Caveat Lector

My memory is hazy, but I think I owe Walt Crawford a(nother) drink. I said I’d never be a keynoter. He, or somebody, bet me a drink I would.

Whoever it was was right, it turns out. Chris Rusbridge scooped me, so I can pull this post out of draft with a clear conscience.

Barring something going boom, I will be giving the keynote at Repository Fringe 2008. I couldn’t be any more thrilled and excited about this if I tried! I am completely in charity with the design and aims of the event; Repository Fringe is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I talk about the “community of practice” that repository managers need. A BarCamp-style participatory event fosters that kind of dense network in a way that even the best conference-style conference has difficulty doing.

I’m also excited that I can honestly put together a happy talk, for once. Not happytalk, which as we all know I dearly loathe—a happy talk, one that acknowledges that despite their rocky start and continued difficulties, institutional repositories are rethinking their mission and their service design in profitable ways in order to fit themselves into their institutions’ (and ultimately open access’s and the academy’s) larger goals. No spin, no nonsense, that’s really what I believe. There is hope. There’s also a lot of work to do yet—but hope makes it easier.

On a personal note, this came at just the right time for me. A little professional validation goes a long way! Plus, Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Fringe, what an incredible stroke of good fortune! If I’m not careful I’ll run out of exclamation points…

… nah.

If you’re going, I look forward to seeing you there. Come up and say hello!

If you were following CavLec on its own URL this weekend rather than through RSS or Atom, I do apologize most sincerely to you; I have been making a heck of a mess.

As far as Firefox is concerned, I’m mostly done. Few tweaks left (DATES, where are my dates?), but the layout and typography are mostly there.

The funny thing is, it feels different to me now, old CavLec does. Less Webby, less freewheeling, less brusque, nicer and more formal. We’ll see if the writing turns out to echo the design.

I haven’t a clue what this looks like in IE. I’ll take a gander sometime and fix anything glaring, but honestly? I don’t care that much. Microsoft is three-day-old fish.

Okay, I think I’m off all the lists I need to be off, so… fairly soon, I’ll be turning out the lights on textartisan.com and my old email address. The new one is dorothea at yarinareth dot net, and as before, you can also reach me at dorothea dot salo at gmail dot com.

The William Morris and the Latin dates and so on will be coming back, bit by bit. I have a lot of content to repost to the top-level site first; it’s going into WPMU, which is now my ersatz CMS, so there will be some experimentation involved as I mess with URLs. For now, I feel your pain—it doesn’t feel like CavLec without William Morris!

(Might pick a different William Morris this time. Dunno. Will have to get out my CD of Morris designs.)

I’ve been tearing through this year’s JCDL proceedings (at speed, because I have an article draft due in three weeks that I, um, haven’t really started yet). I had to chuckle at a wink-wink-nudge-nudge in which the authors mentioned that certain blogs expose certain difficulties and limitations with a certain well-known institutional-repository platform (okay, all right, DSpace)… without a nod to the blogs in question.

Well, as the owner of one of those blogs—thanks for taking better care of my reputation than I do. It’s appreciated.

Roach Motel will appear in Library Trends 57:2 (Fall 2008). I remark upon this for the simple reason that someone asked me, because they want to cite it in something they’re writing.

This is not the first time. It got quoted in a presentation at OR ’08. It’s got thirty-some-odd saves on del.icio.us. A couple quick Googles indicate that it has been recommended reading in high places. A quick look at statistics on the repository I run indicates that it rapidly soared into the top spot on download numbers, beating out a popular journal whose top issue had been there since 2005. (It has since been eclipsed by several articles from an undergrad kinesiology journal. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

The thing ain’t been published yet. Moreover, the preprint version has several embarrassing errors (I fixed the boneheaded mis-citation of Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical, and Economic Aspects, I promise). Nevertheless, it’s out there and it’s making waves. If ever there were a demonstration of the impact of preprint-posting, Roach Motel is it.

From a whuffie perspective, this is jaw-droppingly astounding. From the vastly more important practical-results perspective… well, we’ll see. An extremely common reaction to it is “Yeah, isn’t that awful? But it’s not happening here, oh, no.” No wonder we don’t have a community of practice. We can’t get our heads out of (ahem) the sand long enough to notice each other, or tell the truth.

