Caveat Lector

Random thought spurred by the coincidence of reading the JISC report on data curation and Deb Kaplan’s report on John Willinsky’s JCDL keynote:

The JISC report admits quite candidly that it doesn’t know where data curators are going to spring from. The subtext, to my jaundiced eye, hints at “from the ranks of underemployed Ph.Ds desperate to stay in the academy.”

But librarians? What librarians? (I do not make this up. I am not sullenly reading my own bias into it. Read the report, which aside from this irritation is a very good report indeed.)

The librarians who run IRs now? Well, We The Researchers are not so much impressed with them. Really, librarians won’t do, don’t you know. They’re generalists, you see. They don’t have Specialized Domain Knowledge. We’re also a bit dubious about their technical skill. Not that we know, of course, because we don’t talk to any and our report-writers at JISC don’t either. (I looked. The only reference to librarian opinions was on the topic of researcher competence at metadata creation. Big surprise: researchers are not competent to do metadata. Guess what? They’re researchers, not cataloguers!)

And We The Researchers are not sure that libraries are serious about this IR business. Are they really committed to preserving information for the long term?

Right. All you librarians, stop laughing now, it’s rude. After all, just because we’ve been preserving information for hundreds of years doesn’t mean we’re any good at it or have any personal, professional, or institutional commitment to it or anything.

Now, look, there are ways to talk about IRs not being ideal for all purposes that aren’t outright offensive. “There may be significant economies of scale and technology in repositories serving more than a single institution” is one way; I happen to think along those lines myself. “The current generation of IR software is not flexible or adaptable enough to manage datasets and their metadata adequately” is another all-too-cogent objection.

But “[IRs'] ability to survive as robust, trustworthy archives is unknown” (p. 57) is pointless insult. Nobody has a track record here, thank you very much. Nobody’s even entirely sure what such a track record is supposed to look like. Government? Can’t speak for the UK, but the US is not a shining example here. Publishers? Do not get me started. Private interests? Portico is too new to talk about. LOCKSS? Oh, hey, wasn’t that a library project? University IT? Please. They can’t plan with a longer horizon than next week. Departmental data centers? Are at least reasonable competition, but you tell me how sustainable their funding models are compared to your average library, and what kind of contingency planning they’ve done for the data they control should that funding someday run out.

Have I done IR contingency planning? You’d better believe I have. Because I’m a librarian. We’re all about contingencies and planning. And long-term preservation of information for use, in case anyone had forgotten—and clearly some have!

What’s going on here is part of the same tired syndrome I have remarked upon before. The substantial and growing segment of the open-access contingent that does not consist of librarians unfortunately shares with academia at large an underinformed condescension toward librarianship and its practitioners. It’s not hard to back up this assertion: merely start with Stevan Harnad.

The more troubling problem, however, is that ridiculous remarks like the one I just eviscerated are just about the only discourse available on librarians (never mind librarian IR managers) in open access outside the librarian literature itself (which nobody reads but us librarians). Librarians are simply absent when We The Researchers talk amongst themselves. John Willinsky, I am looking at you, sir; it’s lovely that you spoke in front of librarians at JCDL, but I’d like you to try listening to one or two, and then writing about what you hear! The Access Principle is a fine book, but on matters touching libraries, it’s stunningly underinformed and incomplete.

For the record: Subject-specialist librarians do indeed have specialized domain knowledge. They have to. I have more than once gone to a colleague to ask about the tools of the trade in a particular discipline. I haven’t lacked for an answer yet.

Moreover, I myself have some specialized knowledge specifically about discipline-based data formats and analysis tools. (I don’t know much about what researchers do with SAS, but I do know bits and bobs about its native data format and export options.) I add more when opportunity arises. That said—I do not consider myself the model of an ideal data curator, and that leads me straight to the other half of my rant…

… which is, where are the L- and I-schools, again? I’d love to learn me some principles and practices of data curation. I haven’t the least notion where to go for tutelage. Some fields are starting to get ahead of the eight-ball here—I hear wonderful things about bioinformatics—but it’s not nearly enough, and it doesn’t help people like me who are in the general ballpark already but need intensive, highly specialized training.

Come on, librarianship. If we’re going to be credible curators, we need to step up and act like we’re serious about it. I’m ready. Who’s behind me?

I didn’t go to JCDL this year, but the fearless Tim Donohue did, and he and Scott Phillips did a fantastic update of the DSpace How-To Guide from last year.

I’m terribly glad for this. Manakin is heading my way in a few weeks, and now I will be just that much less clueless about it.

I meant to sleep in this morning; I truly did. If one can’t sleep in on one’s own birthday, when can one? The Goths had other ideas, however.

