steve than with my inability to cope productively with the horrendously vicious micromanager he had running his conversion department, it wouldn’t have happened at all if I’d been smarter.

So I’m telling you: when you get a neat offer, find out why it’s been offered. Secondhand whuffie, the “I’ve heard of you!” syndrome, is insufficient reason to accept, even (perhaps especially) if you’re desperate. Mismatched expectations (on both sides) make huge messes.

To make that concrete—I’m cool when somebody says “I’ve been reading CavLec for ages, and love it!” Anybody who can read CavLec for years and still like me pretty much has to be my kind of person. No comment on whether my kind of person is a good person or a bad person—you’ll assuredly find folks who’ll take either side of that question. But my kind of person isn’t likely to be shocked rigid at sight of me, or put off by my general style, or wholly unaware of my take on things. My kind of person and I are likely to get along famously and do good things for each other.

“You were recommended to me by X,” however, needs a little work. Did this person actually check me out? What does s/he actually know about me? Is s/he just looking for a warm body with basic articulatory skills? (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing in whuffie-driven academic librarianship; I just like to know first.) Fundamentally, am I there because I know something, or because my name supposedly lends lustre? I distrust the latter motivation. Your mileage may vary.

One positive about academic conferences is that the review process dilutes the role of whuffie in the system. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to have a big name when you’re submitting a paper proposal—but it doesn’t count for everything, either. A good paper by a relative nobody can and does get heard.

In a way it’s rather nice to be starting over again on the whuffie scale. I can be reasonably certain that such offers as I get these days are genuine, and the friends I am making in the profession will be my friends a long time. I do have a couple-three friends from ebook days still, but a lot of those relationships, I now see, were superficial at best.

So be careful of whuffie. It occasionally bites.

When I got off the bus yesterday, I met David coming back to the apartment. “What are you doing out in the hot-hot?” I asked.

He looked abashed. “Buying things,” he said. “Um, things you don’t know about… okay?”

“Okay,” I said cheerfully, knowing how these things go.

“I think you’ve had a cake every year, even if it was only a store-bought one,” he mused as we came up to the door of our building.

“I don’t mind store-bought ones,” I reassured him. “Especially when it’s this hot.”

“Well, I don’t care if it’s hot,” he said stubbornly. Ah. Homemade cake, then. He’s so cute.

Something there is that does not love a 34-year-old librarian, because a half-hour after my birthday started an epic thunderstorm woke me up. What terrible upheaval this presages I know not—but I’ll manage one way or another.

In the meantime, the Goths are playing with the string of my birthday balloon. We shall have to get them balloons of their own when it’s their birthday.

I completely ran out of verbs today. Couldn’t come up with a one. Other than “to be,” that is, and my high-school English teachers beat into me with sticks that too much “to be” is a bad thing.

I hate formal writing like poison. When will I get this bloody chapter done?!

On the plus side, one door shut and another opened—the last feeler I got for a command performance fizzled out yesterday, but I got another nibble today. Aside from writing, life is good, even at the brink of 34-dom.

Yesterday I started my workday on one of MPOW’s other campuses, owing to a meeting with someone who wanted library-related information about a new project. (I am, as usual, being deliberately vague, because I don’t know how much information should be let roam free at this point.)

The meeting turned out to be an object lesson in the deceptions of linguistic register. From the emails sent me by the man I was to meet, I envisioned a formal, middle-aged professorial sort. The man I met was a smart, fresh-faced, enthusiastic youngster. I figure I’ve got ten or twelve years on him. Age and wiles, you know?

But I remember writing over-formal emails to my elders at his age. Hell, I still do it, if I’m scared enough. It turned out to be a fun, relaxed meeting about an extremely cool project that I think has good chances for success. If I helped it along, I’m happy.

It does give one to wonder, though, what he thought he’d be meeting. Probably not an ugly awkward elephant of a woman with a ridiculously deep voice and puppy-doggish enthusiasm about ’most everything. Somehow that’s not what people expect.

