EPrints just put out a statistics app that doesn’t suck and will supposedly work with DSpace.
I want this. I want it a lot. Unfortunately, it’s got a dependency on commercial charting software. See my occasional rants about “no budget.”
It’s BSD-licensed. Can’t somebody rip out the dependency and substitute JFreeChart or something?
So I’m whipping up another little Python haxxie to pull down stuff from a locally-held conference for the repository.
And all the authors (except a few smart people) are identified by first initial(s), last name.
I have a very simple directive for disciplines, journals, conferences, and authors who format names this way: DON’T. You are making it harder for authors’ work to be associated with them and with their other work.
In a print world, space was at a premium. In a world sharply demarcated by discipline, it was relatively easy to tell which J. Doe was which. We are not in those worlds any longer. The Internet spans all disciplines, and a few extra bytes for your full name is no problem at all. You don’t want your work lost in the clutter!
This rant brought to you by a tired and decidedly cranky repository-rat who has an Augean-stables authority-control job waiting for her when she finishes the Manakin redesign.
Okay, Friday is supposed to be the day for catblogging, but David sent me this and I had to share it:
She’s going in to be spayed on Wednesday. I’m telling her it’s not so bad—I lived through it!
My stupid, for once. I broke Manakin by creating a false XSLT analogy: because there is a last() function, I assumed there had to be a first() function.
Nope. position()=1 is what I wanted, and if I’d been thinking I would have guessed as much.
For the record, Manakin kicks back a really weird error when something breaks in a theme’s XSLT; it pretends that it can’t find a “transaction handler” for the theme. Now I know.
The ideal conference is one that sends me home recommitted to what I do. I needed that quite a lot this time around; quite a few frankly disheartening things have been happening around MPOW and my job, and I don’t think it’s any particular secret that despite a bright spot here and there, I’ve been losing hope.
No more. It’s a bad time for institutional repositories and no mistake, but I made some people hear me at ASIST, and I’ll make more people hear me over the year to come. I know what I’m about, and where it fits, and why it matters.
My shining conference moment occurred when I sat down front for Clifford Lynch’s keynote. Cliff Lynch occupies an odd place in my personal pantheon of heroes. I couldn’t be Peter Suber if I tried (and I have some meditations on the recent Poynder interview that I’m saving for when I have energy to write them down), and there are a few luminaries in the field I wouldn’t want to be.
Cliff is different. His chief gifts are perspicacity, the ability to distill everything he sees around him into a coherent account of trends and threats and hope; and remarkably effective communication both in speech and writing. Someday, if I eat my oatmeal and work very very hard, I might be able to rise to somewhere in that league. I do have my moments.
So anyway, there I was down front with bells on, because Cliff Lynch is my hero and all, when the great man himself sees my name tag and comes up to introduce himself! “There was an institutional repository panel—weren’t you on it?”
“Two,” I say cheerfully, “and I was on both of them.”
“Yes,” he answers, with this indescribable look, “I read a blog post about that.”
Uh-oh. I don’t have Internet access at the time (and yes, I’m sure ASIST has heard in spades about the ridiculousness of holding a conference about Web 2.0 technologies in a hotel where the wireless runs ten bucks a day), so all I can do is squirm and wonder what the heck somebody said about me.
Well, it turned out to be a straight-up recap, so I’m grateful!
Ken Varnum did a fine job liveblogging Cliff’s talk, so I don’t have much to add. Only that I’m fairly sure that even if institutional repositories fail (and I’m still not sanguine about them), the need for intelligent action on digital curation won’t go away—and based on the panel about educating digital curators that I went to, I’m well-placed to be part of that action.
So I’m pleased… and ready to go back to work.
Remarkably, I am all done with my ASIST 2007 conference responsibilities. And I’m not dead yet! This is really quite startling.
Friday’s preconference workshop went without a hitch, and the comments Tim and I got were remarkably kind and gracious. I learned things about Manakin that I didn’t know! (And a few things suddenly made sense that hadn’t.) I also think we genuinely helped some people, and that’s wonderful. And of course it’s great to share a dais with anybody from UIUC.
