Caveat Lector

Those bloggers who also write books will enjoy this. I had The Moment today. The Moment when you realize you’ve made a huge stupid careless mistake that will cost a ton of time, and if you’d only been thinking you’d have avoided it.

I’d been forgetting to source my author quotes. I didn’t realize it until I reread the entry I’d written up as a sample, whereupon I had The Moment.

It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I got all but one quote properly sourced by midday (Google’s inurl: search is a godsend), and I won’t make that mistake again.

If I may offer a hint for author fansites with quote pages, though? Please, please, please source your quotes! They’re great quotes (some author fansites are genuinely stellar; without them I doubt I could even find quotes for some of our new-on-the-scene authors), but I can’t use one if I can’t trace it back to the author actually saying or writing it.

In other book news, I notice an odd correlation between writers I read as a teenager but no longer enjoy, and authors whose attitudes (as expressed in interviews, weblogs, etc.) I find either thoroughly repellent (hello, Mr. Anthony) or completely vapid (hello, Mr. Brooks). Whereas writers I read as a teenager and still read come across much more agreeable (hello, Mr. Alexander and Mr. Beagle). Funny, that. I promise the correlation can’t be causation, and I don’t think I’m reading my current reading habits into my readings of these authors’ statements.

Critical attention to fantasy is a capricious thing, I am finding; but I’m deeply glad that Nalo Hopkinson is getting plenty. Fantasy needs more from her and more like her.

It feels odd to be giving electronic-publishing advice again, I must say. Thought I’d left all that behind. Still… A specific group of journal publishers has even more reason to be wary of a Google deal than the usual run: any publisher that has kept accurate electronic files for its journal.

“Accurate” is a key word. A journal that makes its final corrections on plates, never feeding them back into the typesetting or archival files, does not have accurate electronic files. This may seem a stupid thing to have to say, but given the typical disconnect between publishing execs and peasants, as well as the disconnect between short-term workflow expediency and long-term electronic-file usefulness, it really does need saying. Back in the day, fellow conversion peasants and I used to commiserate regularly over publishers who thought they’d sent us accurate files but hadn’t.

Google has only one digitization method: scan and OCR. A lot of vendors in this space use this method; I’m not knocking it. Sometimes it’s all that can reasonably be done. A journal with accurate electronic files, however, is almost always better off converting those to desired output and archival formats rather than going the scan-and-OCR route.

Why?

• Accuracy. Even the best OCR leaves lots of scannos in its wake. I admit that we’re putting up with horrendous OCR accuracy in a good many article databases—but why put up with it for your journal if you don’t have to?

• Ceci n’est pas une lettre. A scan-to-PDF isn’t text, but a picture of text; computers can’t search pictures. When OCR is included in a scan-to-PDF (which it isn’t always; check a dissertation database near you), it’s buried somewhere in the PDF binary. This is very much not an ideal situation. It’s not ideal for full-text indexing and searching, it’s not ideal for preservation, and it’s even lousy for disk space. Building a PDF from a typesetting file is invariably a better (smaller, more searchable, more preservation-friendly) option.

• Retention of computer-accessible document structure. Okay, okay, “XML-friendliness.” Most of the time it’s easier and cheaper to convert a typesetting file to good, useful XML (please note the adjectives; not all XML is created equal) than to work with a scanned document. When it’s not easier, XML is most likely an impossible target either way.

  Why does this matter? Well, consider searchability again. A search engine can only be told to add extra relevance weight to search terms titles, abstracts, and section headings if it can reliably pick those out. It can reliably pick those out of a good XML document; they’re labeled. (I can pick them out reliably from a competently-produced typesetting file, because typesetters use styles. This is the secret to creating good XML from typesetting files!) To do so with a PDF—even a good PDF—it’s got to behave like a human eye and brain, detecting typography changes. Trust me, most times this doesn’t happen.

• Format evolution. Back in the day, I sent out a lot of journal articles in SGML, usually some variant of the ISO 12083 DTD. ISO 12083 has gone the way of the dodo; the NLM DTD suite now reigns supreme. Are the publishers I sent those SGML files to crying? Of course not. If they see a need, they can build an automated transform to NLM at quite low cost, and consider throwing in some up-migration (citation parsing, perhaps) as long as they’re touching the files anyhow. Try that with a scan-to-PDF.

