Caveat Lector

So I’ve got this one collection that the sponsoring body doesn’t want people idly browsing. (Yes, the items are already off-limits, but even the browse pages are spoilerrific.) Okay, um, maybe I can hack the JSP, let me see… yes, I can. Grab the collection handle, test it against the proscribed collection, if it’s the proscribed collection kill the browse links. Easy-peasy.

(Yes, I know that smart people could hand-construct a browse URL, and the items can still be picked out of all-of-DSpace browses. If anyone’s willing to work that hard, fine. When I told the collection sponsor this, he was fine with it too.)

Except. It. Didn’t. Work. It didn’t kill DSpace. It didn’t break anything. It just plain didn’t work.

WTF?

In any decent language, my first attempt at the if clause would have worked:

<% if (handle == "1234/5678") { %>

But this is Java, which regards decency toward programmers as a matter for its inferiors, so we can’t use ==; we have to use the .equals method on the string. Oh, and heaven forbid the incorrect == syntax should, you know, fire an error or anything, because of course Real Programmers never need to know where they’ve screwed up. Silent failure will be just peachy.

For the record, though, <% if (handle.equals("1234/5678")) { %> worked fine, and the collection is now off-limits to casual browsing.

Java. Is. Teh. EEEEEEVIL!

I just got added to the book-review panel for a newish journal, during which process I learned a thing or two.

One: gee, it wasn’t hard! I saw a call for reviewers, looked over their list of books, emailed the review editor my CV with a link to my HigherEdBlogCon paper as a writing sample, and that was that—I was in. My first book to review (and a couple-three bloggers’ ears should be burning right now) is coming in the mail as soon as the review editor gets it.

The length and time limits on reviews are such that I’ve got three weeks to write a typical CavLec blogpost (minus the typical CavLec snark and sentence fragmentation) on each book. I can do that. Thinking about it, I realized that the snobs who decry bloggery for its brevity aren’t considering an awful lot of writing forms and venues in which brevity is a virtue.

Two: The open-access situation in library-related journals is bad, but not hopeless. Almost none are gold, but plenty are green. ALA, for example, offers two licenses for its divisional journals and newsletters, one of which (the “license agreement”) leaves copyright with the author. Putting my repository-rat hat on, I note that the other one (the “assignment agreement”) appears to forbid placement of material in institutional or disciplinary repositories, and so I urge folks to use the license agreement.

Haworth is green. Elsevier is green. Emerald is green. That plus ALA is a big whacking lot of US library journals right there. So if you’re writing in these venues, but you’re not using your local institutional repository, E-LIS, or DLIST, you should be. No excuses. Just do it.

I looked this up because I have obvious ethical and career concerns about contributing my work to journals that are passively or actively working against open access. I absolutely wouldn’t contribute to an Elsevier journal despite its greenness, for instance, because Elsevier is lobbying the living daylights out of Congress to keep FRPAA from passing. Nor I won’t contribute to a journal that yoinks my copyright and leaves me nothing, neither—but a green journal is all right with me; I don’t require gold.

(If anybody’s got a good list of the anti-FRPAA lobby and its contributors, I’d surely like to see it.)

Three: Walt Crawford’s First Have Something to Say should be on the desk of every librarian who wants or needs to publish but is nervous or lacking in clue about it. This short, reassuring volume systematically treats publishing venues, guidelines for different kinds of writing, the roles that librarians can fill in addition to authoring, how to get started before you’ve made your name, and how to avoid publication pitfalls. I was particularly gratified to see a chapter on speaking, since I still think that a neglected skill in librarianship.

It’s written in Walt’s kindest and most approachable style. Regular blog-readers (of his blog or many others) will feel immediately at home with it. It’s also notably honest; Walt isn’t afraid to explain where his knowledge ends or where he differs from received wisdom. I picked up MPOW’s copy of the book, but I am inclined to grab one for myself when I next have a few spare shekels.

No, this isn’t the kind of review I’m going to write for the journal—but y’all are my friends, so naturally I write differently for you. Ignore my non-leet reviewing skillz and go pick up the book, hm?