A blogger friend of mine confessed that she’d been afraid of meeting me; she’d magnified me into some kind of unholy fusion of Dorothy Parker and a buzz saw. (Dorothy Parker? In what bizarro universe?) I can’t imagine being afraid of meeting me. Does not compute. I’m so incredibly harmless that if I were any more harmless harm would stick to me like the opposite pole of a magnet. I’m just that harmless.

But… okay… if all somebody knows of me is the pigheaded rants on CavLec… I guess I can understand a dash of apprehension. Who wants to meet somebody capable of nothing but pigheaded rants?

I don’t think I was quite so much the pigheaded ranter when I was younger. Not, well, pigheaded enough. I daresay that I occasionally gave people the same turn that young man gave me, though; if nothing else about me is formidable, my vocabulary is, and always has been.

Eh, well. There are worse fates for him than to grow into someone like me, I will make bold to say. I may be turning into an old jade (thirty-four on Friday!), but I’m not turning jaded, and that’s what counts.

In honor of the DSpace 1.4 beta release today… Ever tried to Google something that you know is in a DSpace repository?

Yeah. I’m rolling my eyes too. The title that you get in your Google results reads: “DSpace: Item 1492/37.” Which tells you precisely nothing.

Fortunately, fixing this is an easy hack (now that I know how; it took me an hour and six Internal Server Errors to figure it out for myself, because my Java is just that bad). Pull up display-item.jsp. (The copy in your local folder, because you’re too smart to edit the default JSPs directly, right?)

Add the following line to the declarations near the top:

<%@ page import="org.dspace.content.DCValue" %>

Delete or comment out the following:

    String title = "";
    if (handle != null)
    {
        title = "Item " + handle;
    }
    else
    {
        title = "Workspace Item";
    }

Replace it with the following two lines:

DCValue[] titleValue = item.getDC(”title”, null, item.ANY);
String title = titleValue[0].value;

    DCValue[] titleValue = item.getDC(”title”, null, item.ANY);
    String title = “”;
    if (titleValue.length != 0)
    {
    	title = titleValue[0].value;
    }
    else
    {
    	title = “Workspace Item”;
    }

This relies on DSpace requiring a title for every item, which out-of-the-box DSpace does. If you’ve hacked your DSpace not to require a title, you should probably tell DSpace to fall back to the handle if the title is null.

I’ve got this running on my test server, and it’ll migrate to the production server shortly.

ETA: Bug, which the above non-deleted code fixes. A workspace item for which a title had not yet been established was causing Internal Server Errors. Shows what you get if you trust me to hack DSpace—though I will say in my own defense that this hack didn’t make it to the production server until I’d found and fixed the bug.

Reputation, distance; consistency and change; perspective; these are a few of the themes running through my head after a week with my dad and at a conference with people I now consider friends. (Not that I didn’t like them before, but for whatever semantic or sociological reason it is easier to attach the “friend” label to someone I’ve shaken hands with.)

I got from DC to Raleigh via the good offices of someone who lives locally and was driving down to JCDL anyway. I was (and still am) fully prepared to split the cost of a tank of gas, but I wasn’t asked to. It so happens that not long ago I was involved in getting the driver a new (and so far, better) job.

My involvement, mind you, consisted of a bit of serendipity (the job is repository-related and the employer got in touch with me first) and two or three emails. That was it. Honestly. Anybody would have done the same thing. I do understand, though, that from the other side that transaction looks a bit different—quite a bit more momentous—and so right or wrong, I wasn’t quite prepared to insist.

When we got to my house, we stuck around for a bit so that the driver could figure out directions to his hotel. That important task accomplished, he asked for a tour of the back yard, whose water-gardens and vined trellises and profusion of plantings represent thirty years of my parents’ labor. I hauled my stuff to my old bedroom, got whacked a couple times by psycho-puss, and went out back to see what was going on, in case my friend needed rescue from one of my dad’s hallmark political tirades.