  It is true, mind you, that keeping typesetting files only is not ideal future-proofing. Good old Penta has also gone the way of the dodo. Quark is swiftly following in its wake. I’ve had to perform data-capture from ancient typesetting formats I’d never even heard of. Even so, it proved more cost-effective to hire the company I worked for to do data rescue than to go the scan-OCR-proof-markup route. Keep your eyes open with regard to your typesetting practices—it’s cheaper and easier to rescue data from Penta or weird variants of T_EX than from Quark—but either way, keep your files, and keep them accurate!

Any journal with a good run of electronic files is shooting itself in the foot if it goes with Google.

Peter Suber says that we’re mostly in agreement about the Google journals deal, and in his understated way, points out that I haven’t put forward any alternate plan of action for journals without a digitized backrun.

Fair cop. If I were in those shoes, here’s what I’d do: sit back and wait, at least for now. I think Suber is right that OCA or someone else will come up with a better deal. If enough publishers express their wariness to Google, Google itself may come up with a better deal! The opportunity cost of waiting is negligible, so why rush in?

Journal publishers will have figured this out already, but for those playing along at home: Google’s deal only works for journals who consider open digital access an acceptable publication and dissemination mechanism. Not all journals will agree with that, be it because of book-smeller bias or a perceived need to continue to charge rents on the backrun. Moreover, a Google deal makes only limited sense for a journal with no plans to publish current runs electronically. I don’t know how many journals that actually is, but it must be larger than zero.

If none of those concerns applied to my journal, however, I’d be looking for a better OA partner than Google while I waited. Not a few journals in this situation will have formal or informal affiliations with institutions. Those institutions have libraries. Do those libraries have publishing-services or conversion or scanning outfits? Do they have an institutional repository? How about an OJS installation? If they do, that’s assuredly where I would go first. (Would I, as a repository manager, welcome a newly-OA journal backrun? With open arms! And I can give it OAI-PMH exposure as well as Google juice. Can Google?)

The hard part is going to be funding. Library digitization arms are often cost-recovery outfits, though repository storage, bandwidth, and preservation are generally free to the storer. (We’re libraries. Storage and preservation are our job.) Still, for a journal that has no OA backrun, I would think grant funding could be had, or even institutional funding for a particularly interesting journal (or a particularly prominent faculty member, as many journal editors are). If this journal-digitization thing catches on, I wouldn’t be surprised to see funds earmarked at some grant agencies precisely to take digitized backruns OA.

A journal that has some elbow-grease to contribute to the discussion will likely find a happier welcome in libraries. It’s much easier to teach proper digitization and metadata techniques and offer a reliable home for the result than it is to take on backrun digitization. If the slow, self-funded, elbow-grease road will work, consider it before signing with Google.

Another group that may be interested in digitizing your journal is journal database vendors. (If I were they, I’d be worried right now, in fact. They’ll have to show some pretty serious value-adds to withstand the Google onslaught. Some can, some can’t—and almost all need to re-evaluate their user interfaces, APIs, and data quality now.) One way for these folks to distinguish themselves amidst the Google onslaught is via unique content unavailable elsewhere. This obviously involves a tradeoff between digitization quality and open access.

Notably, these strategies are only likely to work if the journal is not already digitized. I’ll repeat this, louder: if you sign on with Google, you are destroying your chances at finding another partner. If that’s all right with you, fine. But don’t do it blindly!

Granting that I am severely biased in this matter, I trust libraries to digitize things right and keep them in good order a lot more than I trust Google or J. Random Database Vendor. Libraries have been hanging onto stuff long before anybody thought about ones with a lot of zeroes after them! If that matters to a journal publisher, that publisher should absolutely exhaust every library connection available before signing on with Google.

And if those connections are exhausted? I would go to Google and say “I’m interested, but…” with a list of caveats. At the very least I would insist that a copy of the bits from my journal be returned to me (with all applicable display, preservation, and change rights) should Google become unable or unwilling to host them. I would do my best to insist on data-quality and metadata-quality standards as well, though I rather suspect Google will be intransigent there.

I still think Google is a lousy deal, but I suppose I must accept that for some journals it’s the best deal going. If I’ve prevented some people with good intentions from blindly signing a bad deal and regretting it later, though, I’m happy, and I’m even happier if my advice means that some deals are less bad than they’d otherwise have been.

Well, here’s a position I never thought I’d find myself in: disagreeing with Peter Suber. In his comments to the news that Google is offering to digitize journal backruns for free, he says that he doesn’t see any downside for publishers who don’t already have a digitized backrun.