I picked up a really quite amazing haul from my husband: two Discworld books (including my very own Monstrous Regiment), a DVD of Singin’ in the Rain (which is my favorite movie ever; Debbie Reynolds is forgettable, but Jean Hagen is awesome, Cyd Charisse is the sexiest woman of all time, and in the eternal Kelly-Astaire wars I am firmly in the Kelly camp), and the fourth season of Babylon 5.

My own present to myself was a pair of trail shoes, which I tried out yesterday and today fully intending to return them if they didn’t suit my cranky demanding feet. But it seems they do—nary a blister, not even the beginnings of one, and the soles are nice and bouncy and feel good.

We walked to the zoo, where Leroy the zebu licked our hands and a little tree frog sang me happy birthday. The butterflies are out full force sucking down thistle-juice, and the water-lilies are blooming, and a li’l baby ’skrat poked his nose out of the bay on our way home.

Oh, and we had a nice dinner at the Dardanelles, topped off by their Banana Cashew Cloud, which is the best dessert in Madison. David had a chocolate cake ready for me at home, but I’d had a slice for breakfast, because it’s my birthday and I can do that if I want to.

“I hadn’t any other festivities planned,” he said when we got home. “Though you didn’t get to blow out any candles, and I did get candles.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I really don’t have anything much to wish for.”

I have an… idiosyncratic mode of dress. Half pure practicality, half what I happen to like—and what I happen to like bears no relationship whatever to what I am supposed to like.

I can behave myself when I have to; I have adequate supplies of nylon hosiery, unobjectionable shoes, dresses that meet standards for professional wear, and even (ugh) makeup. It is my privilege, however, that most of the time I don’t have to. Dress-code at MPOW is jeans and one step up from T-shirts.

Pawing through my closet the other day, I found a caftan bought from a catalog ’way back in the day and barely ever worn, because it just felt too pretty for regular wear. Hell with that, I thought, and wore it yesterday. With, because I am a practical woman with very picky feet and I walk the mile and a half to work and the mile and a half back, black socks and my workhorse Munros.

Yes. I wear socks with dresses. You may all point and laugh now. Then go find the most uncomfortable pair of shoes in your closet, wear nylons with them, and walk a mile and a half somewhere. That’s why I wear socks with dresses. Even my best pair of sandals, which is pretty good, leaves blisters right under the ball of my foot. (Got one now, as a matter of fact, from last weekend.)

Anyway, someone stopped me during yesterday morning’s walk to work to gush over the caftan and ask where I’d gotten it. In the course of a day’s meetings (which for me involves even more walking—this is a big campus), I attracted quite a few curious glances. I’m used to that. As I said, my fashion sense is… unusual.

So I didn’t actually take note of any of it until I passed a coed on my walk home. Said shiksa had the raccoon-eyes, low-slung pants, and tight shirt that proclaimed strict adherence to fashion dicta—and the look on her face proclaimed “OMG somebody get the fashion victim out of my sight stat!” clearer than words.

Whatever. I bet her feet hurt.

Some days I wonder why in hell I do what I do. Such days usually feature supercilious faculty, dubious librarians, or (worst of all) both at once. These days, when I have one of those days, I walk back to my office grumbling and hammer away at another para or two of the Roach Motel article.

(Said article currently consists of four single-spaced pages of notes and half- to fully-composed paragraphs. Oh, and a lengthening del.icio.us tagset.)

Then there are days like today, when I meet a librarian who immediately has half a dozen ideas for materials I ought to capture, volunteers (VOL. UN. TEERS.) to create a listing of faculty in her discipline who already have preprints on their websites, and suggests marketing materials she would find useful.

I must say, I’m much happier working on marketing materials that have actual use in their future than I am writing a critical re-evaluation of the institutional repository.

So I promised colleagues a while back that I’d do up some marketing materials for the repository. And there’s nothing like a nice flyer, right?

I have no budget. Repository-rats never do. Hey, we work on open access, what do we need money for? So I can’t do spiffy four-color stuff; I run on a strictly grayscale basis. I mention this not to whinge, but to point out that it’s a pretty serious design constraint in a full-color world.

I also don’t have Photoshop (see above about “no budget”), so I’m working with the GIMP.

The story I wanted to tell in this particular flyer is “Librarians have always cared for your books and your journals… now we take care of your digital works too!” (I dearly hope that’s both/and enough to be inoffensive. I’m never sure about these things.)

So I got the bottom half done fairly quickly. Screenshot, list of Things To Put In The IR with nice arrows pointing to the screenshot. (The GIMP doesn’t do auto-shapes such as arrows. Google kindly informed me that the way to do arrows is to use a wingdings font at a suitably-enlarged size. Worked a treat.) Logo, URL, and contact info at the bottom. No sweat. (Well, some sweat, because ever so not graphic designer. But it wasn’t bad.)

