Caveat Lector

The Ithaka folks put out a really sharp report on the state of university presses and libraries vis-a-vis scholarly publishing last week. This is excellent stuff; I highly recommend it. A few random thoughts on it:

Some provosts need to unpack their heads from their you-know-wheres. “Don’t change, university presses, we love you just the way you are—but don’t expect us to fund you unless you change, because you’re relics of a bygone age!” Yeah, that’s a winner. I bet uni-press people are rolling their eyes right out of their heads at that one.

The hits at institutional repositories are so good I’m going to quote them in the Roach Motel article. Yes, we are dusty university attics. No, I don’t like it either. However… we’re not as well-funded as the uni presses think we are. Nor I don’t understand why some of these folks aren’t working with us, neither. Heaven forbid we should solve some of their preservation problems or give their backlist new distribution channels or rescue their out-of-print works or anything. But siloing and Not Invented Here is the heart of the difficulty, isn’t it?

I still have personal difficulty with all of this marketing-speak that presses are so concerned about. Monographs, okay, I get it a little—but what do they actually do other than send out review copies hither and yon? (David’s book barely even got that much, and as uni-press books go, it’s a marketing dream.) Journal marketing I don’t get at all, especially in an open-access environment. To whom are they marketing, and is it for eyeballs or sales?

That last question, I think, is a highly salient one. As I read the language coming from uni-press folks, their marketing is geared toward marketing for sales, and they’re still thinking about electronic publishing in terms of making money directly from it. I believe that’s retrograde thinking that they need to move past. If you’re going to be a cost center, be a cost center—that means don’t sell stuff when you can avoid it, people, because when you do the green eyeshades come after you!

I don’t mind the print-on-demand-for-pay models so much, but I do think trying to make direct money off e-publishing, especially of low-demand monographs, is a pipe dream. Bite the bullet and go open-access. The argument you then take to university brass is a cost-containment one: “This stuff needs to get published. It can get published at zero marginal cost and at the same time take advantage of greater reach from data-mining and web crawling, or it can get published in print at huge marginal cost and languish in warehouses because libraries can’t afford to buy it, or it can get published online with totally unnecessary (and possibly not recoupable) marginal costs of building and maintaining secure datacenters and fulfillment operations, or it can not get published at all and torpedo careers. You tell me what makes the most sense.”

Anyway, once everyone gets over the idea of marketing for dollars, a lot of innovation can be spurred in the marketing-for-eyeballs department; that’s what the Internet revolution is all about, if you ask me. I’d like to see it happen, myself, and I don’t mind in the least admitting that a uni-press person may well be better at it than I am.

As for dealing with faculty as authors, I think there’s some miscommunication and distortion happening. The library folks who want to get into publishing (rarae aves with a publishing background such as myself aside) do indeed tend to be the systems types, behind-the-scenes folks who don’t interact with faculty much. Thus the impression that librarians don’t grok the faculty-massage aspects of publishing.

The thing is, we systems types aren’t the whole of librarianship. If you were to ask bibliographers or specialized reference folk, I believe you’d get a much different picture of faculty interaction patterns. We know more than we’re given credit for, we librarians; we just divide up the knowledge in sometimes-odd ways.

Me, I’m just as happy leaving the authors to the uni-press people. Authors are bloody insane, faculty journal editors are just as bad if not worse, and I’m all about avoiding insanity when possible. But there’s a difference between “librarians may not want to deal with that part of the process” and “librarians can’t deal with that part of the process,” and I’d like that difference respected.

I’m chewing my fingernails to the elbow waiting for Information Tomorrow to come out. Rereading my chapter, I wrote a lot of things that Ithaka is writing and Brian Rosenblum is saying and so on and so forth— but honestly, it’s irritating as all hell that I wrote them a full year ago now and nobody gets to read them but me!

Fix that, university presses. Fix that, and we have a winner!

