Caveat Lector

So I get an email from one Megan Farnum asking to buy an ad on my graduate school page. It is unprofessionally poorly-spelt, but seems sincere enough, and lacks the commonest feature of spam (that being, spammers want my money, not the other way ’round). The commodity to be advertised is not named. I am offered $30.

I could fire off “Scram, pathetic loser,” but that would be rude. Megan looks like just a kid trying to get a business (or something) started.

I could just delete the email, but that would be boring. So I Google Megan Farnum’s name, and look what I turn up! I also check out the domain listed as her return email address, and look what I find! I could call them skeevy Internet marketers with a lame brochureware site, but that would be rude.

I wonder, though… is Miss Megan stupid like a fox? For one thing, she is obviously targeting sites with respectable PageRanks (the page she wanted from me is PR 5; not great, but not bad either, especially for a static page) that don’t already have great green gobs of greasy-grimy advertising all over them. The sorority-chick email style got past my spam filters and actually got a personal response from me.

If my guesses about their motivations are true… clever, they are, but astoundingly slimy. I could call them scumsucking Internet parasites trying to goo up the last few bastions of advertising-free materials on the Web—

—but that would be rude, wouldn’t it?

Sometimes I manage to convince myself that I don’t actually run off at the keyboard too much. Been pretty quiet lately, as a matter of fact; combination of too much to do, nice spring weather, keeping vows about putting Somebody Else’s Problem fields around things that just make me hyperventilate uselessly, and a slow-motion adrenaline crash from the move and the getting-settled. (I think I could use a vacation. Not much point in taking one until these damn driving lessons are over with, though, so I’m looking at August, earliest.)

But then I see myself splashed all over the latest Cites and Insights like so much blood in a slasher flick, and I just wince. Walt did a good job finding me-antidotes, though; I’ll give him that.

I happen to know about the incident with which Walt opened the latest C&I; I confirm that it was a real situation. I have to disagree with his analysis, though: to me, the crucial bit is that the vendor had been invited specifically to talk about his gizmo. I think it enormously unethical of conference organizers to pay or reimburse a vendor to talk about his gizmo. If he’s talking about the library-relevant IDE he uses to build his gizmo, or the metadata standard whose committee he sits on and which his gizmo happens to support, okay, that’s different; he’s an “outside speaker” then with whatever perquisites apply. And, within reason, he’s entitled to mention his gizmo, mostly to illustrate other points, without raising eyebrows.

But we do not pay vendors to talk about their gizmos at our conferences. They’re supposed to be paying us (for “conference” values of “us”) to do that. I should think that other paying vendors/sponsors would object! (Exception: I don’t see an ethical problem with actually designing a vendors-show-off-gizmos conference. That’s an “expo,” and lots of industries have them, including book publishing. But mixing paid gizmo-showing vendors with unpaid librarians in what is not supposed to be a sales situation, and not so much as telling the audience the compensation difference? Very bad. The kind of bad that starts rumors of kickbacks.)

Honestly, even were the vendor not being paid to talk about his gizmo, I would still have a problem with it; vendors take our money already, so why are we paying them yet more when we won’t pay our own? I wouldn’t, however, consider it unethical, just misguided; I have had my nose repeatedly rubbed in the fact that librarianship simply doesn’t have a take-care-of-our-own ethic. (I think that sucks, for a variety of reasons, but I accept it as reality.) As the situation was described to me, though—yes, I believe it’s unethical. We can’t do sweetheart deals with our own members, but we can with vendors? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. Doesn’t ALA, to take one cogent example, already have enough of a reputation of existing to provide a captive market for vendors and library schools?

For the record, I’m also not on board with the idea that associations can’t pay members for speaking labor (though I am completely on board with the idea that members can and often should decline such payment as a contribution to the organization). Walt doesn’t go into why that is, just takes it as read, but from the tenor of his comments, I assume (and all are welcome to correct me, especially Walt) that the problem is sweetheart deals and cronyism.