Thanks to the indefatigable Open Access News, I now know about and subscribe to two Spanish-language blogs on open access. It’s indescribably gratifying to see word getting out.

OA News also posted details about a blowup at the Canadian Medical Association Journal that led to a new open-access journal with a similar theme. To me, this points to another reason to expect the scales to tilt slowly but surely in favor of open access: journal churn.

Journals fail. New journals rise. Journals get bought and sold. Journals move. Journals break apart because of editorial dissension. Every time this happens, there’s another opportunity for a new (or newly-) open-access publication. It’s not even necessary that a journal go gold, though I’m certainly not against that and it does seem to be happening more frequently these days. Whenever a journal changes hands, someone reviews editorial policy, which is an opportunity for journals to go green, either by allowing self-archiving when it wasn’t previously permitted or by making self-archiving rights more explicit to authors.

The CMAJ/Open Medicine case looks on the surface like other editorial-board revolts, but I see a new wrinkle. Previous revolts (such as Donald Knuth’s from the Journal of Algorithms) took place specifically over access policies, usually too-high subscription prices. The CMAJ revolt, however, had to do with editorial freedom; open access for the new journal is a byproduct, a side benefit.

Why did that happen, and will it happen again? Worst-case, open access was the natural outflow of this specific situation only, and we should not expect other journals to follow Open Medicine’s example. Open access might simply be earning some rebel chic, in which case we can expect a few more examples like Open Medicine, but no widespread change. Or, best-case, the world has changed (or is changing) such that open access is now a natural choice for fledgling and metamorphosing journals.

Time was, someone wanting to start a new journal naturally looked for a society to fund it. Not so long ago (judging from what I hear around me at MPOW), a new journal bootstrapped itself as best it could in hopes of a buyout from one of the big publishers or aggregators. That, I am told by someone at MPOW who used to work for a society publisher, doesn’t work any more; the big publishers own so much of the journal market that a small subscription journal can’t accumulate enough cachet to be worth buying.

So it seems to me a new or breakaway journal has two choices: manage itself indefinitely as a bootstrap operation, or find an ally that isn’t a society or a big publisher. Both options strike me as open-access–friendly. It’s just plain easier to bootstrap an open-access journal than a subscription one; subscription journals have to build a money-handling infrastructure that an open-access journal doesn’t. And I believe libraries, who have their own reasons for preferring open access, are the up-and-coming ally for new journals.

Indeed, the CMAJ/Open Medicine case should have librarians perking up their ears. One way to assure editorial-board independence is not to ally a journal with an interest liable to compromise that independence. In all likelihood, a library won’t—or, perhaps better-stated, a library is far less likely to allow ideological ax-grinding than a professional society or even a scholarly society. (For those of you who don’t already know, librarians are specifically and explicitly trained to avoid letting our personal ideological biases get in the way of collection decisions. That doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally do it anyway, but training does tell.) So library-supported publishing efforts are a natural haven for beleaguered knowledge producers. That’s a structural advantage—societies and big publishers can’t just wish it away—and in my opinion a telling one over time.

As always, my crystal ball is murky at best; take this analysis for what it’s worth.

I had a grouchy weekend, filled with Googlebot blasting my DSpace installation into smithereens not once but twice (how much does Dorothea hate Java, boys and girls? A LOT, that’s how much) and a TAG markup project that led to the growl following.

People who understand books and book production understand that individual aspects of typography are overloaded. Overloaded in the programming sense, I mean—depending on context, a given typographical embellishment may have a different meaning. Overloaded, polysemous, ambiguous—whatever word floats your boat.

Take the humble italic font. It demonstrates emphasis. It sets off the titles of books and other extended-length works of art. It sets foreign terms apart from surrounding text. It sets biological genus-species names apart from surrounding text. It delineates ship names (but not, curiously, aircraft names).

It can also be used just because somebody thought italics was a good idea at the time. Colonial-era American typesetters were absolutely notorious for this. If you can extract rhyme or reason from their type choices, you’re a braver woman than I.

