Caveat Lector

My last day at MPOW is tomorrow (and all hail the civilized employer! not all of them are), and so I’m trying to do the right thing by the poor mail admins and get off all the listservs I’m on.

This led me to ask myself just what I was going to do with the subscriptions, because I certainly can’t afford to jettison all of them. I thought about adding them to my personal account and shuddered. The idea of creating a new account on my webhost wasn’t much better, frankly; listserv mail just doesn’t really belong with the rest of my email. I don’t need to keep it for the long term, as when I need to search listservs, I search web archives thereof. I don’t need POP access to it, either—it just builds up into a huge maintenance and storage-space hassle.

If I wait until I have a work email address again, that only means a bunch more subscribe/unsubscribe tsuris. Ugh. But every once in a while, there’s that one mail that’s worth keeping…

So I got myself a GMail account. First name dot last name at gmail dot com. GMail can handle the load, everyone will still know who I am, I don’t miss any mail, and I don’t ever ever ever have to mess with the subscriptions again.

Because how much more of a pain in the rear could that be?! I’m on four DSpace lists at Sourceforge, but Sourceforge’s Mailman installation is so screwed up that I had to unsub/resub individually from each one. And then there’s dspace-general, which isn’t hosted at Sourceforge. SPARC-IR cost me twenty minutes of head-scratching, before I noticed the unsub/resub links at the bottom of their archive pages. (”Feed,” “index,” and “digest”? Huh? And why doesn’t SPARC-IR put the addys at the bottom of posts the way that SPARC-OAForum does?) ALA-SCHOLCOMM doesn’t actually tell me anything I don’t hear from six other places, so I took several minutes to figure out how to ditch it. JISC-REPOSITORIES is on crack some listserv system I’m not familiar with, so figuring out how to get an account and switch my subscription cost me another fifteen minutes.

No wonder social software is taking over the world. Listservs are a hassle. Only takes me two seconds to subscribe (or unsubscribe, for that matter) to an RSS feed.

Points to GMail for how easy it is to create filters, though. Thunderbird could learn something about that.

I just laid a major smackdown in a reply to a post on the SPARC/ARL mailing list. It was impolitic, I shouldn’t have done it, and I’ll take the lumps I’ve got coming for it. But people (especially librarians, as this individual was!) who get in my face (of all faces, mine!) with condescending know-it-all lectures about what libraries and librarians (and, it is loftily implied, my peasant self in particular) should know about and do for open access—these people really hack me off. They hack me off to the point of laying return smackdowns when they betray a serious lack of awareness about and respect for what libraries and librarians already do for OA.

And that is in large part why I ranted as loudly as I did about the notable absence of librarianship from the Chandos open access book. Leaving libraries out of the picture is insulting, and it’s practically universal (The Access Principle is just as bad as the Chandos book), and it causes real librarians, librarians like me who have staked our careers on OA and are working our butts off for it, real problems. We deserve to be taken seriously, damn it. If we deserve nothing else, we deserve that.

So I got ranty today on the SPARC/ARL list. And as is the way of these things, I expect I’ll regret it in the morning. But I also expect some other librarian will have an easier time of it sometime in the future because of my rant, and I guess that helps a little.

I don’t talk about the details of work here—especially the more personal and social details—ever since I got strong hints from the Ruritanians that this was a thing Not Done in libraryland. But every rule has an exception, and this is that exception.

Most of Fenwick reference took me out to lunch today at everyone’s favorite Italian place. This was completely unnecessary (I mean, I’m not even in their department!), completely charming, and not unexpected at all, because the people in FenRef are just like that.

And as though that weren’t enough, they presented me with a gift bag packed absolutely to the gills with tidbits whimsical and useful, from a Mason Final Four pompon to a laminated campus map (just in case I forget) to a couple of stuffed critters in Masonwear to a…

“Oh, no,” I said as I pulled out one oddly-shaped parcel. “You didn’t. You DID NOT.”

See, okay, I have to explain this one. For the Fairfax Choral Society Christmas concert, we were directed to bring “festive headgear” to wear for the encore—anything from plush reindeer antlers to deelybobbers to light-festooned tiaras. Me? I walked into FenRef and saw that the Scream blowup doll (it’s that kind of office) had on a faux-poinsettia-festooned “Mason Patriot” tricorne hat, tasteful black trimmed with gold braid (like this one sans logo). I howled with laughter and asked to borrow the hat; I honestly think they didn’t think I’d wear it, but I sure ’nough did, returning it afterwards.

But now I have my very own Mason tricorne. Because they got me one. I love these people!