To which I have two reactions: one, that existing controls probably suffice to keep gross abuse to a minimum, and two, it’s happening already, wake up and smell the rooibos!

Part the first: We have conference organizing committees, and unlike some committees, they turn over relatively rapidly. It might not be impossible to create a crony bloc, but it wouldn’t be easy, either. We have conference accountants, who I presume would not be beholden to a crony bloc even if one existed. We also have trackable, maintainable data in the form of those annoying but necessary session-feedback forms. (I would add attendance data if I were running a conference, but perhaps that’s already tracked. On that basis, TXLA shouldn’t invite me back; I wasn’t a sufficient draw.) And we are also grown men and women, and professionals. How many of us would actively harm our professional organizations to shoot a few hundred bucks at a friend? Seriously, how many?

Part the second: I wouldn’t have even the pathetic speaking career I do were it not for Allen Renear, who has heard me talk (a lot, the poor guy) and still finds it in his heart to recommend me. I got the STM Innovations slot because Allen Renear looked Geoffrey Bilder in the eye and said “Trust me. Salo can do this.” (And for once, I will say of myself that I actually met expectations, sprained knee and all.)

All y’all who are lucky enough to turn down speaking invitations, what do you do? Say a flat no? Of course not (except, of course, in cases of gross speaker abuse). You recommend somebody else. I did it for Top Tech Trends, though as it turned out LITA had already approached the folks I suggested. In fact, all y’all who want a speaking career would be well-advised to catch the attention of folks who already have one, especially if you get a sense they’re overloaded or likely to become so. That’s one way the wheel turns—and with every scintilla of honesty I possess, I don’t see how compensating association members for speaking labor changes it. I really don’t. Enlighten me. Maybe there are horror stories I just haven’t heard.

There certainly are sharks in these waters. Representation and diversity issues are the great white shark, of course; innocent cronyism (such as recommending friends!) that unconsciously reinforces systemic privilege is the hardest thing in the world to root out. Let us consider, however, that our disadvantaged association members and eligible members—whatever the disadvantage in question: women in tech, people of color everywhere, rural versus urban librarians, public and K-12 librarians versus academic and corporate librarians—often have more difficulty securing invitations, funding, and time off for conferences than others.

In that case, blind adherence to no-compensation rules is actually keeping our conference slates disproportionately white, male, urban, and academic. (Anyone who thinks I’m playing identity politics in order to get grabby for myself here is invited to recognize that I’m in three of the four privileged demographics I just mentioned. I happily aver that I don’t need to see more people like me behind podiums. I need to see more people not like me.) And the problem feeds on itself, what’s more, because them that has, gets—and recommends more just like them to boot. So tell me again how no-compensation rules improve association conferences?

One counter-argument I will make myself: either conference organizers and association brass must recuse themselves from conference compensation entirely, or the organization must have a fair, transparent, and inviolable compensation policy for them. No first-class airfare, penthouse suites, and jetskis, please. I just haven’t seen anyone else making genuine counters yet—the old hands are simply taking them for granted. I’m a newbie. Here’s a clue bat for you. Hit me with it, as hard as ever you please.

All that said… this is my second-to-last post about conferences. My last post will blow this post completely out of the water. I believe, more and more strongly as time passes, that the mega-conference and the association conference as currently constituted are on their way out, so all this wrangling over compensation models will eventually become moot. I intend to support this radical position as best I know how… but not in this post. In my I-hope-to-$DEITY last post ever about conferences.

There’s an entire issue of OCLC Systems and Services dedicated to institutional repository startup and management. Most of it is ignorable, bleached white of any actual significance or character, the same old boring “how we done it (good or not)” management doublespeak that irritates more than it enlightens.

I could have written an article like those. I wouldn’t have.