I did not know that the UW runs a four-week summer choir that’s open to the community. Now I know, because I went to their concert Saturday night and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The theme being “Spice Up Your Life,” naturally David and I hit the new Indian restaurant in town, Maharani, beforehand. It’s a solid restaurant with service a cut above standard Madison “Is everything okay?” behavior. I never thought we’d see waiters ceremoniously pulling out chairs and unfolding napkins once we’d left Fairfax (where that level of service is standard, even in inexpensive restaurants), but there it was, right down to hot towels at the end of dinner. For Madison, quite decadent!

I love me some good pakoras, and Maharani’s are very good, crisp rather than mealy. We can recommend the combined vegetarian appetizer; everything on it was tasty. The onion kulcha was excellent as well (I like my neighborhood’s Taj fine, but it tends to burn its naan). We’ll be going back, if only so that I can take a crack at the South Indian page of the menu.

The summer choir, I am told, puts itself together in four weeks flat, three rehearsals a week. That’s fairly intense—and not a lot of time to just let the music sink in. For that reason, it’s fairly clear why the choral timbre didn’t vary much (a Renaissance madrigal really ought to have a different timbre from a Brahms piece), lines weren’t shaped dynamically, and a few cutoffs were a mite sloppy. The sound was nice and full and even, though, and there was dynamic variation, just not on the line-shaping level.

PDQ Bach’s “The Seasonings” formed the concert’s second half. I love PDQ’s choral offerings (would do much to sing Madam Peep in “Oedipus Tex”), and this one is familiar to me from high school (didn’t sing it, as I wasn’t in the SATB choir the year they did it, but did hear it sung). It’s a hoot, full of hopelessly vile puns and bizarre instrumentation. The gentleman playing (if such a term may be used) the tromboon, the foghorn, and other such tortured instruments did so with perfect aplomb, considerable attention to pitch (probably more than PDQ himself ever gave), and a tuxedo with white sneakers.

If I’m not hopelessly busy next summer (and I don’t have to learn to drive again, so I might actually manage not to be), I’ll give the Summer Choir a whirl—it looks like a fun group.

I passed my road test, and am now the proud possessor of a Class D Wisconsin Driver License (probationary).

It was one of those things where the disastrous dress rehearsal means a fine performance. I think I shook poor Drew’s confidence during the rehearsal session, but the actual test (with a very pleasant examiner) went fine. I didn’t emerge quite unscathed; I changed lanes without noticing the small side-road, and per my usual routine, I missed a blind-spot check (quoth the examiner; I don’t think I did, but I’m not the examiner, am I?).

But I passed, and I am now a legal driver, and I do not have to spend any more money on driving lessons, and life is good!

Drew. Four Lakes. He rocks.

Had my last lesson before tomorrow’s road test tonight. I suck at three-point turns, but I’m reasonably solid on everything else, and I can parallel-park like nobody’s business.

So if I don’t do anything epic-ly stupid tomorrow (which, I’m afraid, is not a sure thing, though it’s a reasonably sure thing), I should be okay. (Memo to self: CHECK BLIND SPOT.)

This has actually been sorta fun. It could have been a real ordeal, and in all honesty that’s what I was expecting. But it’s okay. Cars have affordances, and I’m starting to feel what they are, and that’s what I was in this to do.

(Well, that and keeping my boss happy by being able to travel within the state.)

Spare a kind thought for me about 4 tomorrow afternoon, please. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Talk about open-access mandates in institutions has tended to irk me rather. I’d love an institutional mandate. I can’t create one. (On twenty-six campuses? All by myself? With no support from above, no institutional power, not even so much as a line in my job description to back me up? Of course I can’t.)

I’m scoffing a bit less, though, after reading this short Surowiecki piece on the discrepancy between the fuel-efficiency standards Americans vote for and the fuel efficiency of the vehicles they actually buy.

Perhaps that’s what’s going on with open access. Faculty are nominally in favor of the idea, but putting their articles where their opinions are could (they believe) entail career difficulties. If everyone has to do it because of a mandate, the playing field levels and they can comply without worry.