I do. I see a ton of downside, so much downside that I don’t think any self-respecting journal should take this deal. I do agree with Suber that should Google’s offer be accepted by a lot of publishers, open access would benefit hugely, at least in the short term—and to be honest, knowledge of that immediate short-term benefit is making it very hard for me to write this post.

Still, I do try to be honest, not just expedient. I simply cannot agree that publishers benefit from a Google deal in proportion to their contribution and their risk.

My stubborn objection to the shape of this deal stems from my ebook days, and boils down to this: never, ever, EVER agree to a digitization deal that doesn’t leave you in control of a copy of the bits. If you agree with that, stop here: no need to read the exegesis.

For the rest of you… Back in the day, NetLibrary and Versaware and others offered free digitization deals to publishers, in return for exclusive rights to offer the resulting ebooks for sale. (I don’t remember what the terms of the sales splits were, I must say, so I can’t do a direct comparison to Google’s revenue-sharing offer.) A fair few publishers signed on. Not a one of ’em I ever talked to after the fact thought it had been a good idea. Here’s why:

• Exclusivity. Hate your digitization partner? Think you could do better elsewhere? Too damn bad. You signed; you’re stuck.
• Quality. What NetLibrary and Versaware were pumping out back in the day was crap; I know this firsthand, thank you. (Versaware’s long gone. NetLibrary is still crap, you ask me; OCLC didn’t school them nearly as much as they needed to be schooled.) Once the contract was signed, the said contract specifying precisely nothing in terms of quality standards, publishers had zero input into quality control. Now, higher-ups at publishers know absolutely nothing whatever about text artisanry, heaven knows—but eventually the smarter ones realized what they didn’t like, and how they’d been skunked.
• Nothing to show for it in the end. Sure, you could stop sending your books to your digitization partner. That didn’t get you copies of the bits of the books you’d already sent, nor did it free you to send those books to a new partner. Essentially publishers had given up all kinds of hope of future rents (and future reach) from their intellectual property, and for what? Low-quality digitization whose results they didn’t have any control over anyway.
• Preservation. The publisher didn’t have a copy of the bits. If the digitization partner went under, the bits were basically gone. Anybody who signed up with Versaware howled about this when Versaware died. It didn’t do the howlers any good; as far as I know, those bits, lousy as they admittedly were, vanished into the ether for good.

Is the Google deal any better? Well, according to Suber, Google isn’t demanding de jure exclusivity. You don’t like what Google does to your journal, you’re free to shop it around elsewhere for re-digitization. Looks good on the surface, but let’s be real here: what library or other digitization shop is going to work with a journal that’s already done a Google run, unless the journal coughs up a whale-load of cash? As a digital librarian, I wouldn’t touch it; there’s plenty of work to do with journal publishers who don’t go Google, never mind all the stuff we can digitize that isn’t journals. I can’t imagine a grant-funder touching it either. So a lack of de jure exclusivity really amounts to de facto exclusivity. Caveat publicater.

Quality? I scoff. We know from the book project that Google is doing crappy work. We’ve seen it. And that’s just the scanning! We also know they’re not going to proof their OCR results, much less mark them up. (Has Google even heard of the NLM DTD suite, I wonder?) Journal publishers can do better, and should if they consider themselves responsible agents of scholarly communication.

Something to show for it? Well… intangibles, maybe. I do like the usage reports, though if I were a publisher I’d insist on COUNTER-compliance and the ability to share that data (for example, with libraries). Open access does increase the impact of a given journal. In a competitive journal marketplace, that’s worth something. It’s a plus for (living and still-working) authors, too, and in the Social Journal age that’s not wholly to be sneered at.

I’m not impressed with the revenue-share argument, frankly; I don’t think it’s going to earn a small player more than pin money, and even the big players might be shocked at how little they get. (Keep in mind also that Google is famously shut-mouthed about its existing revenue-sharing arrangements. Do you trust them, when they offer no data? I wouldn’t.)

But, more importantly, Google is controlling the bits. As I read Suber’s summary, Google isn’t promising never to lock them up, and it is promising never to hand them over. There’s no way that I see for a publisher to withdraw its material from Google once the contract is signed; as an OA advocate, I love that, but if I were a publisher, I’d hate and fear it.

Want a use-case? Here’s a use-case. Google’s low-quality work, combined with its control of the resulting bits, casts de facto exclusivity in an even more sinister light: a Google deal may well prevent a publisher that wants better-quality bits from obtaining them. The publisher can’t improve Google’s bits, because it doesn’t have Google’s bits. The publisher has no leverage to force Google to improve the bits. And the publisher can’t start from zero, because of the expense, dubious return on investment, and dearth of willing partners and funders. Rock, meet hard place.