I do recommend the following:

• John Kelly’s article, “Creating an institutional repository at a challenged institution.” IR creation and management isn’t one-size-fits-all. Glory hallelujah, yes. And Louisiana’s inability to implement and properly manage DSpace and EPrints is a cautionary tale for the developers of those fine tools. Same stuff I’ve been harping on here for ages (support, services, easier and more comprehensive management, that last especially important for librarians dependent on unresponsive IT for systems administration), but hey, it’s not me harping for once, and it’s In Print, so it’s automatically more important than I am anyhow, right?
• Green et al.’s article on RepoMMan. This is a beautiful thing; where’s the code, please? What’s beautiful about it is that it actually responds to faculty needs, with the side-benefit of populating the IR. Waltzing in at the very last stage of the process to beg for content is a dud; it’s extra work for extremely nebulous benefit. Giving faculty a secure, sharable storage service (which they absolutely want and need, if folks at MPOW are any indication) and adding an “archive it!” button is a winner.
• Bevan’s article on Cranfield’s IR; skip to the intelligent IR-population strategies about halfway through.
• Royster’s article on UNL; skip to the “Some counter-intuitive lessons” section, which is absolutely without question completely correct, and generalizable to other institutions to boot. (The “personal note” at the end is good reading for repo-rats too; I quite resonated with it.)

The one thing I recommend everybody interested in this space read is the supplementary interview data (PDF) to Margaret Henty’s truly excellent article about getting IRs up and running in Australia. This is the real deal, folks, from people on the ground floor. No doublespeak here, just a double helping of reality check—and plenty of humor to go with it, which I for one appreciate.

If you’re crunched for time, skip the OCLC Systems and Services issue; read Henty’s interviews instead. Trust me on this one.

Since I’ve had several people ask… no, I’m not at Wiscon, and I never have been, despite the length of time I’ve lived in Madison. It’s not out of the question that I will someday go, but in all honesty, it’s not high on my must-do list.

I am a feminist and a geek, I grant you; I would seem to be Wiscon’s ideal demographic. And I quite gave up on other SF/F cons after the Harlan Ellison debacle; they’re by geek guys, for geek guys, and I refuse to give that style of social atmosphere credence any more, nor is it my responsibility (or, frankly, desire) to reform it.

But Wiscon is for the serious feminist geeks, the ones who engage with the intersection of feminism (as well as other -isms) and geekdom on a daily basis. Me, I’m just an idle eye-roller. I read some of the right blogs and work on being attuned to representation issues and occasionally try to mess with others’ heads when that seems like a fruitful thing to do…

… and that’s it. I’m just a dilettante. Wiscon isn’t for me. That’s just not my crowd. It’s not like they’re having any trouble with attendance, either; Wiscon sells out months in advance. So I’d only be taking up space that could go to someone who’s better at all this than I am—which, admittedly, isn’t hard.

So, no, I’m not at Wiscon. I wave happily at those who are, though.

I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t even hit anything. But I’ve a ways to go yet.

A two-hour lesson is actually a lot of driving, and I (being nervous) was more than ready to stop by the end of it. As I remember from the old days, I’m good at anticipating and reacting to traffic, but I don’t have the physical affordances of a car in my bones, so I’m not good at getting the car to do the right thing even when I know perfectly well what the right thing is.

So my lane changes are a bit abrupt, I don’t handle pulling into medians well, and I have to watch the speedometer too much because I don’t have a good sense of how the car feels at particular speeds. Plus my turning leaves a lot to be desired.

But… for the first time behind a wheel in seventeen frickin’ years… I wasn’t so bad. There were people out on the road doing way stupider things than I was. (You. In the white Infiniti. On Park Street. Yeah, you. Fix your turn signals or learn how to use ’em, one or the other, preferably both.)

My instructor assumes I am able to do some practice driving on the side. I’m actually not (the whole “no car” thing), so this could get to be an adventure. Hope not.

I have a field trip tomorrow, in preparation for which I have to bring marketing posters home, so David met me at work to help schlep.

Then we went to dinner, and a very good dinner it was.

And then I came home to homemade peanut-butter cookies and nine white roses, one for each year that has passed since he and I stood in Gates of Heaven (ex-)synagogue and promised a lot of serious stuff to each other.