This view of things is optimistic for national mandates and funder mandates, where the levelling of the playing field is immediate and obvious, but less optimistic for institutional and “patchwork” mandates. I am already hearing rumblings at MPOW about playing dog-in-the-manger with intellectual property—and yes, that’s mostly patents, but if those offices determine that research results are being flung to the four winds, they won’t hesitate to pry. Somehow I don’t think they’ll share librarian ideals, and there’s no question that they’ve more institutional pull than the library.

Overall, if there is a sense that mandating open access will put our institution at a disadvantage compared to others, it won’t happen. (One of the first questions I get when I discuss author addenda with faculty is, “Will the journal reject my article if I use this?” They are that concerned.) At this stage of the game, unfortunately, it’s impossible to provide clear and convincing evidence that OA won’t cause pain. Just telling faculty that they oughtn’t publish in their discipline’s top-ranked journal because it’s neither green nor gold will immediately end the conversation; worse, it will create a cadre of vocal OA detractors.

I admit that I have never tried to push for any sort of mandate, neither institutional nor patchwork. The time is not yet right. What I would suggest instead to my fellow repository-rats is close attention to funder mandates… and crafty service development in advance of them. “Need to send your paper to PubMed Central? Push this button, and we’ll handle it—oh, and we’ll keep a copy in our IR for proper safekeeping as well.” That, I suspect, will play very well indeed in the University of Peoria.

After all the foofooraw about the New York Times “hip librarians” article, I feel I owe it to journalism to point out when journalists get librarianship right.

Andrew LaVallee got librarianship right and is to be commended for it. A full list of everything he did right in this article would be longer than the article itself, but just for starters:

• No buns. No shushing. No covert sneers. No misogyny. Dayenu!
• A real debate, not something trumped up out of nowhere. Nor is it fluffy “style” bushwa. These are people I recognize as librarians (and would even if I didn’t recognize the names), thinking librarianly thoughts and doing librarians’ work.
• Appropriate skepticism, presenting all sides without throwing support anywhere obvious. Sometimes that’s just wishy-washiness or unwillingness to hold to an unpopular truth, granted, but in this case it’s quite fair to let all sides have their say, since nobody knows how these particular experiments are going to turn out.
• Awareness of the online world. Some journalists turn up their noses at it, much the way we do Wikipedia, but let’s face it: online is where immediate response to immediate questions happens.
• Homework. LaVallee did his Dewey research, and expressed the results nicely.

Bravo, sir, well done. Write more about libraries, please!

This is for my own reference as much as anybody’s. If you’re not coming to Milwaukee, feel free to skip this post and move on.

Friday October 19th: DSpace tutorial, 8:30 to 12:30. (Ugh, I’m going to have to rent a car and drive to this. They couldn’t start at 9 so I could take the first bus in?)

Saturday: preconferences, none of which I’m interested in; not going. (I must say, ASIST could stand to brush up its preconference game a bit. An entire precon on RSS?)

Sunday:

• 11:30 New Members Brunch
• 1:00 Future of Institutional Repositories (I’m pinch-hitting for Ken Frazier on this panel, I was recently informed)
• 3:30 Online Communities
• 5:30 Leadership Development Program
• 6:30 Welcome Reception

Monday:

• 8:30 Live Usability Lab: OA Archives and Digital Repositories (I’m on the panel. Monkeys! In barrels!)
• 10:30 Plenary
• 1:30 Social Computing in LIS Education (may be preempted by poster session)
• 3:30 Social Justice and the Information Professions (may be preempted by poster session; if not, Approaches to Teaching and Learning Info Retrieval as backup)

The thing about the poster sessions is a big argh. The Five Weeks poster is scheduled during the first poster session, which is up against the usability panel I’m on. I’m asking to get the poster moved to a different session, because I think I’m the only Five Weeks peep going to ASIST, but I have no idea whether they’ll do it. Argh.