“Better-quality” is a polysemous term, too; I mean more than just raw data quality by it. Consider the Social Journal. What if Google’s article permalinks are terrible? What if Zotero takes off like a rocket, but Google journals don’t play nicely with it? What if Google’s article metadata rots, as is all too likely given their track record? What if the standardistas come up with a fantastic new annotation mechanism that doesn’t work with Google? What if PDF finally dies its long-deserved death, such that all the serious journals are in NLM? Lots of possibilities, all of them ugly.

Preservation? Google isn’t signing up with CLOCKSS or Portico that I’ve heard, nor is it allowing its publisher partners to do so. The deal as detailed by Suber doesn’t contain “trigger events” that would cause the bits to be turned over to the publisher, or to another responsible agent (such as, say, CLOCKSS or Portico!). Google doesn’t have a preservation plan, and I daresay they don’t care about creating one.

Sure, sure, journal publishers don’t care about preservation either, and researchers care even less (just ask Dr. Harnad). I know that; I struggle with it daily. But I care, librarian that I am, and my sense is that the Google deal actively gets in the way of a proper preservation plan for the digitized journals. If Google goes under—and however remote an eventuality that seems now, the mighty do fall—whither the bits? And how does a journal suddenly dumped at square one with regard to digitization recover?

Careful CavLec readers may have noted that I have never dumped on the Google book deals this badly, and be wondering why. Simple. The Google book deals leave participating libraries in control of a copy of the bits. This causes its own problems, to be sure (just storing that much data is a challenge for an academic library), but it reduces a hopelessly lousy deal to a mere long-term bet: that even if Google plays access hardball, Google will eventually go down, leaving the libraries free to do the right thing. I’ve seen worse bets.

This journal deal, though? Is smellier than a day-care’s diaper pail left in the afternoon sun. I strongly urge journal publishers to think hard and bargain harder before signing on, if they sign on at all.

In fact, the only way I can imagine doing this would be if I were to (cynically and very possibly illegally) keep a copy of the bits myself (after all, they’re OA! Google can’t exactly stop me!) without telling Google. Eventually some David will topple the Google Goliath, at which point I’d have the bits and be willing to risk lawsuit by keeping access open, knowing that Goliath has plenty of other issues to worry about, and right-thinking libraries everywhere will support me should Goliath attack. That’s pretty sharp practice, though. A journal publisher unwilling to compromise its ethics that far shouldn’t sign on with Google.

Always control your bits. Always. Even your open-access bits. If you don’t believe me—ask a publisher who signed on with Versaware back in the day. Or ask a library—we’ve been asking ourselves this question for several years now, and Portico and CLOCKSS are some of the results of our ponderings.

Always control your bits. Can I make it any simpler than that?

We woke up bright and early the next day, avoided the Englishy parts of an English breakfast, and put ourselves together to walk over to the British Museum. 30% chance of rain, said the online weather forecasts. So okay, we pack our umbrellas.

And walk out into a driving hailstorm.

Obviously “30% chance of rain” means something a wee bit different in England. My hypothesis is that it means “will only rain for 30% of the day.”

We took shelter in a covered doorway, as many native Londoners were doing across the street from us, and waited it out; it didn’t take long. Again, this is behavior I can personally recommend faced with really abysmal weather in England. It just doesn’t last all that long.

I just bet the British Museum has more cuneiform per square foot than anywhere else in the world: obelisks to intimidatingly gigantic Assyrian stone gate-guards to tally-tablets to name it. Astounding place. Of course we caught a glimpse of the rock that unlocked a language, but anyone who does just the highlight tour is missing out. David and I enjoyed learning that Greek vase-painters were really lousy spellers.

(I also note that the vases on display, whatever their artistic or historical importance, are remarkably tame as regards subject matter. Sure, dancing girls and naked heroes, but let’s be real here—the Greeks weren’t shy about painting sex on vases. So who forced the British Museum into prudery, I wonder?)

My minor art-history insight of the day concerns the friezes that are part of the famous Elgin marbles. The sculptors thereof had made great strides in depicting movement and stance—the friezes are vigorous and varied, with good work on human and equine anatomy in motion. But… the faces (those still undamaged enough to examine) are all the same! Not only are the features identical from face to face, but the vigor of bodily motion is reflected nowhere in the faces; they’re all serenely expressionless. It’s odd, especially when you put it up against (for example) the individuality of the warriors at Xi’an.

