Caveat Lector

I’ve had a third-party request to talk a little bit here about the BibApp, so I’ll do that.

The BibApp was a major reason I got so excited about coming to work in Madison. At the time I first heard about it, there just wasn’t anything like it, and while it shares DNA with projects such as Cornell’s VIVO and BePress’s Selected Works, it still does useful things that nothing else does.

The public face of BibApp is a set of researcher profiles (see live examples from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), anchored in but not limited to their publication record. Researchers or their proxies can add photographs, statements of interest, and so on. BibApp is browseable and searchable, and results can be limited by facet. Publication results have OpenURLs attached to them, so interested readers can be directed to their local link resolver.

The behind-the-scenes face of BibApp is a publication-list manager and repository-populator. BibApp vacuums up citation lists in popular bibliography formats such as RIS and BibTeX. (Not, alas, EndNote, because doing anything with their homegrown formats has been proven hazardous. Word to the wise: Zotero exports both RIS and BibTeX. If I were to start a BibApp project, that’s the tool I’d use.) BibApp checks for duplicate citations, prompting to have potential duplicates resolved or removed.

It does its level best to assign authorship automatically to individuals it knows about, no matter how a name is represented in the citation. Over time, as BibApp learns more about name variants, coauthorship patterns, publication-venue patterns, and subject patterns, it becomes more accomplished at assigning authorship. BibApp performs similar authority control on publisher and journal names, and it will shortly be possible to federate this information in order to pre-populate new BibApp installations with the knowledge other adopters have built.

Once BibApp recognizes a journal or publisher in a just-imported citation, it checks with SHERPA/RoMEO for policies relating to green open access. If it recognizes that the publisher’s typeset PDF is archivable, it bundles up a package for import to a repository via the SWORD protocol, which currently works over DSpace, EPrints, and Fedora. No muss, no fuss, no bothering faculty for keystrokes!

A pilot with a fairly small engineering department at UW-Madison turned up about 1400 archivable articles. The major time investment in all this is putting together those citation lists, but in at least some cases, faculty themselves use citation-management software and can lend a hand. If not, student labor is quite adequate to compile lists. Eventually, BibApp will be able to update citation lists automatically via author-search RSS feeds from indexing and e-journal databases; that feature used to exist, had to be taken out, but will be put back!

And that’s the BibApp. The first stable release should be out in the first quarter of next year.

BibApp’s initial developer was my colleague and former SLIS classmate Eric Larson, of the Wendt Engineering Library. I also credit Wendt Library director Deborah Helman for giving Eric time and space to write code, and for tirelessly championing the software on the Madison campus. Eric shares development duties with Tim Donohue of Illinois, and Sarah Shreeves of Illinois has been instrumental in its outreach and sustainability strategies. Jointly and separately, we are pursuing several avenues for funding and additional developers, and I’m quite optimistic about its future.

That said, we are definitely looking for additional BibApp developers and early adopters, so please get in touch with us if you’re interested!

I was not supposed to end up a big fish in my little pond. (Take that, Les.) I’m not cut out for it, didn’t court it, and think back wistfully on my days of comfortable obscurity.

In my little pond, though, those days are so over. When well over half the people you bump into at a pretty good-sized (over 300 people) conference recognize your name, when an appreciable proportion of those actually make an effort to find you for a greeting or a question, when you are namechecked several times in more than one presentation in a mere two-and-a-half-day meeting—it’s over, honey. Time to learn to wave prettily and smile a lot.

I was right that Roach Motel has reached places that disreputable old CavLec couldn’t. That said, I also found quite a few fans of CavLec, disreputable or not, and a great many more readers, even if I can’t classify them as fans without considerable semantic violence. (Just say no to word abuse, people.)

… And that’s humbling. And weird. And even scary.

But there was a near-universal theme in the contacts I had with people at the conference, and it goes beyond mere notoriety. I learned a lot from you, people told me again and again. Now that, that is gratifying. That makes me feel valued and (in my rat-in-the-wainscoting way) valuable. Since I haven’t been feeling much of either of those lately, I can only be grateful.