Tuesday:

• 8:30 Opening Science to All
• 10:15 Social Computing
• 11:45 Awards Luncheon
• 2:15 Seeking Knowledge in a Social World (with Tagging and Social Networks for backup)
• 4:00 Social Software (with Transaction Log Analysis for backup)

Wednesday:

• 8:30 Standards/Restrictions/Reinterpretations (with Digital Libraries and Information Retrieval as backups; why is everything so good at this time?)
• 10:30 Plenary
• 1:30 Best Practices… in Data Curation (as I want to be part of the developed workforce in this area, I’m interested!)
• 3:30 Complexity and Value of Managing in the Digital Environment (Social Capital as backup)

I’m thinking I’ll skip the President’s Reception and go the heck home. But I may change my mind.

So, anybody up for a bloggers’ dinner on Monday or Tuesday? Looks like I also have Monday lunch open.

Remember when I promised to write one last post on conferences? And remember when I didn’t? Now I’m going to.

Here’s what I said last time:

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.

You’ll notice the weasel words. You didn’t notice the weasel words? “As currently constituted,” I said. And with those weasel words in place, I still believe it.

What do these conferences do? What are they (de facto or de jure) for?

1. Provide social networking and reunion opportunities.
2. Provide a venue for vendors and (potential) clients to meet-and-greet.
3. Provide face-to-face meeting time and space for the association.
4. Provide résumé opportunities for those who need them.
5. Provide opportunities for idea exchange, professional growth, and learning.

I’m a big old conference nerd. I go to conferences for point 5. I’m the one you see carefully annotating the conference schedule so that I maximize my learning time. I don’t care about the vendor floor, I’m happy to see people but it’s not the highlight of my day, I’m not doing association business (yet), and my résumé’s quite healthy, thanks.

Nerds like me are in a distinct and (I believe) shrinking minority. I went to TXLA. I saw what attendance at sessions was like (keynote aside), compared to the hordes of people on the conference floor or chatting in hallways. Now that I think back, the same was true of ACRL, and from what I hear of ALA, the same is still true there.

What’s more, the Sage on the Stage model is about as tired at conferences as it is in the classroom. The kind of learning more and more librarians need can’t be got from a Sage on the Stage. It’s experiential, which means small groups rather than hotel ballrooms. It’s technology-flavored. It’s many-to-many rather than one-to-many. It runs in clearly-defined themes.

So why are associations spending so much time, effort, and money on speakers lobbed scattershot into conference schedules? Excuse me while I do my best Zero Mostel impression: “TRA-DI-TIOOOOOOOOOON! TRA-DI-TION! (five beats) TRA-DI-TION!”

Okay, it’s not just tradition. Some of it is frankly figleafing. Résumé-padding is one form of figleaf, of course. But so is pretending to go to sessions so you have an excuse to go to conference and hang out with your buddies. C’mon, we all do it. (Except for conference nerds like me, but that is because I am a NERD.)

Think I make this stuff up? Nah. I got an email from a friend yesterday asking me if I’d like to run for office in the state library association. (Being vague as to nature of office for all the obvious reasons.) What’s it entail, I asked. She sent me a fine list. On it: organizing conference stuff. Good librarian that I am, I checked my state association’s conference compensation policy to see if it accords with my personal sense of what’s ethical. It doesn’t. So much for that, then. I told my friend so.

Part of her response: “Or we could just let conferences as we know them die. Could be a good thing - massive savings of time and energy for what one could describe as 3-day class reunions.”

It’s a waste. It really is. And eventually some enterprising association is going to decide that conference-session money is better spent—on almost anything, really. Lobbying. A real website designer. Whatever.

So what will association conferences look like then? Me, I think they’ll split into several pieces. Vendor expos will be vendor expos, and they’ll be cooperative events handled regionally, with profits split among sponsoring associations. (Big ’uns like TXLA will stay more or less as is.) Association business will move online, because it’s dead stupid that it hasn’t already done so.