Both of us were a little put off by the frosted-glass floor of the bridge between the outer and inner circles on the upper floor. Being that high up gives me the wiggins to begin with; the floor under me ought to look as solid as it feels. I suggest they carpet it, honestly.

We ended up both opening and closing the place, before we wandered down into Soho to find dinner and watch all the Pretty People (which we emphatically are not!). An annoyance about British restaurants as compared to American ones is no free water. You might as well order whatever non-alcoholic drinkies look good on the menu; bottled water will cost about the same. The Thai place we eventually chose had decent food and lousy service. We didn’t eat in enough London restaurants to know whether that’s par for the course.

’Twas a good day. Tiring, but good.

Well, drat. Here I go wanting to spin a little mystery around the book chapter I wrote for Rachel Singer Gordon, in which it is explained why I consider myself the enemy of right-thinking for-profit publishers everywhere, and Roy Tennant goes and spoils it:

Described as the “canary in the coal mine” by one university administrator, academic libraries can draw perhaps some small solace from the description of university presses as “code blue.” As someone who has worked with our university press to enable new forms of publication and scholarship, I took this as inspiration to redouble our efforts to capitalize on the opportunities offered by a robust and ubiquitous network and effective software applications to recreate scholarly publishing.

This is why I am the enemy. I am not the enemy just because I’m an academic librarian. I am not the enemy just because I run an institutional repository. I am not the enemy just because I pay attention to scholarly publishing and data curation and preservation. I am not the enemy because I’m going to stop subscribing to journals—I don’t even make those decisions!

I am the enemy because I will become a publisher. Not just “can” become, will become. And I’ll do it without letting go of librarianship, its mission and its ethics—and publishers may think they have my mission and my ethics, but they’re often wrong. Think I can’t compete? Watch me cut off your air supply over the course of my career (and I have 30-odd years to go, folks; don’t think you’re getting rid of me in any hurry). Just watch.

I could reprise what I wrote for Rachel about why I think this, but that really would spoil the chapter, and I don’t want to do that. I am fuming, however, at the slow pace of book publishing right now (though that isn’t Rachel’s fault). I’m starting to think that books are too slow for anything that belongs in a conversation, as this topic assuredly does. If we’d just get over our weird print-privilege hangups…

Anyway.

There’s been a bit of a dust-up between Jan Velterop and Stevan Harnad over (you guessed, right?) green versus gold open access. I’m going to break a streak here and say that Harnad is right and Velterop wrong. Researchers do not have nearly the duty to journals qua journals that they do to their own careers and the wider dissemination of knowledge, and they have absolutely zero duty to journal publishers. Who serves whom here?

The problem with Velterop’s argument, to my mind at least, is that it presumes that breaking up the current journal-publishing system while we work on something else is a near-fatal blow to the scholarly-publishing mission. I find that a ludicrous notion. We’re smart people, here in libraries, and the researchers we serve aren’t stupid either. If and when Elseviley Verlag breaks up, we’ll find a way (probably many ways) to pick up the slack. In my meaner moments, I rather suspect this argument gets trotted out because nobody wants us to realize that Elseviley Verlag doesn’t contribute as much as they’d like us to believe.

About which, see above about me becoming a publisher-librarian. It’ll happen. I daresay I’ll even be good at it. And yes, Elseviley Verlag should fear me and my kind. If nothing else, we can’t be any slower than the current system!

So two weeks after I sprained my knee, it’s not healed, but it’s definitely been downgraded from Excruciating Hindrance to a mere Noticeable Annoyance.

Range of motion is much improved; I can put my own socks on! I can do stairs now, if I’m careful about it. I don’t need the cane, and I’m not wearing the brace (though I keep it in my bag just in case I do something stupid). My gait now looks normal most of the time, though I can definitely feel a difference, and I still limp some right after getting up from a chair I’ve been in for a while.

I even managed to turn over on my side last night and go to sleep without my knee immediately waking me up. I ached a bit once I drowsily realized what I’d done and turned back on my back, but it’s a start.

I can tell that some of my long leg muscles need some rehabilitation, probably because of how weird my gait has been for the last half-month. The physical therapy sites say to try stationary biking, which is good as we have one in the house. I don’t think I’m quite ready to get going on that yet (based on experience with stairs), but I should be sometime next week.