Which he, um, did. I grew up with my dad. I know how he behaves. Some things don’t change. I was expecting another get-rich-quick scheme; I heard all about the latest one at Sunday lunch after the tutorial. I was expecting fulminations against his former place of work; I got ’em. I was expecting status-conscious praise; shortly before I left, Dad told me that he’d never imagined I’d be doing what I am, but he’s proud that I’m in the forefront of my profession.

I’m not. I’m not even in the forefront of my niche in the profession. How could I be, a year in? It’s not even a goal of mine. Kicking Elseviley Verlag’s butt to the curb, that’s a goal of mine (though if Springer keeps pulling stuff like this, I may have to apologize abjectly to Jan Velterop and find myself another bit of shorthand slang). Putting scholarly publishing and archiving on a sounder footing, that’s a goal of mine. More usable electronic texts, that’s a goal of mine. Fame, fortune, honorary degrees? Not so much.

And as for his imagination, he never once imagined me anything but a tenured university professor at a Research I. I daresay he’s trumping up my status to console himself for his deep disappointment in me. But if playing silly-buggers with my career helps him, I won’t argue it with him. I said “thank you” and shut up.

Funny thing is, couple days into the conference, my friend said to me, “Your dad—he’s a really cool guy!” Which put a new spin on things entirely. Maybe my dad isn’t the problem. Maybe his too-easily-embarrassed kid is the problem.

The day after the conference ended, another new friend emailed me to invite me to a party. Dad talked her into town over the phone when she got a little lost. So she and I went to the party, and we hit a comics shop and a coffee-dessert place afterwards, and I at least had a wonderful time. Dad didn’t say word one against it, though it was my last night in town. And she, too, complimented me on having a cool dad.

On the train trip home, I occupied two-thirds of my brain with Willinsky and Benkler and let the other third wander about considering how Dad and I are perhaps more alike than I like to let on, both for good and ill. And how he’s not such a bad guy. And how a little outside perspective is a good re-evaluation tool.

And things like that.

JCDL 2006 has closed, though there’s a “metadata party” tonight that I will probably be attending. This has very much been a “get looked over” conference for me—a lot of people wanting to meet me, doubtless to reassure themselves I’m not an axe-wielding maniac. Since I’m not, I don’t worry. Much.

The papers I liked best fell into a category I have just invented that I am (for the next five minutes) calling “technical ethnography.” (Technography? Ethnographic techosophy? I dunno.) Essentially, it’s technological insight acquired via observation of human behavior.

(Rather than bog-standard survey work, which I am really starting to loathe, especially as presented at conferences. Hey, presenters of bog-standard survey work? Don’t tell us about your methodology; we already know how surveys function. Don’t do a lit review during the presentation; if you’re talking about something of interest to us, we’ve already read the papers, and if we haven’t, we can read your bibliography. Tell us why we care about yet another bog-standard survey, then tell us what you found out from it, especially if it’s cool or anti-intuitive. Then shut up and let us ask questions. Honestly, though, if I ever run a conference survey work will be relegated to poster sessions, period. In passing, do ARL libraries have to hire a Survey Librarian just to answer all the bog-standard surveys they get?)

Anyway, the conference Clever Boots award goes to the guys who bootstrapped name-disambiguation software for Citeseer (which desperately needs name disambiguation; I loathe Citeseer metadata more than I can even begin to tell you) with the observation that people cite themselves. That’s just bloody brilliant, is what that is. Human behavior informing a technological solution to a metadata problem. Love it.

I also liked the winning student paper, about PDA software for specimen identification in the wild via cleverly-implemented dichotomous keys with a side order of easily-accessed photos and drawings. I want an EcoPod for hiking, I do—and that’s what’s brilliant about it. It ties into a basic hiker desire: “hey, what a cool critter! what is it?” Ethnographic technosophy, again.