So thank you. Thank you for coming up to shake my hand. Thank you for smiling at me. Thank you for talking to me and listening to me. Thank you for asking me questions; I hope my answers were even a little bit useful. Thank you, the two or three people who were surprised not to see me on the podium at the conference. (BibApp was supposed to be shopped to the Innovation Fair, but I was the one who was supposed to shop it, and I completely dropped the ball. Nobody’s fault but mine, and in fact, the conference extended my deadline, so really, there is no excuse for me.) Thank you for emailing me after the conference. Thank you, one and all. Your kindness, individually and collectively, meant more to me than I can conveniently explain.

One person at the conference was kind enough to be worried for my worklife over CavLec. It’s fair to say that certain parties consider CavLec a liability rather than an asset—and I’m certainly not arguing with them!—but it’s also quite well-established in blog terms, has outlasted several jobs, and like it or not, has had real professional impact. (Which weirds me out, but there you are.) Some liabilities aren’t important enough to make a fuss over. For the nonce, although MPOW isn’t generally as laissez-faire about these things as MfPOW and especially the World’s Coolest Boss, I think I’m okay.

Dan Chudnov, in the middle of a mostly-genteel blackmail attempt (whose spirit I wholly agree with), said pretty much what I think about the trouble that CavLec occasionally gets me into:

It can be freeing to say things everybody thinks but out loud and Annoyedly and annoyingly… Though, to be honest, I’ve been lucky enough to have done that one or two times along the way, and I know you know what I mean, we already established that. Here’s the difference: when I’ve done it, it’s pissed some people off, but it was me who did it, me with my name and face and the sincerity you can’t mock when it’s your name and your face and your voice and people are going to remember that combination.

Yes. Trouble isn’t fun, and I don’t intentionally court it; who needs the stress? But I’ll take my lumps when I’ve earned ’em, and though I’ve met people who don’t respect some things I’ve said here or the way I say them (and no more they should, either), I’ve never met anybody who didn’t respect my general integrity. That’s good enough for me.

There’s been a bit of buzz about the so-called death of the blog lately. Blogging is so 2002, don’t you know. Abandoned blogs, splogs, big names leaving their blogs behind them, new blogging blood siphoned off to Facebook and FriendFeed and whathaveyou, whatever.

Whatever. CavLec isn’t going anywhere. It’s not a notoriety magnet, it’s not a social tool, it’s not a tentative experiment with things 2.0-ish. Quite simply, it’s where I think stuff through, it’s turned out to be a fantastic tool for that, and I’ll never not need to think stuff through. Sure, it comes with side-benefits, more than I could ever have imagined. But those could all go away, and CavLec would still be worth something to me myself. Good enough.

And a last thank-you to all of you who read. Thank you.

(with apologies to TS Eliot)

Not all repository-rats are as difficult or irascible as I am. We are, I will venture to say, a tough crowd to speak to, though. What I know about us, based on observation, is that we tend to be on the one hand ruthlessly practical, on the other remarkably attuned to our environment. I myself am more the former than the latter, but in all honesty, it’s the latter group of rats who tend to be more successful.

We are also a group of people that has had a lot of ideas that turned out to be wrongheaded shoved at us, and a lot of smack talked about and to us. Moreover, those of us who have been in this business awhile are a bruised, beaten crew, and we are cynical in direct proportion to our scars. That makes us a tough crowd.

Herewith, some suggestions for avoiding the biggest pratfalls in talking to us.

Know what we do and respect its difficulty. Breaking this dictum seems to be particularly common among career academics, and it may be part and parcel of academia’s general disdain for librarians. Nonetheless, the successful rat-whisperer knows something about the lifecycle, care and feeding, and behavior patterns of the common repository-rat.

We know when you lack clue. We do not appreciate it. We are, however, a fairly approachable species. If you don’t know what we do and why it’s hard, ask before you speak, please. Or, you know, read something like Palmer et al.

Understand our environment. There is a lot about open access in general and IRs in particular that’s just plain weird. I am constantly gobsmacked, caught utterly by surprise, by things that go on in this arena. That said, a lot of what goes on can be reasoned about from available evidence, and a number of us engage in this reasoning regularly. Peter Suber, of course, is an honorary repository-rat in this regard. I have to assume it’s the philosophy background that lets him reason so well and explain his reasoning so clearly.

When you run into an environmental phenomenon you don’t understand, such as (for example) the behavior of scholarly societies with regard to open access, you need to look for evidence (it’s there), look for analysis of that evidence (there has often been some), and do some thinking. If you don’t, you sound poorly-informed or just plain stupid.