And the teaching and learning will take place at smaller, tightly-focused venues (when it takes place in meatspace at all, that is; I do expect distance events, properly imagined and managed, to catch on). Immersion. Code4Lib. BarCamp. ACRL Institutes. Et cetera. You’ll notice that there are two basic types of these: classroom-like affairs not unlike preconference sessions, and peers-teaching-peers events. The former style of event pays everyone or no one. The latter pays no one.

I think that’d be a good world, a more honest world, certainly a better world than the one we’ve got for conference nerds like me. It’s a world that will respond faster to what librarians need, because it’ll be attendees (rather than conference committees) deciding how and with whom to group themselves for best learning. Narking on myself here—what the hell do I know about what Wisconsin librarians need to learn at conferences? Not a thing, that’s what. So why guess?

My crystal ball is murky when it isn’t outright broken. Librarianship also has a remarkable capacity to resist good, even necessary, ideas. So maybe the association conference as currently constituted will last out my career.

If it does, it won’t be for intrinsic merit or even interest, however.

DSpace now has a foundation. This is looking to be a good thing.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed chronicled the event (not OA; see Peter Suber’s summary), extraordinarily poorly. With the understanding that I do not speak for the DSpace Foundation, the DSpace committers, or the DSpace community at large…

DSpace the software project is not foundering and never has been. It is blessed with a thriving (if somewhat contentious) community of developers and adopters. It is in active development. It now has a Foundation!

Self-archiving is arguably foundering, but it’s been that way from the outset. The pathetic uptake of self-archiving is not specific to any one software platform; BePress or Fedora adopters mostly aren’t having any better luck encouraging it than I am. Certainly one might say that deficiencies in the current generation of institutional-repository software are part of the problem, but no IR package is perfect on that score, not least because they have all been predicated on assumptions about faculty willingness to self-archive now abundantly proven false.

Conflating self-archiving with DSpace as the Chronicle article does is ridiculous. DSpace has other uses than self-archiving, and self-archiving is not limited to DSpace. I would be most appreciative if the Chronicle would clarify this question—and more appreciative still if they would engage self-archiving and scholarly communication in a thoughtful and considered fashion within their pages.

I haven’t forgotten I’m home, and that it’s good to be home. My first few days walking to work, I positively soaked in the Madisonity of it all: lake, cold, variegated (*ahem*) architecture, university. That particular sense of pure wonder faded, as it was bound to, but I still haven’t forgotten.

Today I went back to the Art Fairs, having Somebody’s Upcoming Wedding and Somebody Else’s Upcoming New Baby to buy presents for, also a bit of something for New Baby’s older sister, who oughtn’t be forgotten.

I found what I was after (and one of the Somebodies reads this blog, so no hints forthcoming), picked up the usual assortment of cards from Lorraine Ortner-Blake (who did my incredibly gorgeous Celestina quote piece for me) and almost but not quite managed to talk myself into a lovely burnt-velvet shruggy-wrappy-thing for conference-wear.

It is good that there should be art fairs. It is especially good that they should be good art fairs. I mostly buy from Off-The-Square merchants because of that local thing (plus, habit; the Off-The-Square merchants don’t change as much from year to year, and I have my favorites among them), but I’m always blown away by how much amazing stuff there is in the world, and amazing people to make it. I’m also grateful that I can buy, now; lots of years there were when I could only look.

I walked home with the loot, stopping off at Electric Earth on West Washington Avenue because that was where we all went for lunch when the Puerto Rico Census Project was still in the ex-warehouse on West Mifflin. It’s still pretty much what it always was, and the Chocolate City smoothie still kicks butt.

Got home and took some stuff from a neighbor’s yard sale; both parties won, I think. (I know I sure did. Wool car coat in impeccable condition for a buck! Now my falling-apart thrift-store skating coat can go to its well-deserved reward.)

I do love me my Madison.