And then there was the top half…

My first thought was a photomontage of books and libraries and stuff. I zipped over to Flickr, searched materials marked with the Creative Commons Attribution license on the tags “books” and “library” and whomped one together with the results. It looked stupid and square and amateurish. I got rid of it, though I kept its individual components.

Going back to my search turned up these awesome old-book cutouts. I snagged one and got to work.

My first thought was to outline the book, cut the outline away from its background, and use the background as a border for photos. The way to do this is not by tracing with the mouse; I figured that one out in two seconds flat. Google to the rescue again—the way to do it is to blow up the picture a bit and use the Bezier path tool. This lets you select points all around the outline of your thing, turn that outline into a selection, and clear everything inside it. Once I grokked the concept, I had my outline pretty quickly.

So I slapped the outline back on the flyer and popped a few photos in behind it. And I printed it out. And it didn’t look too bad… people know what an open book looks like in outline, don’t they?… it’ll work, kinda… okay, okay, it looked like a squashed butterfly with ragged wings. No good. Try again, genius.

My next idea was to outline the top pages and the edges of a couple pages underneath—again, the Bezier tool lets you do this—and layer photos as though it were a book of photos. After a while, it became clear this wasn’t going to turn out well, so I abandoned it.

And then, finally, I did the right thing. Outline the open pages, recto and verso, clear the interior of the outline, pop the photos underneath, and leave the rest of the book image alone. This? Looked awesome after a bit of photo tweakage. Even in grayscale it looks good.

I had my husband critique it, and I’m going to fix a couple of layout and font issues tomorrow. But in the main, I am well content.

A graphic designer would have figured this out in much less time than I took. But I added a few tools to my amateur’s arsenal, so I consider it time reasonably well spent.

I haven’t been one of the Google Books doomsayers heretofore, because the participating libraries have observed Dorothea’s First Law of Digitization: “Always control your bits.”

I’m not happy with the CIC right now (despite, I should note, working for a CIC institution), because from all appearances they didn’t heed the First Law. Bad contract negotiators, no biscuit.

Nothing to be done about it now, I suppose, but let me suggest this to all libraries in any stage of Google Books negotiations (including just considering such negotiations): If we must have escrow for copyrighted bits—and I don’t have an opinion on that, not being a lawyer or a copyright strategist—at least don’t leave the fox in the henhouse. Google should not be the escrower. Toss the bits at Portico, toss them at the Library of Congress, toss them at the DLF, toss them at a dark archive, whatever—but find a trusted third party.

I suppose I’m fine with Google funding that third party to hold the bits for the time being, though I don’t consider it ideal and I hope the third party would be smart enough to have a backup funding plan. I’m not fine with Google demanding the escrow, not (to all appearances) having a clear plan for taking work out of escrow, and holding the bits. That’s unsound practice.

Truthfully, I think Google’s missing a trick here too. Publishers are slavering to go after deep-pocketed, for-profit Google for the least hint of an actionable cause. Publishers aren’t slavering to fight libraries. They do it, to be sure; I thought the AAP’s e-reserves hunt would die a quiet and ignominious death owing to fears of awakening the slumbering faculty behemoth. I was wrong. The hunt hasn’t stopped; it’s just gone underground.

But at least it’s gone underground. That’s protection that I would think Google would find intriguing. Apparently not.

Please, library contract negotiators. Google out of the henhouse. Please.

(with apologies to I.B. Singer)

So the biblioblogosphere’s gotten out its monocles (sans ponies, alas) and its ascots and is responding with all seriousness and decorum to M-ch–l G-rm-n’s latest sallies on Brittanica. Ahem. If you care to learn more, a Technorati search will provide most necessary reading.

Me? I’m still stuck on the funny. C’mon, people, this is comedy platinum here! Laugh! I think I’ve still got one or two “One of the Blog People” buttons left. Who’s with me on a mass snailmail of same to Mr. Now One Of Us?

It does appear that G-rm-n was his usual insultingly privileged self. He’s pulled overt privilege trips before, and damn it, I am past annoyed and getting downright angry that my tribe is not calling him on them louder and more often. My personal thanks to those who have. Mr. G-rm-n can have my “alternative medicine” Armaid when he pries it out of my working-very-well-thank-you hands, the same hands that standard Western medical practice ignored for years and even damaged further.

For the most part, though, I’m kicking back and letting myself enjoy the joke. Much more fun than getting offended yet again at G-rm-n’s unshakable beliefs and offputting personal style. (I say “personal” rather than “writing,” incidentally, because I have met him, and he went out of his way to put me down. I’m not sure what it says about the personality of our profession that many of us revere this man when that same repellent condescension crisscrosses every bit of his written output I’ve ever seen. I’m damn sure it says some ugly things about elitism and privilege.)