All in all, I think I’m calling myself lucky. This could have been a lot worse than it was.

Thought I’d never get a round enough tuit, didn’t you?

The flights to London were uneventful, which is just how I like ’em. The first thing we noticed as we peered out the window on the way down was how very very green the “green and pleasant land” actually is. Saturated green, jewel-green, everywhere green, even in late November. Even DC, which is pretty green itself, feels arid-yellow-brownish by comparison. Especially in late November.

Gatwick is a mob scene and its signage is thoroughly abysmal, but it isn’t hard to find the trains to London, which dropped us at King’s Cross in the middle of a rainstorm. We waited the worst of it out, found our hotel, left our suitcase, and tripped off to the British Library to kill time until our room was ready.

(“Waiting the worst of it out” turns out to be tolerably good strategy for London weather in November. More on that anon.)

Most places claiming to have “treasures” are overselling themselves, a little or a lot. Not the British Library. David and I were absolutely agog at the Treasures of the British Library room (which is a permanent exhibit, and if you’re in London YOU MUST GO, no exceptions; it’s easy walking distance from the British Museum). An unassuming parchment codex, written over in tidy rows of unspaced, pale-inked Greek, that only happens to be pretty much the oldest New Testament there is, with one of the earliest full Greek bibles right next door. Greek I do not read (I “read” Greek in the same way a three-year-old “reads” Dr. Seuss—I know individual letters, is all), but even I can recognize the first line of John.

The Lindisfarne Gospels! Which are not only a magnificent work of art in their own right, but also the earliest English translation of the Gospels. It was really our good luck that this book was on display—it had been taken off for conservation and only recently returned. Near the exit they had placed a full-size facsimile, which David and I spent all kinds of time tag-team reading, me chugging gamely through the Latin and him sorting out the Anglo-Saxon. (As much Latin as I’ve taken, Biblical Latin is about my limit, because I suck at light-syntax synthetic languages. I just do. Something in my sad excuse for a brain begs for reliable word or morpheme order.)

A short distance away are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, open to a thrilling Viking raid. (Well, thrilling if you can read Anglo-Saxon, which I mostly can’t—can more-or-less pronounce it, can puzzle out bits and pieces; that’s about it—and he can.) Magna Carta (one of the few surviving copies). A Castilian siddur. A psalter that must have been a historian’s dream, such are the detailed illustrations of farm implements and other tools; and a gorgeous missal with an entire English aviary (labelled!) in the margins. Meticulously-illuminated Persian and Turkish books. A First Folio. A Ben Jonson manuscript. Newton’s Principia (which was of special interest to me because Newton figured largely in my STM talk). Dodgson’s original Alice in Wonderland manuscript. Brontë’s original Jane Eyre manuscript. Austen’s writing-desk. Music manuscripts from Handel and Vaughan Williams and Elgar.

I’m talking treasures, people. TREASURES, do you hear me? Of all the things we managed to see in London, this absolutely blew us away. Sharing the same room with the Lindisfarne Gospels. Wow.

Steve Lawson, in a comment about my STM Innovations slides: “*thinks ‘jeez, these are beautiful slides’”.

It’s not me. It’s the tools. And the Creative Commons.

I build presentations with Apple Keynote these days. It’s such an awesome tool it even makes me look good, and I am a completely worthless designer. Want to know something weird? I regularly export my Keynote presentations to PowerPoint, just in case something goes kaboom at the presentation site such that I can’t use Nova the PowerBook. The resulting presentations invariably look worse in PowerPoint than in Keynote. Mostly, it’s not translation glitches (although PowerPoint can mangle line spacing); it’s subtle details of font appearance. Keynote gets them right. PowerPoint gets them wrong.

(That said, I wish Keynote would adjust line spacing and font size automagically to fit stuff on slides the way PowerPoint will. But one can’t have everything.)

I get most of the images I use in my presentations from Flickr, via their Creative Commons tools. I restrict myself to the “By” license, because my presentations are a derivative work (especially given that I often alter images), and I don’t want to fall afoul of a use that might be judged commercial (if I get an honorarium for a talk, for example). Believe me, that still leaves plenty to play with!

(I get other images from NASA: the glory of free-to-reuse government data! I also reuse images created by my work colleagues, because I’m lazy that way. If you see an uncredited picture that isn’t from NASA, that’s probably where it came from.)

