Caveat Lector

We recently moved our DSpace to a shiny new server, which mostly made things much faster, but also caused some funky email glitches. Once the glitches were resolved, we discovered we had a problem with DSpace email subscriptions going to no-longer-usable email addresses. As far as I can tell, DSpace doesn’t have any UI for getting rid of those subscriptions.

The fix is to go into the database and perform the following query:

delete from subscription where eperson_id = (select eperson_id from eperson where email='bouncing email here');

This doesn’t affect the eperson record in the slightest, so if your eperson was responsible for item submissions, you haven’t destroyed any provenance information. You may, however, want to check the eperson out in the dspace-admin UI to be sure you’ve removed any submission privileges they shouldn’t have any longer.

Remember way back when, when I was a wee baby librarian trying to figure out how to rewrite DSpace URLs without breaking everything?

This is how I shoulda done it.

I couldn’t have figured that one out on my own without a hell of a lot more Apache-fu than I have. I feel stupid, but not too stupid.

And hey, now everybody else stuck in my baby-librarian booties doesn’t have to go through hell and back trying to get that done.

So now we all know.

I need to migrate my repository-rat rear to Australia. That’s all there is to it. Monash University, they’ve got the goods. I cannot express how blown away I am with the strikingly intelligent pragmatism they display, and how infuriated I am that the United States cannot seem to get on the damn stick and follow their example.

Why do we need to follow their example? Bless Cat McDowell for telling it like it is. If you’re still under the delusion that Stateside institutional repositories are sailing along just fine and dandy, I hereby sentence you to read this article one hundred times or until you get it, whichever comes first. Money quote: “At a median growth rate of 1 item a day, IRs in America will likely not achieve the critical mass to significantly impact open access or change modes of scholarly communication for some time to come.” I agree. I would only add “if ever.”

I read the Granada University IR intro (PDF). I’m sorry to have to say this, because obviously a considerable amount of work went into that—but it’s more useless ideological happytalk. When do we get past that? When?

When people like McDowell and Monica McCormick (whose work I just discovered yesterday) get cited as often as the happytalkers, I suppose. And when we repository-rats come out of our holes and speak up for ourselves instead of skulking afraid in the darkness taking yet more surveys. I’ll certainly do my part. I’m bloody sick of surveys, I tell you what.

I waited to do this post until I saw what students were coming up with by way of ideas for final projects, because I didn’t want to railroad them into projects of my choosing. (Okay, I admit I did railroad one, but not too strongly, I hope.)

If your library is looking at starting a pathfinder-wiki, a blog, or an Open Journal Systems installation, and you wouldn’t mind working with a library-school student to define scope and requirements, plan for sustainability, choose out software (where appropriate), and perhaps even customize it, drop me an email, please? I’ve got smart people in this class. I’d like to see them contribute to the library world.

I may post again, as more project ideas trickle in.

It occurred to me last week that I started teaching grad school precisely ten years after I first taught college, back in the Department from Hell. I’m frankly amazed at how far I’ve gotten, despite all the twisty little paths I reconnoitered to get here.

I see my first Department from Hell advisor in the library fairly frequently these days. He doesn’t recognize me, but as someone I met at SLIS orientation once said, he never recognizes women—and to be fair, it has been nearly ten years, and even longer than that since he was my advisor to begin with.

He gets a polite smile from me, and if there’s a wee bit of self-satisfaction in that smile, I doubt he notices. Perception was never his strong suit.

Over the summer I often saw one of my classmates from back in the day, working busily at a laptop. She was the best teacher in the department, won prizes and everything. She recognized me, and we exchanged smiles but no more. Out of curiosity, I checked her out on Google. She’s adjuncting. The research I’m guessing she’s working on, must be happening on her own time. Thus doth academia reward its faithful. All hail academia!

Could have been me. Pretty likely would have been, too. I hated getting dumped out of the pond at the time, but I can’t help feeling lucky now. Found me a pond where I’m the right-size fish, I did.

I did get a fair wodge of stuff done this weekend. Lecture done. Book review done, largely because I just did not want to have to open that miserable excuse for a book again. Substantial bits of ASIST poster done. Some of fantasy-book entries done, but that’s going to take me another weekend.

Unless my Friday can remain meeting-free, in which case I can take the day off to wipe some of this stuff off my plate, maybe even get a lecture or so ahead of the game. Here’s hoping.