Italics, in other words, are a cue. They don’t unambiguously tell the reader the reason for their existence; the reader picks from a mental list of what she’s known italics to signify in past reading, and happily goes on from there.

The neat thing about markup is that it permits various uses of italics to be disambiguated behind the scenes, if desirable. If I’m writing a biology textbook, it’s probably not a bad idea to disambiguate genus-species names from other uses of italics—that makes it possible to create a handy-dandy index of organisms named in the book.

Understand, though, that this disambiguation doesn’t just happen. Somebody’s got to actually do it. Trust me, that somebody is not going to be anybody in standard book production. Italics is italics, end of story. (You might get a clueful copyeditor. I wouldn’t count on it, though—and the clueful copyeditor’s work is wiped off the slate when the book hits print anyway.)

This brings us to HTML, where back in the day, <i> was <i>, and that’s all she wrote. But this is bad! cried the semantic generation of HTML designers. <i> doesn’t mean anything! We have to have tags that mean things!

Which is a complete misunderstanding of the problem. The problem is not that <i> is meaningless. The problem is that it means too many things. The proper solution to this problem, given HTML’s problem domain, would have been to add tags for the commoner uses of italics on the Web and perhaps to insist that <i> be embellished with a class attribute for less-common uses that HTML cannot be expected to anticipate. (I don’t think many practicing biologists sit on W3C working groups, so a separate tag for genus-species names was probably never in the cards.)

What happened instead? <i> was deprecated—people were told not to use it!—in favor of <em>, which means “emphasis.” So let’s step back. Web folks used to tag things ambiguously. This is sometimes necessary (perhaps I don’t know why something is italic!), sometimes not great, but can always be lived with; we’ve lived with it in print for centuries. Now, with the blanket replacement of <i> by <em>, Web folks are demonstrably tagging many things incorrectly, because not every use of italics is for emphasis! This is an improvement? I think not.

I spent much of the weekend wincing at (and either fixing or actually performing) tag abuse of <em>, <strong>, and <q>. And checking my work email every hour or so to make sure DSpace hadn’t run out of memory again. No wonder I’m grouchy.

A year ago yesterday, I landed at Dulles with a husband, two Goth-kitties, and some suitcases. A year ago tomorrow, I proceeded to start drying the space behind my ears as a Digital Repository Services Librarian (whatever that is; I’m still not entirely sure, to be honest).

And hey, they ain’t made firing-me noises yet, so I can’t be bollixing things up too badly. (Hold that thought, though. I go up for reappointment the end of this year.)

Listening to the cohort of librarians who graduated when I did makes me humbly grateful to be in the job I’m in. I have met a few roadblocks, but they’ve been minor and absolutely unrelated to my lack of longevity in the profession. I have all the freedom I need to do my job as best I know how—which includes making mistakes and going on from them. The World’s Coolest Boss still is. My colleagues are energetic, personable, and helpful. Damn, y’all, I got it good here.

I wish I could have accomplished more this year, but I’m not entirely unhappy with what I have done. I have allies, supporters, and a few early adopters. I have policies and a plan. I did a DSpace redesign that got me fan-mail from Britain. (No kidding. Surprised the heck out of me, too. My head can’t swell too far, though, because one or two people at MPOW loathe and abominate the design for not being blingy enough.) I learned enough command-line Unix, Java, Tomcat, Postgres, and Apache to fix bugs, admin the system on my own most of the time (the WCB has to lend a hand now and then), and figure out a few shortcuts to make my life easier. I wrote some stuff and presented some other stuff, and did not as far as I know embarrass myself in so doing.

For the next year, I’ve committed to getting DSpace 1.4 and Manakin-UI (assuming a timely release) up and running, as well as corralling as much as I can of the research authored at MPOW that’s already kicking around the open web. For that last, if I can get some kind of halfway-reasonable workflow set up, I’ll be all right—but it’s hard when there’s only me to handle everything; stuff gets misplaced too easily.

Fairfax and I are more or less used to each other. I wish the Thai restaurant down the street had a more talented chef. I still wish there was a hardware store nearby! And of course I wish public transportation weren’t so scattershot, though I’ve learned to manage.