I think Jane is on to something. “I’m better than the common man” is exactly what’s going on here. I do not, however, think that we need to be looking out for “trivia,” because the content of blogs is not the real meat of the attack. If it were, maybe we’d get cited and formally refuted once in a while, instead of merely sneeringly alluded to!

No, what’s going on here is captured neatly in this blog comment:

I think the main problem the presenter was trying to illustrate was the use of casual prose and an expression of personal feelings in a professional-themed post, which would never occur in a column because they have to meet Editorial Standards.

Aha. It’s not the content. It’s the register. The G-rm-ns of this world aren’t afraid of what we might say; they’re confident enough in their superiority and their privilege to think they can outargue us or just plain shut us down within the profession—no one who’s anyone reads blogs anyway, right?

What they’re scared of—and I wish I understood why, but I don’t; it can’t just be a control issue, it’s too visceral for that—is that conversations can be had, lessons learned, and decisions made without a choking cloud of turgid prose and rigid process descending over everything.

It’s almost an identity issue. If we don’t write the way librarians have heretofore written, are we still librarians? If we don’t do things the way libraries have heretofore done things, are we still working in libraries? Librarians are librarians. They behave a certain way and have certain narrow interests. They’re not knitters or gamers or parents or genre partisans (much less ficcers) or football fans or political activists (well, okay, maybe that last). So when they’re presenting themselves as librarians, librarianship should be the whole of the self-presentation. All that other stuff? Is other than, and therefore less than, librarianship. It should not be presented alongside it for fear of lowering the lofty communicative register that makes librarianship what it is.

That’s my read on all this. That’s my best guess about why G-rm-n hates bloggers but still contributed to a blog. He’ll never be a “blogger” as long as he still writes like a (G-rm-n–style) librarian. And he’ll slam me (metaphorically speaking) every chance he gets, because even when I’m writing for publication, I don’t write like a G-rm-n–style librarian. G-rm-n–style librarians don’t put “Roach Motel” in their article titles.

Now, it should be noted that the friction between work demeanor and non-work demeanor has been a CavLec theme since CavLec’s earliest days, with work-versus-blogging a common subtheme. I may well be reading my own issues into this kerfuffle; I was glad to see Jane’s and the Mad Strategerist’s contributions because they happened completely independently of me while still capturing pieces of my sense of the issue. Adjust your internal bias sensors accordingly.

And now I am done being all buttoned-down and serious, and shall therefore go off into a huge gale of laughter again, on my way back to my usual court-fool stance. Mr. Blog People his own self, blogging! How bloody hilarious is that?

ETA: And what should come up in my aggregator mere seconds after publication of this post? Some days I wonder why I bother. Except, the funny, the funny!

We hadn’t seen Third Goth in quite a while, but this morning there was An Incident that ran something like this (allowing for PG-13ing of language):

Third Goth: O HAI THAR

Dream: WHO R U?

Third Goth: IM IN UR YARD, CHASIN UR BIRDEEZ

Dream: NO WAI!

Third Goth: WAI!

Didi: NO WAI!

Third Goth: WAI!

Dream: DO NOT WANT.

Didi: I made u a cookie, Third Goth, but I—

Dream: DO NOT WANT!

Didi: ‘k, DO NOT WANT. Sheesh.

Third Goth: EFF U!

Dream: EFF U 2!

Third Goth: I chase moar birdeez nau, kthxbye.

Dream: ??!!!!!???

Third Goth came up to me as I left the house to go to work, and purred and rolled as long as I would consent to give pettinz. Third Goth howled after me when I finally said I had to go.

I wouldn’t mind adding Third Goth to the Goth menage, but Dream would kill me.

Late May and early June are primetime baby-critter season around these parts. Ducklings and goslings, of course—one intrepid goose couple in the bay has ten youngsters, which has got to be a hassle and a half. The goose families are fairly social; more than once I’ve seen a sort of goose playdate, three or four families mowing the lawn together. The mallards aren’t like that; they keep their families separated, because adults will attack ducklings that don’t belong to them.

There’s also a baby rabbit living near Brittingham Park. Bit nervous, but insanely cute, right down to its little tuft of a tail. I think the dark-gray finch-sized birds hanging out in a dark-gray posse are juvenile starlings, but I could be wrong.

Should I tire of younglings, I can always keep an eye out for the green heron, who gets huffy and flies off if I get too close, or the purple martins and swallows in the martin-houses on the west side of the bay, or the little bunch of goldfinches who hang out at one house’s thistle-seed bags.

Goldfinches are wonderful. They are just joy in bird form. There’s no better way to start or end a day than to happen upon goldfinches.