Mouser and the Goths have not yet reached an understanding. The antibiotics cleared up Mouser’s illness nicely, so I let her out this weekend, since I’d be around to supervise interactions. Didi has taken to rushing Mouser, which has got to be scary given that Didi is a pro linebacker to Mouser’s gymnast. The Squirt Bottle of Doom has had to come out of hiding more than once.

Eh, well. These things take awhile—and as David noted, we’re actually pretty lucky with Mouser. She could have been standoffish, hungry for the great outdoors, or just plain mean. Instead she’s our good-tempered little cuddlebug, who forgives us even the manifest indignity of white glop squirted down the throat.

Just reading through the messages.xml file, I see some things that Manakin has streamlined compared to the JSP interface, and I entirely approve.

They haven’t, however, gotten rid of the unnecessary task-choice workflow step, which makes me mutter various things not safe for a PG-13 weblog. I’m hoping I can go in and fix this, but I suspect it’s going to be a Java problem, and that may be tougher than I can deal with.

Sigh. Back to fixing language.

Anyone using Manakin: Do not—DO NOT—send it live without a thorough read of the messages.xml file in the i18n folder in the config folder. Just in a quick read, I’ve found misspellings, incorrect apostrophe use, and similar things that send a librarian’s spine shivering as though nails had run down a nearby chalkboard.

I’m fixing them on my end, and when I’ve time, I’ll shoot a corrected version at the developers. In the meantime? Don’t embarrass yourself or your institution. Read the file and fix it!

Edited to add: Also, verbosity and redundancy. Argh. Librarian thing. Sometimes we need to be beaten with copies of Strunk and White. Avoid needless words, dammit, especially on the web! (Expostulations are never needless.) I just changed “If that is the case” to “If so.”

Edited to add (again): Even better. “The following represent ways in which you can log in. Choose the appropriate method by following the link.” changed to “Log in via:”.

We should totally hold a contest. Whoever can reduce the wordcount in DSpace’s message file most while retaining appropriate clarity wins.

So this is the design I’m supposed to imitate in the new Manakin-based repository design. Except for the Arial (ugh), it’s not bad, passing over lightly that the CSS code looks like what I might have written when I was new to the spec—that is, disorganized and messy.

But I have a design problem. Well, several. One is that I don’t have a reverse-video repository logo. That could be gotten around; I can just make one. But if I do, I may cause brand confusion between the repository and the larger organization, and I can’t think of anything calculated to cause me more grief. If I don’t, then I have the problem of trying to fit a multi-colored logo into that nice red border. Yucko.

Okay, so we get rid of the red border at the top and make it white, demarcating it with the thin red line. The nav sidebar can stay more or less as it is, white-on-red. That will also let me move the breadcrumbs into the header, which is a feature of the default Manakin design that I quite approve.

Now there’s the two-logo problem. Two logos? Yes, two logos: one for the repository, and one (optional) for the community or collection. How do you put two logos on a page such that they don’t clash? And why is the real page title living in the body of the page and not the header?

Okay, so let’s be clever about this. If there’s a logo, we put it in the logo spot in the header. If not, we use the default repository logo. Either way, proper title goes in the header. Yes! I like this. (Others may not, if they are concerned about the repository “branding” itself. Me, I’m pragmatic. The repository “brand” isn’t worth diddly-squat. Letting campus communities brand their own collections is worth a lot.)

Now to figure out how to make it happen… title shouldn’t be hard, but I’m not sure about that logo…

One of the things my students don’t know yet, because it completely slipped my mind to tell them last week, is that I will in fact be doing their final project with them.

I asked them to investigate and then either implement or plan for a technology that is unfamiliar to them. And timing worked out such that I now have a Manakin-enabled DSpace test server to mess with.

The Manakin theme tutorial is pretty good so far, though it’s mildly frustrating that the xmlui.xconf file (like the dspace.cfg file) is the Special File that has to be changed in the running directory, rather than in source. If you’re working with a fresh copy of the code in Eclipse as I am, that makes the tutorial look wrong, because there’s a config directory inside Manakin with the xmlui.xconf file in it.

Ugh, complicated goofiness. But I believe I have created space for a new theme, and so on I go.

Oh, and I made a new category for Manakin grumblings and squees. I expect to emit many of both.