And because they took the trouble to know me a little and understand how I operate, they got me a great little Mason-emblazoned billfold gizmo on a keyring that’s perfect for putting my university ID and bus pass in. That was just pure thoughtfulness, and I wanted to cry.

So thank you, Jen and Mario and Michael and Sarah and Maureen and Joy and especially Jamie; you make me feel sad to go, but privileged to have been here.

After all the blog-hoopla lately regarding treatment of conference speakers, it’s a real joy to report that the 2007 Texas Library Association conference has been treating me like royalty—and I’m not a keynoter or even a featured speaker.

My direct contact is Necia Wolff, who has been incredibly patient with my occasional spaciness (I swear I’m not always this bad; changing jobs just eats up too much brain CPU), quick to anticipate needs, and just generally eager to please.

When I first suggested travel dates, doing my best to minimize my stay so as to minimize their expense, the response was, “Won’t you stay a few days? We’d love to have you.” Wow. I was very not expecting that—but I changed my plans and I’m glad I did, because Isabel Allende is one of their keynoters and the ex-Hispanicist in me is squeeing madly.

And get this: I already have plane-fare reimbursement in hand, and I haven’t even gone to the conference yet! I don’t know what’s in the water in Texas, but it sure makes them friendly and hospitable to conference speakers. If they ask you, accept!

I will be presenting “What’s Driving Open Access?” on Friday the 13th of April at high noon (and yes, I saw the date, and I’m just hoping it doesn’t mean I bust up another limb). I will do my absolute best to inform and inspire; anything less would be dishonorable.

To that end… I know CavLec has readership in Texas; the logs don’t lie. If there’s a Texan open-access–related project or initiative that I should know about (and Rice University need not worry; them I know about), drop me a line with information. I’ll do my own research, naturally, but I don’t want to miss anything, because I think it’s important at a regional conference to bring these large and sometimes remote-feeling issues home, and give attendees local people to contact and local projects to examine.

I am so looking forward to this; I got the conference program today, and it looks beyond excellent. Can’t complain about the venue, either; I was quite taken with San Antonio at Open Repositories ’07, and going back will be fun!

Let’s just take it as read that I have a hate on for Elsevier. This is not news to anybody who’s been reading CavLec for a while. Take that into account as you read this post.

I got a press-release email just now, of which I reproduce the plain-text version (with full headers) below:

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Subject: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Engineering Village Introduces Record Tagging
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Date: 22 February 2007
Contact: Ross Graber
Marketing Director
Engineering Information
+1 212 633 3695
r.graber[at]elsevier.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Engineering Village Introduces Record Tagging

Allows Researchers to Interact With, Classify and Share Engineering Research Content

New York, N.Y., 22 February 2007 - Engineering Information (http://mail.elsevier-alerts.com/go.asp?/bEEI001/qOGW4A3/xX2JI5 ) announced the introduction of record tagging to Engineering Village (http://www.engineeringvillage.com ), an award winning web discovery platform designed for engineering researchers. Tagging allows Engineering Village users to apply meaningful keywords to database records to facilitate sharing records and retrieving documents based on user-generated data labels or “tags.”

Records from engineering research databases including Compendex® and Inspec® and patents databases can be tagged by Engineering Village users. Users establish their own tags based upon what they find meaningful about a document. Documents can then be retrieved by searching for specific tags or sets of tags. Tagging facilitates a user’s ability to share meaningful content. Users will assign tags to documents and can choose to make those tags accessible to colleagues, peer groups and even to all the users in the Engineering Village community. Users may also opt to keep tags private for personal use.

“While tagging is often considered a Web 2.0 phenomenon, it is incredibly well suited for a professional quality information service like Engineering Village” said Rafael Sidi, Vice President of Product Development, Ei. “Engineering Village databases have traditionally relied upon records being classified by experts using structured indexes. Now, by adding record tagging the power to classify records and create content has been extended to our users. Users can now tag records based on how they define a record’s relevance and importance . By choosing to expose those tags, Engineering Village users’ community is provided with a powerful way to
identify engineering content other users find meaningful.”

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About Engineering Information

Engineering Information (Ei), which is a business unit of Elsevier, is the leader in providing online information, knowledge and support to engineering researchers. The company provides information research tools specifically focused on the content and intelligence that engineering researchers need to stay informed and step ahead of the competition. For more information about Ei and its products, including Engineering Village 2 , Compendex®, and Ei EnCompass please visit www.ei.org.