To my mind, the key thing you must build a sense of regarding IRs and repository-rats is the power relations surrounding them. Innumerable are the speakers and writers who behave as though repository-rats were Hogwarts professors, able to wave wands and create content, awareness, administrative backing, funding, software, developer time, staff, buy-in from librarians and faculty, and copyright clearance from nothing. We’re not and we can’t, because we do not have that kind of power, not individually and not collectively either.

Do not speak to us as though we were faculty; many of us are not. Do not speak to us as though we were deans or library directors; we’re not. We are, by and large, caught in a terrible responsibility-without-authority bind. I cannot overemphasize how important it is to understand that when you speak to us. The instant you make me say “great, but who bells the cat?” you have lost.

What does work is to point out parts of our environment that we don’t entirely understand. Discipline-based insight, events outside academia that may help or hinder us, and anything happening in smoke-filled back rooms that we aren’t in are prime topics for us. Coherent visions of the river in which we are but small eddies may also serve (John Wilbanks did this beautifully yesterday), but…

Glittering generalities do not fly with us. Glittering generalities are what got us into the mess many of us are in. I am reminded of the scene in Kipling’s Stalky & Co in which some rich slob with no skin whatever in the military game slobbers on to a bunch of kids who are about to go out to India (and lose their lives as like as not) about patriotism and valour and service. “‘This man,’ said McTurk with conviction, ‘is the Gadarene swine.’”

You don’t want us to think that about you. I know you don’t. So be grounded, be realistic, be practical, be where we are.

And please, please, please don’t ever quote Lynch 2003. Trust me on this: the IR discourse has moved a long, long way on from “essential infrastructure.” We rats are so done patting ourselves on the back about how essential we are; we know differently. If any glittering generality has come back to stab us in the back, it’s that one. We loathe it. Avoid it.

We know what we’re supposed to do. We need grounded insight on how best to do it. We know we need content. We know we need increased awareness at our institutions. We know we need to speak to faculty in language they respond to. We know we need sustainable funding and staffing. We know we need allies and partners. Do not speak to us as though we do not already know these things. It is trite and patronizing. Do not speak to us as though we do not try, every day of our working lives, to make these things happen—particularly if you have never tried it yourself. It is condescending and rude.

If you have insight or experience on what we can do to get ourselves these things, though, we’re all ears. If you can actually help us get these things, we will bless you forever. I’m still waiting to hear Stuart Shieber talk, for instance. He’s as close to somebody who waved a magic wand as I can think of. I have no earthly clue how he did what he did, nor how his environment hindered or facilitated it, and I’d dearly like to know.

This is a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger post, unfortunately about a real speech to a roomful of real repository-rats at a real conference, a speech that failed to meet its mark in a truly trainwrecky fashion. I post it in hopes of avoiding further such trainwrecks. In order to keep the focus on the larger phenomena that fed into that speech rather than the speech itself, I decline to name conference (sure, right now that’s obvious, but in a few months it won’t be) or speaker.

I wasn’t sure about SPARC-DR. I wasn’t sure about the organizers, the agenda or the speakers.

I was wrong. I own that. I’m happy to correct myself in public.

There was a lot of high-quality material yesterday, and there’s been more today. I want to call out John Wilbanks’s keynote, Paul Royster’s talk, the Innovation Fair, and Catherine Mitchell’s talk this morning as being especially inspiring and helpful, with lots of ideas I can take home and try to get some traction on.

Quite a few people here are old-timers like me, but there’s also a healthy complement of people with new or in-the-planning-stages repositories. I’m impressed at how much has been said here that’s useful to both populations. That’s a hard balance to pull off!

The hallway conversations have been excellent as well, though I feel more than a little goofy about the number of people hunting me down just to say hi. On a purely practical note, the wireless is free and has been rock-solid, the food is fantastic, and the hotel staff at the Baltimore Renaissance Harborplace have gone out of their way to accommodate us laptop-toting nerds.

Good job, all, and I’m sorry I doubted you!

(My live notes from the John Wilbanks keynote.)

John Wilbanks

i.a.n.a.r.e. “I am not a repository expert.” “I almost said that I am not a repository rat.”

gets his information from Mellon and JISC reports, and links seen on blogs “especially Caveat Lector.”