I’m glad we did all that, nine years ago, as much fuss and bother as it was at the time. It’s paid off since.

I cannot take entire credit for the insight in this post. It came out of a three-hour meeting today on the topic of research computing. It feels terribly important to me, though, and it’s crying out to be part of the “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel” article, and I don’t know of anyone else who has put quite these words together in quite this way, so I am writing it down before I forget it.

The natural constituency of institutional repositories as they are generally envisioned is the STM world—scientific, technical, medical. That’s where the serials crisis is most acute. That’s where funders are starting to mandate open access to research results and the underlying data used to generate them. That’s where the digital revolution in scholarly communication has made the most progress.

That’s also the group least invested in academic libraries, especially in their traditional image as The Book Barn. (Library branders take note! The “Book Barn” brand, I would argue, is actively harmful among this population.)

E-journals and article databases are a transparent service to these researchers; surveys have shown that because the access technology is the same—that is, the web browser—they simply cannot distinguish between a resource on the free web and a resource that their libraries have paid dearly for. (OA, of course, is muddying the waters somewhat, which should not be construed as an argument against OA.) Books? They don’t use books. The OPAC? Is irrelevant to them, because they don’t use books. Reference service? They don’t use it much if at all, and (as a rule) they don’t send their students to it. Instruction? Typically has the least penetration into these disciplines (health-sciences may be something of an exception here, but I think the point stands), and researchers in these disciplines are most likely to have teaching exemptions, so instruction is not a useful gateway for them to learn about and value other library services.

These researchers do not see the library, do not go to the (physical) library, do not care about the library, do not think about the library. So insofar as institutional repositories are a library service (and as I have repeated ad infinitum, they are that nearly everywhere they exist, at least in the United States), they are just as invisible as every other library service. Small wonder I have an outreach problem! My key constituencies just never think to look in the library for me.

The arts and humanities tell a different tale. The library is a major locus of arts and humanities research, with librarians a major part of the faculty’s working lives, both as scholars and as teachers. This means in practice that librarians often play a key role in introducing arts and humanities faculty to technologies that can help them—from database searching to wikis to RSS to Second Life to bibliographic managers to, yes, the institutional repository. In my nearly two years doing this work, I have actually had more contact with humanities scholars than STM researchers, and I am quite willing to believe that’s partly or wholly because the library impinges more often and more deeply on their consciousness.

(I cannot take credit for the analysis in the preceding paragraph, which I think is brilliant and entirely correct; it came from Madison’s acting library-system director, Ed van Gemert. My experience, however, is mine only, and may not generalize.)

I need to think about this situation some more before I can formulate a coherent response to it. My first impression, though, is to follow an instinct I’ve had for a while and market to STM departments’ local IT staff, who are both less contemptuous of the library than those they serve and more likely to see the IR as a solution to genuine problems they have.

A blonde mallard (don’t blame me; blame gene-mixing with barnyard ducks) is the first to take her ducklings out on Monona Bay; I saw them a couple days ago. At least seven or eight.

This morning a contingent of Canada geese had four babies waddling about the shore. Until someone showed up with a couple of dogs, at which point they went for the water, with some shrewish observations about the neighborhood going to heck.

Still no loons, baby or otherwise. But at least I’m getting pinfeathers on parade!

Arthur Sale nails it again:

[The institution] recognizes that author-side fees are now a significant requirement, and moves to re-align its ‘acquisitions budget’ to become a ‘research journal budget’. A fraction of the journals budget is reserved for supporting alternative funding models, and the institution commits to monitoring and adapting its expenditure to match the change in the industry and the activity of its authors.

Yes. This needs to happen. It will not, however, be an easy sell—serials librarians and collection developers are going to scream bloody murder. If budget reallocation to support of open access is to happen in spite of the screaming, library top brass must back it.

I’ve said before that academic librarians are sadly ignorant about open access; our discipline’s research literature lags well behind others in progress toward OA. Sale’s eminently sensible and logical proposal is unfortunately liable to run aground on that very same ignorance, that very same apathy.