The institutional repositories panel that I pinch-hit for (“I’m not Ken Frazier, but I play him at ASIST!” and I have the “NOT Kenneth Frazier” name card to prove it, too!) was a thrill and a half. Meeting Drs. Robin Peek and Leslie Chan (even if only virtually in the latter case) was super-fantastic, and Sarah Shreeves and I tag-team emphasized each other’s points. I knew we’d do that, but emphasis is not a bad thing at all… and what’s even less bad is sitting with five people (three panelists, one moderator, and one facilitator) who all contributed excellent insights that came together into what I thought was a coherent, compelling story.
Today’s institutional-repository usability lab—I don’t have words for the awesome. If Paul Marty asks you to do one of his usability labs for your project, do not hesitate: do it! The satori flows like sake. Plus, it’s fun! The test volunteers really got into the spirit of the thing.
Next time I do a poster session I’m going to be a little less ambitious about my poster size. It looked pretty darn good, mind you—I caught several folks taking pictures of it!—but it could have been smaller and still done well. I’m filing that under “live and learn.”
And in a bit of serendipity, the ASIST book exhibitor display had Information Tomorrow, which I hadn’t seen yet. Yes, I picked it up, and yes, I hunted down my own essay, and… remarkably, it didn’t read all that badly. Fit well with the related piece before it, too. It’s so neat when that happens!
I like ASIST. It’s laid-back and fun-loving in tone, which I consider to be a good and too-rare thing in a conference. (I can get uptight and humorless lots of places.) The material is a bit eggheady sometimes, but I knew that going in, and this year’s slate is actually quite a bit more pragmatic than I expected. I’ve seen lots of people I know and like, and been rather more lionized than I in any way merit, and I’m looking forward to the rest of it! Now that I can actually relax.
So I hauled myself out of bed at oh-dark-thirty this morning to hop in a rented car and drive to Milwaukee—all by myself. I was prepared with Google Maps and regular maps and weather reports and everything, but heck, I’d never done this before and I was kinda nervous.
But it was fine. Wisconsin, it is said, has two seasons: winter and construction. It’s not winter. Milwaukee is a hell of a mess. Google Maps let me down on the way back; there’s a nasty detour to get back to I-94. I should have followed the signs; I didn’t, but I managed to un-lose myself and get where I ought to have been in the first place.
In fact, it was so much fun we’re keeping the car for the weekend and going to Kettle Moraine (the Southern Unit) tomorrow for a bit of a walkabout.
Andrew Dillon makes me happy yet again with his thoughts on LIS research:
It is no coincidence that our most frequent theorizing is in the broad area of ‘information seeking’, where there exist dozens of models of human behaviour and cognition in the context of use, many reasonably plausible, but few robust tests are ever conducted that discriminate between them. It is almost as if the field is content to approach theorizing only as far as it ties weakly to systems design, but not to any more ambitious effort at explaining fundamentals. Can we now agree to place a moratorium on further general models of information seeking?
Yes. Please? And can we dump information-seeking models out of ALA library-school accreditation so that we can then dump stupid pointless information-seeking courses from MLS curricula? Sometimes the problems with library schools aren’t library schools’ fault!
Read the whole article; what Dillon has to say about LIS faculty’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the pathetic preparation for a research career vouchsafed many LIS Ph.D students, is worthwhile—and from my observations, right on. (And another reason to resist the sirens. I don’t even want to put up with graduate school for the sake of a good education. Why the seven hells should I do it for a lousy one?)
I’ve been asked to guest-speak on open access and IRs at SLIS’s digital-libraries course in November. This may have been a mild tactical error on the professor’s part, because my thought on LIS and IRs dovetails very neatly with this examination of an OA LIS journal:
Library school professors, particularly, need to show more leadership in the open-access movement. If you are not a part of an open-access journal, join a current project or start a project of your own. If you are an author, submit your work to an open-access journal. Be sure to make your work openly accessible. Don’t be obscure!