“why is there a disconnect between planning to share and actual sharing?”

Disruptive processes can’t be planned in advance; planned innovation is slow.

Digital publishing is just “a bigger earhorn” because we’re still thinking that the way to communicate is through writing papers. We’ve made that better, faster, and cheaper, but the process is basically the same; boil it down to 8.5×11 pages.

Process change comes more slowly than product change.

So why is it hard to get this content? Why don’t faculty see the light?

- stable systems are resistant to change on multiple levels. No one thing will make people wake up; there are interlocking barriers to change. One such barrier is copyright, which locks up the container of the facts, not the facts… but it really locks up that container!

So we’ve moved to leasing materials, not owning them; and licensing makes it harder to unlock those facts from their containers. No indexing allowed; no adding hyperlinks.

Rights clearance is a pain! It is a block preventing process disruption. We haven’t provided enough incentive, enough “universal solvents,” to remove these blocks. Now we’re even seeing copyright applied to databases, often through confusion rather than malice (e.g. ChemSpider). What do the ideas behind CC mean, as they propagate into the scholarly realm? The rights problems are going to get MORE, not LESS complex; forcing IRs to focus exclusively on the peer-reviewed research ignores the library’s role as repository for lots of stuff. This complexifies rights issues.

- Faculty prefer carrots to sticks. So what do incentives need to do for them?

The minimum incentive needs to get faculty to go through the metadata/upload process, or to let somebody else do it.

Cartoon: “Behind one door is tenure; behind the other is flipping burgers.” If it doesn’t help them get tenure or another grant, it competes with activities that WILL help them toward tenure and grants. This is another way the system resists change! We wouldn’t NEED mandates if this weren’t so.

Let’s assume we fix the copyright and rights-clearance and incentives problems. This will create a flood of work!

Not easy to install IR software! Very powerful systems, but they need PEOPLE to run them. Can’t just go to register.com. Too frequently these people are not part of the conversation. Can be hard! (CavLec: miniature disasters post. An hour to change one link!) This, too, is another change-resister.

This is the complexity of the system we’re up against. Multiple levels of barriers, with multiple fail-safes.

reports from the front lines: building a commons is really, really hard! Takes passionate people with a clear point of view who are not willing to compromise on that view.

Everything at Science Commons is based on “running code:” legal and software code. >1000 journals now under CC license, which is pretty good! Scholar’s addendum engine, done in a single line of HTML code that can be dropped into a page. But they can’t keep data on who uses it (privacy), so it’s hard to follow up to assess.

Goal: using this to negotiate with publishers. But unless there’s a funder or institution behind this (NIH or Harvard), faculty won’t use it, because the power is on the side of the publisher (remember tenure!). “When institutions copy Harvard, we hope this will help.” (But people aren’t copying Harvard! -me)

Databases: copyright status isn’t clear, how/when to integrate isn’t clear, storage is a technical challenge. Ties lawyers in KNOTS! Default stances different in US and UK (no protection in US, some in UK). This makes Science Commons’s charge harder — but the only way to combine datasets is to eliminate the rights barriers. Solutions: CC0, and a set of “Science Commons norms” (citation, plagiarism control, etc). Dangerous to use law for that; better to use norms (yes! -me).

However, this conflicts with the protection instinct faculty have, and corporate funders even more. However, the protection instinct is frequently (? I would say “sometimes”) an instinct to protect freedom.

OA solves the legal problem, but the other problem is the “container problem” — the paper as a container for facts, the standalone database as a container for facts, are bad ways to go. Solution: Semantic Web. How do we make Google work better for science? Google finds things based on inbound links, but Google doesn’t search databases and doesn’t notice “links” to them. Goal: e pluribus unum (discovery tools that work usefully across different datastores). Get money to bribe database owners to do the right thing to make this possible.

Can put queries in URLs and then remix them by changing URLs. “Corpus of queries as links” and let people hack them. Not planning to share, but actually sharing, and throwing the result open, and it creates a commons! <$500K to make this possible! Have to do horrible screenscrapes and stuff just to create proof-of-concept to show people what’s possible when you open up.

NOTHING replaces hacking and releasing! Using trademark to protect the quality of their work, not copyright.