I admit I’m sort of looking forward to the SPARC IR meeting in November (which I am planning to attend, and present at if possible), because Roach Motel should be out in print by then. I’ll be happy if it informs discussion, happier still if it informs policy, happiest of all if it inspires action. As yet, though, all it’s accomplished in meatspace that I’m aware of is getting several people angry at me that I don’t at all need angry at me, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

No, what I’m really pondering at the moment is the impact I am having on my chosen profession, sometimes intentionally… and sometimes not so much so. Honestly, I’m starting to be—startled? unnerved? weirded out? Something. Not so much by Roach Motel, which I knew all along was something of a Molotov cocktail, as by all the other stuff.

Whenever I check my referrer logs these days, I see a hit or two from a library-student blog or Somebody Else’s Courseware (which of course I can’t get into, thank you, AAP and FERPA). I mean, every time. Warping the minds of the young and impressionable, that’s me, I guess. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does; after all, I taught library school and have every intention of doing so again.

But it does bother me, just as CavLec getting linked to and quoted is sometimes bothersome. It’s that damn context thing again. Grrrr, it’s irksome.

What it boils down to is that very much against my will, I’m finding myself self-censoring on CavLec because like it or not, it’s a large part of my professional face, and as such, it needs to be polished to a brighter sheen than I have heretofore employed. This annoys the living hell out of me. It wasn’t supposed to be this way!

And I don’t have a solution. But, again, I’m thinking about it. It’s a good time for that; I’m six-squared years old today, which invites the yearly navel-gaze.

Well, that was fun, for values of “fun” that mean “no fun at all, really.”

I got all the other yarinareth.net blogs up and running in a jiffy. No sweat. WordPress export, WordPress import, ba-da-bing ba-da-blog. (Li, I can’t remember what the name of your theme was. If you remember, let me know… or feel free to dig up a new theme.)

CavLec? Was a problem. I couldn’t use the WP export, because CavLec is so gargantuan the export command timed out, and I couldn’t convince OldWebHost to help me make it work. So okay, I did the SQL dump, checked it, and lit out for greener pastures.

It’s supposed to be easy to restore a blog from a SQL dump. Change the table names to fit WPMU, import, done. Except not so much. Go to blog, get white screen sans error messages. Well, that’s just great.

After contemplating my rock collection, I picked up the bit-at-a-time SQL rock, playing only with the tables I knew I would need. I suspected the issue was that the wp_options table from the old blog was playing hob with WPMU.

Well, I was wrong, but the tactic did enable me to figure out what the problem was… the wp_posts table in WPMU was missing two fields (post_lat and post_lon, and why I need to geolocate my posts I’m sure I’m not sure) that the SQL dump had. So okay, I add the fields to the table, cut-and-paste the INSERT clauses just to be safe, and what do you know, I seem to have a blog again.

There are issues. Image links from this blog (and all Yarinareth blogs) are umpty-broken. I have the images and will fix when I can. But for now, I’m just happy to have my BLOG BACK.

I will be moving my web presence to a new host sometime soon, probably within the next week. This will be a complex move, because the Yarinareth blog empire will be moving off individual installs of WordPress to either a WPMU or Lyceum install (depending on which takes less fiddling). So it may take me a few days. With luck, mail won’t bounce too much; if it does, my Gmail is always open.

I will also be retiring textartisan.com, because it’s just time. It served its purpose, but it doesn’t really have a purpose now, so let it go. I’ll keep it parked for a few years, because I don’t want it taken over by some moron spamvertiser.

I haven’t completely decided what I’ll do for a new professional web presence. If I could slap up a BibApp install and let it take care of my online résumé, I absolutely would, because I’m no better about maintaining it than faculty are. Lacking that, I’ll have to think of something else.

Gavin Baker points out a CHE article talking about the vexed question of evaluating “online scholarship” (whatever that is) for tenure and promotion purposes.

This came up at Project Bamboo, and also during a dinner out at data-curation bootcamp. I don’t have an answer for it; that kind of thing happens way above my pay grade. I do have a possibly-useful observation, however, videlicet and to wit: this is a heuristics problem.

If tenure and promotion committees wanted to, they could evaluate their colleagues by reading their actual work, print or online or both, and coming to conclusions about its worth and effectiveness. They do not do this. They do not want to do this. They would walk miles and miles over broken glass on bleeding bare feet to avoid doing this.

They give lots of reasons they don’t do it, ranging from not being experts in their colleagues’ areas of expertise, to not having time to read all that, to the tenure-and-promotion process being full enough of angst and drama as it is. Be that as it may, they don’t do it. So what do they do? They rely on heuristics instead.

