Caveat Lector

One thing that a focused conference like Open Repositories presents to the halfway-savvy people-watcher is a sense of social hierarchy (or network, if you’re not a hierarchical thinker about matters social) in the field.

I know roughly where I am in DSpace-space. I am assuredly not inner-circle, nor am I one of those social nexuses that pulls everybody together from all over. If DSpace-space were Orwell’s Party, I’d be in the Outer Party, a minor functionary just dangerous enough for the Inner Party to be watching. Plenty of people know my name, as it happens; they just don’t consider it an important name.

This is good. This is a position I can live with.

The Manakin developers were the unquestioned, lionized heroes of the DSpace user-group meeting. They deserved it. I am very much looking forward to getting my claws into Manakin. That’s not all, though. One of the frustrations of attending repo-rat meetings is seeing all sorts of people writing all sorts of lovely code around DSpace, code that I daren’t use because it mucks up the upgrade path.

I expect Manakin to change that. For the first time, I’ll be able to hand a DSpace design to someone else in one nice, neat package. (Can’t do that with DSpace’s JSPs, because some bits live in servlet code, and other bits live deep in the tag definitions, and just trust me, it gets ugly.) For the first time, a useful metadata-munge can be pulled out of one context and plopped into another without horsing around in core code. I fully anticipate that Manakin will mark a great flowering of shared code around DSpace. Exciting!

Repo-rats are an intensely pragmatic people. (Yes, me too. Strip away my Quixotesque idealist’s lance, and I’m a right peasant.) We love Tim Donohue because he solves our rubber-meets-road problems. Tim won the poster-session contest with a MediaFilter gizmo that automagically turns Microsoft Office docs (which are the bane of any repo-rat’s existence; we have lots of them, but we hate having them because they’re bad for preservation) into their corresponding Open Document formats. Tim was mobbed the entire poster reception, poor soul, and he arrived the next morning hoarse as a crow. Fortunately, he’d already given his Configurable Submission System talk—which just goes to show, doesn’t it? Practical, Tim is. We repo-rats like that.

For similar reasons, Eric Larson’s BibApp suite absolutely 0wnz0red the third day of the conference. I’m talking pwned, people, PWNED. It was a beautiful thing. BibApp is a little like DSpace Researcher Pages on steroids. Given a bunch of citations for a faculty author, BibApp can check them against SHERPA/ROMEO to see which are available for immediate repository ingest, at which point it happily packages those up for DSpace’s batch ingester. It can check indexes for a list of keywords indicating the author’s research interests. It can list the author’s favorite coauthors and publication venues. It’s gorgeous. Everybody wants it.

I went to library school with Eric, as it happens, and while I love his gizmo absolutely to pieces, what impressed me most is that Eric is a damn good speaker. I had no idea, more fool I. Pwning an entire day of OR ’07 is likely to lead to more opportunities for him, both for speaking and for code, and that is all to the good.

It just goes to show, sometimes the right work at the right time can put you on a moon-rocket. Fewer people knew Eric than knew me, before this conference. After it, I shall toddle on in my beloved semi-obscurity, nodding sagely as Eric gets used to well-deserved rock-stardom.