“Don’t plan to hack, hack! That’s the only way around the incentive problems.”

2 futures for repositories.

Note that repositories are points on a map — with no edges! No links between them! No networks! But networks create better incentives than points. Doesn’t mean “get complicated,” just the opposite: simple systems win the network game! (”OAI-PMH helps, but not enough,” with which I completely agree.) AOL and Prodigy were points, and they did cool stuff, but only “their people” could do anything to improve the system. The WWW was bloody ugly in comparison, but it was OPEN, and so huge numbers of people improved it. Three layers of openness (Benkler): physical layer, code layer, content layer. Fourth layer: knowledge layer, which means we have to deal with IP problems — so we have to engage the copyright problems.

If we do this right, we create gears instead of locks. This is the opportunity! “Open copyright, balanced incentives, and distributed workloads.”

We have to do this by solving an information problem faculty actually have. That’s the road in. (HALLELUJAH. -me) What questions can only a network of IRs solve? So that people who use IRs outcompete people who don’t.

“How does the IR keep me from flipping burgers at McD’s?”

Individual brain capacity is not scaling, but COLLECTIVE brain capacity is, so how do we make our stuff work on a collective level?

Conclusion: don’t wait. Lots of things need to happen before all this becomes real! If we wait until all the problems are solved, the commons won’t have what it needs to explode. But people aren’t watching IR space, which is the best time to create an open, disruptive system! Use existing ontologies. Work around problems rather than tackling them head-on.

Create new ways to measure things. Tenure vs. McD’s is a matter of citations; that’s the only thing we know how to measure! But what about data? Downloads? TrackBack?

We need a thousand flowers blooming, not the slow process of consensus.

Invest in your repository staff! Hard to do when facing real financial crises like the serials crisis, but “there’s nothing so expensive as cheap people.” (I am ready to cry. That’s exactly what libraries are NOT DOING.)

I’m at SPARC Digital Repositories, heavily caffeinated (two cups of coffee at breakfast, which may have been slightly unwise; one is my usual limit), properly badged, and thoroughly namechecked.

I had a lovely breakfast this morning with Jean-Gabriel Bankier, President of BePress. It’s a rare privilege and pleasure to talk shop with people who run the same kinds of shops that I do, and have a similar understanding of the problem space. Jean-Gabriel and I exchanged a lot of useful ideas about what we do, which I’m still chewing on in my head and will share with the rest of you, I hope, a bit later.

We sat down in the ballroom just as Heather Joseph was wrapping up her conference opening (sorry, Heather!) so that John Wilbanks of Science Commons could take the stage. Almost the first thing he said: “I am not a repository expert. I almost said ‘I am not a repository rat.’” I promptly shrank down in my seat, reddening.

He namechecked poor old Caveat Lector thirty seconds later, as an information source.

Five minutes after that, he showed a screenshot of this post, in which it takes me an hour to change one link. (CavLec sure does look pretty on the big screen. Rock on, William Morris!)

Twenty minutes after that, he used the “carrots and sticks” metaphor, which I certainly didn’t originate, but I have certainly used in this space.

That’s the weirdest feeling in the world, I tell you what. It’s like being the winning coach at a football game when the Gatorade barrel is upended over his head. It’s the feeling of victory, of vindication—but it’s also damn cold and damn wet.

I am a figure now, almost a Grande Dame ($DEITY help me), in the repository space. I can’t deny that or tiptoe around it any more, much as I would like to. 2008 has been a phenomenal year for me in terms of professional development: breakfast with Jean-Gabriel Bankier this morning (I mean, how cool is that?), a book out, a game-changing preprint, my first keynote, another bespoke article, several talk invitations, a contest-winning blog entry, some brilliant learning opportunities…

… and yet. I think most of us can fill in the “and yet.” I won’t do so here, as it could be hazardous to my job, which is in enough trouble as it is.

I got some email about that contest-winning blog entry from people who found it inspiring. Inspiring? It’s not inspiring. I didn’t write it to be inspiring. I wrote it to pose problems. I wrote it to express frustration. I wrote it to try to turn the profoundly sterile, even hostile environment IRs exist in into a narrative people will perhaps finally understand. But readers found that “inspiring.” Paging Stanley Fish! Why are my readers’ reactions so different from what I thought I was writing?