Peer review. Impact factors. Citation counts. Quantity of output. Supporting letters from field experts. Publication-venue reputation for quality (or “branding” if you must). None of these evaluation methods was handed down from heaven; they’re just what’s evolved out of the system.

To expand the system to cover online scholarship, especially online scholarship that doesn’t have easy print analogues, we need to come up with judgment heuristics for it. It’s that simple.

I think the society-seal-of-approval idea in the CHE article is a good one, but I’m also selfish: such vetted collections would be nifty for librarians to have as well. For the sake of academic politics, I presume the evaluation process would be private, the list of sites under evaluation kept under wraps, and no list given of sites that didn’t make the grade for whatever reason. But again, that sort of thing happens above my pay grade.

Judgment heuristics for online scholarship turned out to be a major request made of Project Bamboo by the workshop I went to. I think PB can and should tackle that problem… but they can’t be the only ones who do, not least because the social sciences and hard sciences need heuristics just as badly, and their heuristics will be seriously different.

But it’s a tractable problem, en masse. It’s when we ask every single department to come up with its own heuristics that everything breaks down.

As often happens, an eddy or two in the biblioblogosphere (no Douglas Adams jokes, please) has given me to ponder about the nebulous and uncertain sense of “place” weblogs offer, where by “place” I mean social context and expectations. I’ve been reading Solove’s new book on the social processes of shaming and gossip and reputation on the Internet, and while I could wish it delved a little deeper (I don’t think I’m its target audience, which is not a criticism of the book), the well-written sections on public and private selves and how the Internet deconstructs that dichotomy inform what follows.

(Incidentally—yes, I have been reading it *gasp* onscreen. Buffle’s screen is a bit small to run Preview in single-page mode, which is frankly what I prefer, but oh well. It does well enough for the purpose.)

Solove spills a lot of ink (or pixels, if you prefer) on misunderstandings of the Internet rooted in the public/private question, from teenagers who think adults have no right (or worse, no ability) to read their blogs to people who find communications they had thought private compromised in the most public and humiliating of fashions.

My question is a little different, though related. It is this: To what extent am I entitled to attach context-dependent social expectations to a corner of the Internet that I control? May I expect that the social context I believe I am writing in will be respected when my writing is discovered in other contexts?

Bleh, this is easier to explain by example. In meatspace, different spaces come with attached social norms. I can put my feet up on my own couch, but not anybody else’s (unless I’m told it’s okay). I don’t pay for dinner in a friend’s home, just as I don’t bring a guest-gift to a restaurant. I say things about my workplace environment in my apartment that I would never say to a colleague at work. (What? Don’t tell me you don’t. I don’t believe you.) Interestingly, my workplace has a social norm that certain conversations take place in local coffeeshops rather than on campus.

To an extent, there are analogues to this segregation-by-space on the internet. LiveJournal norms are not LinkedIn norms are not Ning norms are not Facebook norms are not Twitter norms are not MetaFilter norms. So one option for the individual wanting her written output to be read in a particular way with particular allowances is to find a space whose norms and affordances roughly correspond with the desired reading. This is, I think, partly why I have a LiveJournal.

That doesn’t solve the whole intellectual problem, though. What social norms can be attached to an individual’s own webspace? How can she enforce them? What happens when her work appears outside the context where her norms operate?

Take CavLec. It is written on webspace I pay for. I installed the software, back in the day (though I admit I rely on one-click upgrades these days). I make a point of disclaiming connections between CavLec and my employer, even to refusing to acknowledge CavLec in many professional contexts despite the considerable amount of writing I do here that is relevant to my profession. (I’ve done it, once or twice. I got to Project Bamboo on the strength of it. I do go out of my way to avoid doing so, though.) I even put a warning in its very title, for those overeducated enough to recognize it as such.

How responsible am I for limiting my language to what others will find—not just acceptable, but attractive and persuasive? Am I required not to name names? Not to cuss? How free am I to go beyond the professional persona? I used to be a good deal more personally open on CavLec than I am now. Some of that is that I’ve been specifically asked not to blog about certain things, and I respect that, but some of it is just… damn it, my context seems to have shifted out from under me, and I’m not sure I’m entirely happy about it.

I suppose I’d like CavLec to feel more like my living room than it does these days. I’m not sure what to do about that… but I’ll be thinking about it.

Chris Rusbridge sketches out what a repository should be.

I have nothing whatever to add. Go. Read. Ponder. Develop. And can we all have your code?