That exact apathy is at work with LIS professors and librarians with regard to self-archiving, as the thin pickings at E-LIS and DList demonstrate. I don’t mind (politely) pointing that out to library-school students. Salience can be a powerful motivator, and we repository-rats can’t afford to be too terribly picky about our tactics.
So the Manakin problem that had me tearing my hair out last week was a constellation of Tomcat configuration issues. Tomcat, as I believe I have mentioned before, gives me ulcers. The problems are solved, however, and I hope not to run into them again. If you want to know what they were, ask the local sysadmin, who groks Tomcat so I don’t have to.
Anyway, so Manakin was up, but it wasn’t paying the least attention to my new theme. I scratched my head. I fiddled. I checked out the DSpace wiki. I IMed Tim, who didn’t know what to tell me.
And then I figured it out. The xmlui.xconf file has to be replaced in the working DSpace directory, not in dspace-source. I did that, and hey presto! I have one deathly ugly Manakin theme up and running.
Holy hell, is it ever ugly. Where did my navbar go, for starters? And my logo?
But at least now I can beat on it until it works!
And in other good news, I was wrong! Yep, sometimes that’s good news. The conference organizers weren’t in the market for happytalk, so I am back on the menu. More news when I have it.
Boss, killing a rat is no problem. Stuff it into a sack. Beat the sack with an ax. Then shoot it. Then drown it. Burn the sack with the dead rat in it.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
That’s a pretty good description of what this repository-rat’s last week was like, from an extremely personally-expensive strategic error on my part (no, no further details, sorry), to getting my butt kicked by Manakin, to my (brand-new, purchased with personal funds) color printer dying (which led directly to the aforementioned expensive strategic error), to various blog-related kerfuffles, to an extraordinarily pointless and time-costly expedition to plug the repository to entirely the wrong audience, to complications in a project that should have been out of my life for good six months ago but somehow manages to have more lives than a rat and a cat put together, to a hurricane of bureaucratic tsuris surrounding what I do and what I’d like to do, to yet another in the long string of accusations from various parts of constituting Part Of The Problem, to spending much too much time getting video ripped and conference posters printed, and…
And then I heard that Roy Rosenzweig had died. My first thought, which does me absolutely no credit whatever but illuminates my frame of mind, was “Bloody hell. Why am I doing this, again? Apathy or mindless happytalk or hypocritical lip-service everywhere there isn’t outright hostility, and here we’ve lost one of the good ones. We can’t afford that, damn it.”
I didn’t know Roy well. I’d met him a couple of times. Some people immediately impinge on the consciousness as too damn smart and capable to quite be real. He was assuredly one of those. I did what I do with people like that: stay out of their way while they do their thing, watching with awe. I’d heard from the Mason grapevine that he was ill; all the more reason not to play the Porlockian.
One reason academic fiefdoms are dangerous is that they tend to coalesce around their founders, withering or stagnating once the founders’ fire is gone. I’m not worried about the Center for History and New Media, though, because the other thing I noticed about Roy was his talent for attracting… well, talent. It’s still there, and my guess is it’ll stay there.
That’s today’s thought, though. At the time, finding out about Roy’s death was just the ugly capstone to my monster brutalist edifice of a week. Honestly, I spent most of the weekend sulking. (And not doing my grading, which I still have a lot of to do.)
Today I came in, put on Fairfax Choral’s performance of the Duruflé Requiem for Roy, wrote off a lot of sunk costs (both time and money), dealt with equipment problems, dumped a bunch of stuff off my desktop and to-do list that didn’t need to be there, starred the email in which the sysadmin hauled me out of my Manakin morass, sneered at NeoOffice when it lost all the non-heading text out of Roach Motel (seriously, NeoOffice, wtf?), promptly rescued the article with Apple Pages, and still made it to the morning staff meeting on time.
Because you can’t kill a rat. Try.