I miss our house in Madison, mostly its kitchen and its sense of space. The latter is silly, because we have all the space we actually need; it was just nicer when we had a bit extra for things like guestrooms and book nooks. Owning something here, despite the teetering market, is still out of reach at present, and is likely to remain so (or I wouldn’t have signed another year’s lease).

That said, I hardly ever managed to sing in Madison (auditioned for the symphony chorus once, got shot down, never mustered the energy to try again), and I must say that singing for Doug Mears with the Fairfax Choral Society has been most excellent. In less than five months I learned more about performing contemporary music than I would have thought I’d ever learn. Maybe this year I even pick up my recorders again, now that my hands are strong enough.

It’s been a good year. I am looking forward to the next one.

Nova has come back from its travels. The hard-drive noise is perceptibly different (yes, yes, it is a terribly geeky thing that I actually notice this), but otherwise, Nova is exactly as it was, right down to the stuff in my trash folder.

Whew. Glad that’s over. It was no fun.

So I’m hacking away in Eclipse, now that I finally figured out how to get syntax coloration for JSPs, when I just have this utter markup-satori moment, changing this:

    <table border="0" cellpadding="10" align="center"
        summary="Browse the repository by subject">
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" align="center" class="standard">

to this:

<p>

I hope you are all enlightened. Would somebody hack line-wrapping into Eclipse now, please?

On balance, I have had a pretty crappy week. It hasn’t been entirely crappy, mind you, but the not-so-bad bits have mostly served to throw the truly astonishingly craptastical bits into sharp relief.

Today my gaming group came over and we played Kill Puppies for Satan. No, it’s a real game and everything, and it’s every bit as wrong and twisted as it sounds.

And the amazing thing is? I feel much, much better now.

I hadn’t actually seriously hosed Trogool; I’d just mucked up a bunch of permissions that I shouldn’t have, and OSX kindly helped me fix them. Won’t be so careless with chmod and chown next time.

After consulting my boss, I decided to install CVS on my staging server rather than on Trogool. Install went smoothly, I got the 1.4 DSpace beta in no problem, I got Eclipse hooked up to it, and now begins the dull but necessary work of re-hacking old hacks (for the last time, I dearly hope!).

(I do know about Subversion, by the way, but DSpace uses CVS and so does Eclipse, so my hands are tied.)

My phone was ringing off the hook for a Friday. Another new journal, some IE6 problems with the design of an old journal (damn you, IE! damn you!), a possible source of digital audio from lectures… if even half of that comes to pass, I’m a happy repository-rat.

Nova has gone off to the laptop doctor, and should be back sometime early- to mid-next-week.

Bit of a sticky situation involving me elseweb, but I am hopeful that it will be resolved with a minimum of drama. So all in all, I’m glad I ended my week with a day like today instead of a day like yesterday.

I walked in the door today not quite sure whether I was gruntled or dis-. Just one of those up-and-down days.

It started off astoundingly poorly, and no, you don’t get details. A jaw-droppingly grunchtastic moment plunged my mood firmly into “seeing red” territory. Honest to goodness, it’s no wonder there are few women in IT. The wonder is that there are any. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

A fascinating conference is coming to MPOW’s law school shortly, and I emailed the organizers on the off-chance they’d let me archive stuff. I got a favorable response and am following up, which is good.

I did get my chapter done today, hooray! I’m just not sure it’s any good. I tried to add a library voice, because for all their general wonderfulness, many of the loudest voices in the open-access movement don’t really quite understand how libraries can help and why libraries should. I think there’s more to both questions than usually makes it into the discourse, and I tried to express some of it, but I don’t know if I got there.

Eh, I suppose we’ll see. I retain self-archiving rights (why, yes, I do read my contracts), so expect to see a preprint eventually.

And then I messed around with CVS for quite some time, and was very proud of myself for more or less getting it to work—but I may have inadvertently done Trogool some (reparable) software damage in the process. If I’ve really screwed things up, fixing them may involve an OS reinstall. Let’s hope not, because I really want to get hacking on DSpace 1.4.