Most of the image alteration and text rotation I do from within Keynote itself. This isn’t as intuitive as fondly supposed by some Mac devotees, so here are some of my favorite tricks:

• To rotate an image, bring up its Inspector, go to the little ruler tab, and spin the “Rotate” spin-wheel.
• To make an image partly transparent, bring up its Inspector, go to the tab with the green circle on the gray square (you see why I say this isn’t intuitive?), and move the “Opacity” slider.
• To darken an image (or sepia-tone it, or any number of other tricks), click on the little black “Adjust” box and have at it. For my background images, I usually go to 40-60% opacity first, and then darken or alter tone as need be. Takes a little fiddling, but it works. (Why isn’t there an opacity slider on the Adjust screen? Got me. Because that would make too much sense?)
• To rotate text, it must be in a Keynote text box first; you can’t rotate normal bullet-point boxes in Keynote. (I’ve tried!) To create a text box, select Text from the Insert menu. To rotate it, bring up its Inspector, go to the little ruler tab, and spin the “Rotate” spin-wheel. (It is possible to add bullets to text in text boxes to make counterfeit bullet-point boxes, and also to remove bullet points from text in bullet-point boxes; go to the T tab in the Inspector, and select the “Bullet” page.)
• Write your text before you adjust its color. Trust me on this one.

Bare-bones Keynote presentations default to Gill Sans for a reason; it’s an inordinately pretty display font. I’m starting to itch to move away from it, though, because too many Keynoters are using it. Your mileage may vary.

Now that my antennae are up regarding all things social and journal-y (as opposed to “journalistic,” which means something else entirely), I keep noticing relevant tidbits!

For example, Steve Lawson comments on the uses of one’s social network as a research filter (which I said something about to STM, if not quite so cogently). I use this. I daresay you do too. Insofar as discovery systems pay no heed to it, they are rather hobbled.

Now, of course no discovery system can exactly reproduce what I get from my professional network. Even link-tracking systems like del.icio.us, unalog, and CiteULike can’t do that, because they don’t necessarily track provenance (where I noticed a work), attention level (how important a work turns out to be to me), or works that I don’t actually bookmark even though I found them to be worthwhile reads. Despite that, link-tracking systems have a better proxy for professional word-of-mouth networks than anybody else does at the moment—yes, even better than most current forms of citation tracking, in my humble and somewhat-uneducated opinion, because they’re faster off the mark. We could do worse than work with that.

I note also experiments such as Faculty of 1000, which attempts to create recommendation networks ab initio, starting from people believed to be experts. I don’t know whether the created or the organic approach is more workable; like as not they can survive alongside each other.

Either way, though, the journal is not the unit of recommendation, absolutely not the center of the social process that gets an article read and valued. Maybe it was, once, before I was born—maybe the mere fact of publication was sufficient recommendation. That’s not so any more, if it ever was. If I were a journal editor, I would worry about that.

Elseweb, Dan Cohen talks about the social-professional benefits of blogging (added emphasis mine):

Surely the happiest and most unexpected outcome of creating this blog has been the way that it has gotten me in touch with dozens of people whom I probably would not have met otherwise. I meet other professional historians all the time, but the blog has introduced me to brilliant and energetic people in libraries, museums, and archives, literary studies, computer science, people within and outside of academia. Given the balkanization of the academy and its distance from “the real world” I have no idea how I would have met these fascinating people otherwise, or profited from their comments and suggestions. I have never been to a conference where someone has come up to me out of the blue and said, “Hi Dan, I’m so-and-so and I wanted to introduce myself because I loved the article you wrote for such-and-such journal.” Yet I regularly have readers of this blog approach me out of the blue, and in turn I seek out others at meetings merely because of their blogs. These experiences have made me feel that blogging has the potential to revitalize academia by creating more frequent interactions between those in a field and, perhaps more important, between those in different fields. So: thanks for reading the blog and for getting in touch!

If I were a journal editor…

I think Dan’s word “balkanization” is key to part of the problem. Journals can’t reasonably serve as community-builders because their sheer numbers and their use of blind peer-review tend to obstruct loyalty of authorship and readership. How can a journal build a community, when its authors publish in seventeen other journals, its readers read bits and pieces of a hundred other journals, its interactions with both readers and authors are routinized and anonymous, and its actual producers (from editors through reviewers on down to conversion peasants) are faceless nonentities? How can a journal show any given author to best advantage within its nominal “community” when it doesn’t hold all that author’s work, barely organizes itself by author anyway, and as often as not uses toll-access and OA-hostile publishing agreements to forbid the author from creating such a showcase herself?