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Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/ ) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/ ), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier’s ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

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I don’t know how I got onto this list; it was surely not by any opt-in efforts of mine. I am also not “a member of the press,” though that little detail tends to indicate that they shoved me on their list merely because they felt like it. I tried logging into elsevier-alerts.com and got nowhere. ei.com is similarly unhelpful. There is no opt-out link in the email, neither in the plain-text nor the HTML version, so however I got onto this list, I can’t get off it.

That? Is spam, folks. It doesn’t matter that it’s coming from a semi-reputable company. I don’t want it, I didn’t ask for it, it’s commercial in nature. It’s spam. You tell me what that makes Elsevier.

Elsevier: get me off this list. Now, please. I only took this public because you didn’t behave like a reputable Internet company and give me a private way to take care of this business. (”We respect your privacy,” forsooth!) And if you want to make an issue of that copyright statement, I’ll see you in court.

If this is a joe-job, I’ll happily apologize and set the record straight—but it doesn’t look like one to me.

Not packed yet. Don’t even ask. March 9 is rushing at us like a freight train…

… but oh, I want to go home so badly I can just taste it. Things I’m looking forward to (work things intentionally omitted), in no particular order:

• The sight of Madison from the air, coming in for a landing. The lakes mean I can pick out landmarks all over the place, and know right down in my soul I’m coming home. DC is so horribly anonymous from aloft.
• A library system with librarians who make great graphic-novel selection decisions. Fairfax County’s collection is unbelievably lame. (Free clue: Manga is not the only game in town.)
• Vegetable-tempura rolls at Wasabi. I’ve never seen them anywhere else, and they’re ridiculously excellent. (I hope they’ll keep those “Autumn Rolls” too. Yummers. And let us not forget the asparagus rolls in spring.)
• Paul’s Books, and Avol’s/Canterbury’s, and A Room of One’s Own, and other bookstores I can actually get to.
• Michael’s Frozen Custard. Nothing more need be said.
• Ice-skating in the open air. (Once I dare to do it; I’m still scared I’ll hurt my knee again. Maybe not ’till next winter.)
• Flowering trees in spring.
• Friends. Lots of them. People I’ve missed a horrible great deal.
• Magic Mill. And Penzey’s.
• The Lake Mendota view from the SLIS Library comfy-chairs. Who needs the Terrace, I ask you?
• Sa-Bai Thong’s pad thai. And the m’hamara at King of Falafel. And the black-bean feta-avocado pizza at Ian’s. And Thai squash curry, which seems to be a Midwest thing as I can’t find it in this area and I’ve been craving it. And the fattee at LuLu’s. And anything from the little chocolate place on University Avenue. And the kebabs at Chautara. And do they still have that awesome stuffed-potato entree at the Indian place on Odana (not Maharaja, the other one)? Wow, that was amazing.
• Wildflower gardens in near-west neighborhoods.
• Maxwell Street Days, and the Art Fairs. Gosh, it’ll be nice to have those back.
• Farmer’s markets. More than insanely fresh vegetables—flowers, cheese, bakery stuff, honey (gosh, buckwheat honey again! I love that stuff), apples apples apples.
• Real cheese. Y’all easterners, you just do not get it.
• The peacocks at the zoo, and the immense tortoises, and Buckminster Badger, and the water-monsters a-thrashing about in the lake.
• A public-transit system that caters to a bit more than commuting.

Two-and-a-bit weeks to go. Must pack…

When Meredith and the rest of us first started hacking out what has now turned into Five Weeks, the CFP garnered a kind email from a purveyor of a web service which shall remain unnamed. Hi, like what you’re doing, it said (paraphrased), maybe we could give you some content about our service?

We scrutinized it, talked amongst ourselves, and came up with the answer Uhhhhhhh… no thanks.

It’s not that the service in question was bad; we are individually and collectively quite fond of it. It’s not that we are overly susceptible to market cooptation, individually or collectively. (A number of us are notably stubborn about this, in fact. CavLec exists because a former employer of mine tried for a land-grab on my expressive capacities, and I resented it.) And it’s not that we think the purveyor was trying to pull a Lex Luthor on us.

We just didn’t want to be beholden. At all, if we could help it. Because too much professional development is, and we (insofar as I can speak for the organizing committee) think that’s a major barrier facing too many librarians. Face-to-face conferences have to make money, or at least cover costs, and so they have to court vendors for sponsorships and Free Stuff. Degree and certificate programs answer to the green-eyeshaded folks at their institutions. Even non-profits (and they do exist, and we are in fact beholden to one in particular) have to cover costs and justify their existence. This all means expense, and too often, events that slant toward sponsors.