The winning non-student paper both amused and frustrated me. Carl Lagoze talked about the National Science Digital Library, and how it was believed that the Magic Metadata Fairy would use OAI-PMH to build a beautiful searchable garden of science, and how everyone ended up with an ugly, weed-choked, cracked-asphalt vacant lot instead.

This? Should not be news. There is no Magic Metadata Fairy, any more than there are Magic Editing and Typesetting Fairies in publishing. Metadata is an artisan’s job. If you want artisanry, pay an artisan, damn it.

Does that mean never accepting author-created metadata? Nope. But it means accepting that much author-created metadata is going to be crap, and building workflows that proceed from that assumption. Lordy, people, I was writing about this back in 2003, and now it wins conference paper awards?

I’ll be blunt. The solution for NSDL’s problem is hiring cataloguers, or metadata librarians, or indexers/abstracters, or whatever you want to call ’em, to clean up the incoming garbage. Ideally, OAI-PMH would be a two-way protocol, so that nice cleaned-up metadata made its way back to the repository that had spewed the garbage in the first place. That, however (despite all the jaw-flapping about frameworks that went on during JCDL) does not seem to be in the offing. It should be.

Yes, this is feasible; your cleanup artisans aren’t creating records from scratch, and existing cleanup algorithms can be run before they see the data they’ll be correcting. (Not to mention that their presence will improve your cleanup algorithms no end.) Besides, a lot of records will be okay to begin with.

The other answer, discussed during JCDL, is lowering the technical barrier to participation so that participants can focus more on metadata quality. This is good and I’m all for it; let’s just not pretend that it’ll solve the problem, is all. Most metadata sucks. Learn to work around that inconvenient fact.

This and other JCDL tech-ethnography got me pondering my own ethnographic inquiries. I think (along with many others, I should say) that a lot of the problem with attracting faculty contribution to IRs resides in the “this is not part of our normal workflow” problem. I would personally love to offer services that insinuated the IR into that workflow, but without some ethnography, I’m not sure what those services should be.

My sense is that a research-collaboration aid would help a lot. Such an aid would look a lot like a networked hard drive with bolted-on access controls. Researchers need somewhere to stash all the digital stuff they accumulate while they’re working on something—research results, downloaded literature, datasets, digitized stuff, Endnote citations, drafts and so on. They need to let their collaborators in and keep everybody else (except me, of course) out. The beautiful part is that if I’m in ultimate control of that drive, then it’s trivial for me to pick up the preprint or the publisher’s galleys for deposit into the IR.

Anybody want to go halfsies on an investigation into researchers’ digital workflows?

The Greenstone guys are the runners-up for the Clever Boots award; several excellent and useful demos of cool things to do with Greenstone. I dearly wish the Greenstone-DSpace integration project would hurry up and finish, because I’m dog-tired of coming under attack for DSpace’s UI ugliness and inflexibility.

JCDL 2006 was a solid conference. I doubt I’ll be flying to Vancouver for the next one, but it’s definitely on my list of conferences I’ll happily consider when they’re in my general vicinity.

My parents have a cat. Her name is Gigi, and she is completely psychotic. All cats can manage baleful stares when the occasion warrants, but Gigi goes all the way beyond baleful to bileful. When she stares at you, you stay stared at.

She’s a handsome animal, a gray Persian, but don’t be tempted by that soft fur. She whacks any hand that gets near her unless it’s got a cat-treat in it.

But I’m not deprived of cat-affection. In addition to psycho-kitty, there is Neighbor Bob the tuxedo-cat. Bob is not my parents’ cat, but my parents feed him. He doesn’t live in my parents’ house, but can usually be found outside. He is delighted to hold a conversation with me while I pet him… and yesterday, I sat down on the front steps to scratch his somewhat misshapen head, and damn if he didn’t just crawl right into my lap and make himself at home.

I miss the Goth-kitties, but I’m just fickle enough to enjoy Neighbor Bob’s company.