(Trust me, an unlinked CV online is a remarkably ineffectual self-marketing tool. A linked one, now, with one- or at most two-click access to the works that look intriguing—now that is a marketing tool. And let’s just not get me started on the self-marketing problems created by citation styles that use author initials plus surname. I have had to fight to figure out who some people in my proverbial Pile of Papers actually are!)

Whereas my blog is easy to ferret through, easy to learn about me with, even easy to find a fair chunk of my formal-publication record from (as often as I link to my MARS page!). I can attract expert attention with it; in fact, I have. I can use it to insert myself into professional conversations; in fact, I have. Even considering the potential disadvantages of oversharing (and honestly, I’ve yet to run into any serious actual disadvantages thereof, despite a lengthy record of oversharing), blogging stacks up well against journal publishing as a tool for integration into a given professional community. And I don’t even have comments enabled here!

I hear a lot about journal “branding,” but I don’t think community is a brand that journals (including society journals!) are working for these days, usually touting “quality” above all other considerations. Maybe that’s how it’s had to be. I don’t know; I wasn’t in the business very long, and I was never privy to this kind of strategic discussion. I don’t know that matters need to continue this way—but that’s up to societies and journals.

If I were a journal editor, though…

Journals are losing face to other knowledge-distribution mechanisms because of speed differences, access differences, quality-of-service differences, cost differences, social-networking differences, all sorts of differences. What they’ve kept, kept a stranglehold on in many disciplines, is the perception of career advantage: “if I publish in journal X/a peer-reviewed journal/any journal, it will advance my career.”

(You’ll notice I just dodged the “quality” bullet. Whatever a lot of journals are peddling, it ain’t quality. I should, however, note that editors of open-access journals have somewhat less to worry about than their toll-access counterparts, because their speed, access, and cost differences vis-a-vis the unfettered Internet are less, and they still retain at least some career-advantage potential. Exactly how much is discipline-dependent.)

What if blogging, performed well, represents a viable alternate route to career advantage? Sure, no academic in a field that requires journal publications is going to survive tenure hearings without them (for now). But if blogging introduces a young scholar/professional to more people who can help that young scholar or professional advance than does slogging through one or a few more journal articles, I expect young scholars and young professionals will figure out for themselves the most profitable avenue of action. And if tenure continues receding out of reach for young scholars, journals have even less to offer; visibility and networking will inevitably become a better career tool.

The less dependent a given discipline is on journal articles, the more journals in that discipline have to fear. Take me, for instance. I’ve had the same experience Dan recounts, many times over. Looking at my current CV, blog contacts account (directly or indirectly) for everything I have published and presented this year (not all of which is on my MARS page yet, mind you), with the sole exception of the JCDL tutorial. Will what I’ve done stack up against peer-reviewed journal articles when I come up for retention and promotion early next year? We’ll have to see… but as I read the stipulations in MPOW’s Librarians’ Handbook, it will.

(I hasten to say that I don’t think I have a lock on promotion, though I feel reasonably secure about retention given how rarely MPOW decides not to renew contracts. The promotion problem isn’t my record, which I will make bold to say stacks up well against those of my colleagues. The problem is my seniority, or rather lack thereof.)

Find me one library journal—ONE—that could have done as well for me as that. (No fair bringing up contests.) Quadruple points if it’s peer-reviewed; as I noted above, peer-reviewed journals are even less effective networking tools because of the author-randomization effects of peer review. Why should I write for peer-reviewed library publications if I don’t have to? Might as well dig a hole and bury my writing in it, for all the tangible good it’s going to do me.

The estimable T. Scott recounts the usual tired death-of-journals boogeyman scenario: everything goes open access and librarians stop subscribing to journals. For various reasons, that’s not how I think things are going to go, though I’ll happily be straight-up in the way T. Scott wishes—I do believe open access will damage the existing journal system, perhaps fatally, and I’m still all for open access. (The folks at STM Innovations kindly laughed at me when I said I was the enemy. I wasn’t kidding. I am the enemy, just not for the reasons they think. If the chapter I wrote for Rachel Singer Gordon’s book ever manages to come out, then they’ll realize why I’m the enemy.)

I think the death of toll-access, for-profit, heavily-bureaucratized journals may well occur not with the bang of lost subscriptions, but the whimper of lost authors. Not today, not tomorrow either… but maybe sooner than even I think.

If I were a journal editor…