We wanted to do something a little different. We wanted to whomp up the best darn workshop we could for the lowest monetary outlay we could manage, relying on people with an interest in us (like Meredith’s patient husband, who fixed Drupal last week when I broke it) or in the workshop’s mission (like OPAL), and pulling together as much materiel as we could from what we already had available to us.

Because if we can do that, lots of people can, and that opens up the professional-development world to many, many more people, on the content-producing end as well as the content-consuming end. (We have one or two Big Names on our program. Most of our content, however, isn’t from Big Names. I’m quite happy with the quality of what I’ve seen and heard so far—bowled over by the excellence of some of it, in fact.)

Being beholden would change the whole vibe, honestly, and even the least hint of favor-trading creates an unsavory whiff of the exhibition-hall. Same old same-old, business as usual—which is exactly what we didn’t want.

That web-service purveyor did himself no favors. Because of that email, we didn’t link to the service on the appropriate page of our course. We probably would have, otherwise. I’m sure it’ll get mentioned, by us or by one of our information-hound participants, because it is a good service. But we couldn’t afford to give it our imprimatur after that, and so we didn’t.

An interesting thing happened today, though… one of our participants mentioned a web service, and one of its proprietors stopped by to say a friendly hello, sans sales pitch. Participant thought it was great; web service has a new advocate; we-the-committee aren’t beholden, because it’s obvious we weren’t involved. Everybody wins.

Dialogue. Unstructured, unfettered, un-marketplace dialogue. (If you think I’m snarking a bit at the Cluetrain, it’s only because I am.) Sure, the exchange I just mentioned was a short one, hardly the sort of thing to set the world on its ear. But just think what might happen if much-maligned ILS vendors talked to their customers outside of the tightly-scripted events they control. Just think.

I’m glad we stayed unbeholden, because completely by accident we offered a level playing field for service providers and those who need services to find each other and talk turkey. Law of Unintended Consequences in action, in a good way for once!

Some thoughts are percolating about libraryland, the retirement “crisis,” library school, and so on. I haven’t got time to whip them all into halfway-digestible form just at present.

One thing does pop out at me, though. Remember the sirens? The “gee, you really should get a Ph.D” sirens? Remember me ignoring them? Resolutely, even? (And sometimes, I must say, rather profanely.)

Well, here I am, a bit short of two years after graduating. I’m published (though admittedly not peer-reviewedly). I’ve got invited talks to my credit, one of them international. I’m helping run an online conference. I’m on a new journal’s editorial board. I am not exactly at the forefront of my niche in the profession, but I’m not wholly unheard-of, either.

And I’m about to take a job in my niche in the place I most want to be. Going home, that’s what I’m doing.

Now, if I’d listened to the sirens, I’d be…

… not even done with coursework yet. Huh.

Don’t let anybody tell you you have to get a Ph.D in LIS. Anybody. Anybody at all. It’s not a racket, exactly—but damn, it’s next-door-to.

I got 1.4.1 running on production today. Had the same problem I had upgrading on test—missed something (don’t even know what!) in the configuration file.

When this happens, for future reference, DSpace throws a wobbly and refuses to run at all, popping up a NullPointerException in ConfigurationManager.java. That’s a great hint that dspace.cfg is the problem. Unfortunately, it tells you absolutely nothing about which part of dspace.cfg is at fault—and dspace.cfg is nearly 700 lines long now.

(Configurationitis is going to become a problem for DSpace’s out-of-the-boxness, if it isn’t one already. If I were a committer, I’d be taking a hard look at how many of these config items can be handled another way, or even better, replaced entirely by sensible system defaults. “Throw in a config option!” is frequently the worst way to resolve a squabble about a development choice.)

But. It’s running. And our modded code is safely in Subversion. Mission accomplished.

Blog is being neglected. Life has more trumps than a bridge game right now, from packing for the move to upgrading DSpace at work to keeping up with what is (for me) the busiest week of Five Weeks to a Social Library.

(Oh, and could special librarians, especially solo librarians, who blog for their libraries weigh in over here, please? Much appreciated.)

So I’m taking the cheapest out I can think of: catblogging! The Librarian in Black points out the wonders of cat macros (there’s an entire LiveJournal community devoted to them, but beware, as some entries are typically NSFW). I therefore unveil to you Dream, the world’s one and only self-macroing cat:

For those adjusting their glasses, the shoebox is from Munro, whose motto is “Proper Size, Perfect Fit.” As Dream so aptly demonstrates.