Meet Cassandra Athens
This is another in my series of personae related to institutional-repository development. The first persona is Dr. Helen Troia. Cassandra is a fabrication based on people I have met and problems I have tried to help solve.
Cassandra Athens is the webmaster for the Department of Basketology at Achaea University. She isn’t only the webmaster, though that is her title because it sounds good; she also does some hardware and software purchasing for the department as well as a lot of highly-unofficial technical support that eats up much too much of her time. Since she does a little bit of everything, Cassandra’s technical skills are broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep; she has to jockey Apache as well as Dreamweaver, MySQL as well as Photoshop, elementary Javascript as well as elementary CSS.
After months of meetings and private cajoling, Cassandra succeeded in convincing Basketology to move from their existing set of haphazard unmanaged web pages to an open-source content-management system. Cassandra hopes this will empower faculty to do some of the website-maintenance work themselves, instead of emailing her whenever they see something wrong. She’s not entirely sanguine about this—in her experience faculty don’t take ownership of the departmental web presence no matter how easy she’s tried to make it—but lowering the barrier can’t hurt, and the new CMS should make Cassandra’s job easier too.
While Cassandra was migrating existing faculty websites to the new CMS, she noticed something troubling: several tech-savvy Basketology faculty have been posting their research papers to their part of the departmental website. Cassandra isn’t at all sure that’s legal, and she worries that if there is a copyright-related incident or lawsuit, either the department or (scarily) the legal system itself will make her the scapegoat, since she runs the server. When she asked about this on the Achaea University general-technology mailing list, a librarian named Ulysses Acqua (yes, upcoming persona) told her that most (though not all) of the faculty postings were actually legal, though she didn’t entirely understand his explanation.
That was the best Cassandra could do, so she let it go. If she took down the papers unilaterally, Basketology faculty would be furious, and she isn’t sure she could explain the problem well enough (especially given Acqua’s contention that what faculty were doing was mostly legal) to content them. She knows she doesn’t have sufficient understanding to tell which postings are legal and which aren’t—and anyway, “copyright cop” is not in her job description.
Mr. Acqua offered to help her move those papers that could legally be posted into a service that he runs, but that represented a lot of work for Cassandra, who knows that faculty won’t redo their links so she’d get stuck with the job. Anyway, Basketology faculty would just keep posting new papers to the department’s webspace instead of Mr. Acqua’s service, so Mr. Acqua’s kind offer won’t actually make the problem go away. If Mr. Acqua’s service could somehow be integrated into her CMS, that might be something, but Mr. Acqua told her sadly that the software his service runs on isn’t set up to do that, and he doesn’t have a software-development budget to make it do that.
What Basketology faculty really want for their individual web pages is a comprehensive, current listing of their publications and professional activities. At first, Cassandra thought Mr. Acqua might have a solution to that. Unfortunately, Mr. Acqua’s service can only make records when it is actually taking in files, so faculty listings based on it wouldn’t be comprehensive. Worse still from Cassandra’s perspective, the service’s listings reside outside the Basketology webspace and just don’t look like part of Basketology’s carefully-designed web presence, so Cassandra can’t outsource listing creation to it. It’d be great if she could, because the chair of Basketology is making loud noises about raising Basketology’s profile on the wider web, and a big part of that is keeping faculty-activity listings current. Faculty nod their heads when the chair expresses this need to them—but they won’t lift a finger to do it, in Cassandra’s experience. Cassandra herself simply doesn’t have time; faculty submit their yearly activity reports in word-processed files, the conversion or cut-and-pasting of which would be a nightmare.
Now and then the copyright problem keeps Cassandra awake at night. She doesn’t see a viable way out, however, so she waits and watches and hopes nobody decides to try to make an example of Basketology.