“What about print?” many of them are going to say, and not without reason; despite trends, many researchers do still use and prefer print, and librarians have to make them happy too.

“Bah, that OA stuff—it’s all vanity-published trash,” some of them will say. In my experience, academic librarians have a strong, largely implicit, and (of course) completely erroneous belief that “you get what you pay for.” In the long run, it’s possible that making them set aside some of their budget to support OA will turn them into advocates—they’re paying for it, so it must be all right. But in the short run, open access smells funny to them, much as it does to many faculty.

“We can’t trust that digital stuff; nobody’s preserving it,” some of them are (still!) going to say. That I’ve had librarians say this to my face, when digital preservation is part of what I do, may perhaps serve as an ignorance measure. (It may also be a measure of pushback against digital librarianship in general. Don’t kid yourselves: academic libraries contain substantial quantities of this style of passive-aggressive pushback, and since OA is digital, OA is implicated.)

“Open access isn’t something we can control; it’s all in faculty hands,” still others will say. I heard this from a senior librarian a month or so ago.

And finally, there’s the ever-popular, “You’re destroying my budget!” When I say “scream bloody murder,” this is what I mean. Serials librarians and collection developers are not going to welcome anything that makes them cut more subscriptions. They aren’t thinking ten, twenty, or fifty years in the future. They’re thinking about the angry faculty they’ll see next week.

Sale’s contention that “Libraries that do not adapt to the changing scenarios run the risk of being labeled by their researchers as biased and failing to meet researchers’ needs” is a spot of mad wish-fulfillment in an otherwise solid thought-piece. For one thing, as Peter Suber must be tired of saying, most OA journals do not charge author fees; this cuts down considerably on the number of faculty inconvenienced by them. For another, those journals that do charge author fees are generally in well-funded research disciplines, where they’re considered less onerous and are more likely to be grant-funded.

For a third, faculty are hazy on where their journals come from to begin with. They don’t know enough about scholarly publishing to think about coming to libraries for OA author-fee money. Even if a few of them do, they won’t be talking to librarians like me who can and will advocate for them—they’ll be talking to liaisons and collection developers, who are (I say again) clueless about OA when they’re not active doubters. For a fourth, per Vivian Siegel, how many faculty are even aware of a journal’s OA status when they publish in it? How many libraries that set up such a fund are going to be besieged by faculty wanting to pay page charges in toll-access journals?

So faculty demand for OA author fees isn’t going to impinge on collection-developer consciousness. They’ll just see OA as one more thing decimating their budgets. And they’ll scream about it, I promise you.

I’m not throwing cold water on Sale’s idea. I reiterate: I completely agree that serials-acquisitions budgets need to move toward funding open access. (In fact, I go a little beyond Sale; I think, selfishly if you will, that some of that money ought to be funneled toward institutional repositories and library-internal digitization, publishing, and publishing-support projects.) I am only trying to explain why this will be a hard slog, at least in US academic libraries. Forewarned, forearmed.

How do we cure academic-librarian ignorance of OA? I wish I knew, and I’m open to suggestions. It might help if OA advocates reminded themselves daily that librarians and libraries exist. A mantra, of sorts: Libraries exist; libraries matter; OA would not exist without libraries.

In other D-Lib news, the British contingent has a fine article on preservation vis-à-vis institutional repositories. Nice change from the narrow-minded “open access doesn’t care about preservation!” crowd and the contemptuous “IRs are no good for preservation!” info-sci crowd. Also, I appreciate the blunt appraisal of OA’s battle for hearts and minds in this article about Australian repositories. Sugarcoating reality is useless, and the Australian contingent is remarkable for not doing it.

Alma Swan is one of the most consistently credible voices in the open-access movement. She’s done the research, and she writes it up with elegance, complete frankness, and caution where caution is due.

And now she’s got a blog. Recommended, partly because she’s Alma Swan and partly because her blog voice is a good deal more energetic and spirited than her carefully-restrained research voice.

(Hat-tip to Open Access News, of course.)