(Okay, putting my lit-crit hat on, I can see why. I piggybacked that essay on some memoir techniques that create certain reactions… right. Shutting my lit-crit brain up now. Onward.)

Jean-Gabriel ran an informal survey of repository-rats shortly before this conference, and one of the spoilers (sorry, Jean-Gabriel!) that he shared with me at breakfast this morning is that a galloping majority of the survey respondents consider their repositories highly successful. This blew his mind as much as mine.

I wonder if all of this is tied up together. I wonder if we are grasping at straws, pretending to more confidence than we have, because we are dispirited and afraid, and we don’t feel empowered to talk about it, because we’d have to admit that we’re not accomplishing what we want to accomplish. We’d have to say the unsayable—and it’s especially unsayable when budget cuts are in play, as they are everywhere.

I don’t know. I do know that I myself am grasping at straws. I do know that I’m wondering how long I can go on doing that. I think SPARC-DR and John Wilbanks have given me a bit of a second wind, and I thank them for that.

I watch people liveblogging talks, and keynotes especially, over on FriendFeed.

What I just realized today, watching one such stream of reactions to a conference keynote, is that a keynote doesn’t have to be right to be good. It’s got to resonate, and it’s got to be not wildly wrong, but the goal is to get people thinking—not necessarily to get them thinking just like the keynoter.

That makes me feel better about my Repo Fringe keynote. It wasn’t the best talk I’ve ever given, and I wish it had been better than it was, but it did the job it needed to do.

I approach JISC reports with a combination of trepidation and schadenfreude. They’re always smart and grounded, but they do make me despair so.

The latest (PDF), on repository metadata interoperability, is a classic of the genre. Smart, grounded, and despair-making. Despite its focus, there’s a lot more to this report than OAI-PMH and authority control; it asks trenchant questions about what IRs are for and whether they’re doing (or even can do) what they’re supposed to.

I keep reminding myself that the bad truths need to make themselves heard before change can happen. I reminded myself of that all the way through writing Roach Motel, and I remind myself again every time I read a JISC report.

If you’re less inclined to despair than I am, check the report out.

I have been slowly loading up my Bloglines with educational-technology blogs, for curiosity’s sake and for various other nefarious reasons. (I’ve been tapped to help run a workshoppy thing on repositories for MPOW’s grassroots ed-tech group next spring. It will help to know what these folks think and talk about!)

Imagine my surprise to find a post on sharing that nails the bureaucracy problems with institutional repositories right through the head.

We are the poster’s They. We should worry about this, in my humble opinion. Quite a lot we should worry about it.

I’ve heard many a repository-rat bellyache about how little faculty want to do to share their work in IRs. We need to stop bellyaching and start accepting that if we want pretty metadata, we’ll have to do that bit ourselves. Make it easy, make it fun, make it magic—and isn’t pretty metadata magical?—and watch our content-recruitment problems melt away.

Also worth reading is Andy Powell’s evisceration of repository success conditions and measurement. Repository rats, the question of metrics is to our address. Do you even have success conditions laid out for you? No, I don’t either. Does that make you comfortable? It doesn’t me. Idealism and look-the-other-way won’t keep IRs viable forever; eventually we’re going to have to prove our usefulness just like everybody else.

Me, I’m not looking forward to that day, not one bit. I’ve stated my case, don’t mistake me; a lot of my case amounts to “given the system it’s embedded in, the IR under its previous assumptions can’t be successful, so can we revisit those assumptions please?” But without so much as a definition of success, how far can I reasonably expect to get with that argument?

I’ve said it before. What do you want and how will you get it? Those are your success conditions, and it’s shameful that IR planning hasn’t been honest enough to answer those questions and stand behind its answers.

So this is my little cheer for Andy, for looking the hard questions in the eye without flinching.

… Except it’s not.

This is not an end; it is a beginning. We haven’t cleared the obstacle course; we’ve barely set foot on it. There is so much to do, so much to save, so much to fix.

What I want in the next four years is for the notion of the res publica to come back to the fore. The public thing. Public. That which is larger than any of us, that which we all contribute to and lean on and derive benefit from. That which surmounts our differences and our competitions and our private fears and our ugly hates. That from which public libraries and land-grant universities sprang. The public thing.

It has been lost, I think, and I want it back.