Caveat Lector

A couple of interesting posts here and here about hiring techies in libraries. As I have ideas about 644 swirling around in the back of my head, those posts settled nicely into a slot in my slate of class-opener “practical sociology of IT in libraries” sessions. It’s certainly an important question.

I do want to call attention to a couple of things. First, that tests like this may exclude some candidates you might not want to. If you’ve got candidates beating down your door, exclusion is one thing. If not, it may be something else. I don’t have a cell phone. I’ve never texted. What bearing this has on my ability to run an IR I must say I don’t know. To be sure, one might not hire me as a public-services techie without at least a strong hint that tying in to Cell Phone Cultcha might be a good thing… but the lesson here is to keep your tests focused on what you expect your new techie to accomplish.

(I do take such hints. Let’s all recall that I learned to drive so I could visit state university campuses. I’ve even driven to campuses since!)

Also, let’s not forget transferable skills. I think it’s dead stupid to give any techie a code test in a specific programming language. Programming skills transfer from language to language. If they absolutely must hit the ground running (especially with no previous code to work from), then okay, I can see the point, I guess. Otherwise? Forget about it. Ask architecture questions, ask problem-solving questions, ask troubleshooting questions, ask them to write pseudocode, let them write in the language of their choice—but don’t ask for code in a specific language. Stupid.

(Let us remember that HTML and CSS are not programming languages, okay? It’s absolutely appropriate to test a putative web designer for these.)

Some techies are probably bristling at this point… but honestly, I’m not. I was recommended to consult on a DSpace-related project for a library consortium, and frankly, I was not what they needed. They needed a programmer, and I am not one. Yet I was apparently recommended on the strength of my knowledge of DSpace internals. I told them I wasn’t a programmer, but either that didn’t register or they didn’t realize where UI fiddling (which I can do) shades into Real DSpace Hacking (which I can’t).

Guys, the DSpace UI I know quite a bit about, because UI design crossed with web design is kind of my thing. I know something about how the DSpace database is put together, because I go in and fiddle with stuff (don’t tell my sysadmin this! he must never know). DSpace building and configuration I know less and less about every day because it’s not my problem these days. The rest of DSpace’s innards I have only a vague architectural sense of, and the current state of the DSpace technical documentation is so sad that I can’t easily find things out using my ’leet RTFM-fu. Let the record show that henceforth, please!

I haven’t heard from the consortium in a while, and I don’t expect to. I’m honestly not even planning to bill them; I don’t bilk libraries, it’s bad business. I couldn’t help them, I didn’t do anything for them I wouldn’t do for free for a colleague, end of story—I’m dumb, but I’m honest. But if they’d had a better way to articulate and test for the skills they were really looking for, neither of us would have wasted time on the other.

So the idea of testing has merit, if pursued with due caution. You’d ask a potential cataloguer about tricky MARC situations, wouldn’t you? This is no different.

So, I got a lot of stuff off my to-do list, what with vacationing, doing the Midwest Library Tech Conference, and surviving data-curation bootcamp (“drop and give me five METS files!”). Unfortunately, stuff just keeps creeping back on. If I make a list, I’ll feel better. Well, I won’t, actually, but I’ll feel more motivated.

• Draft of authority-control article for Cataloging and Classification Quarterly due mid-July.
• A lot of prose on the IR I run for next Thursday’s face-to-face meeting. (Gah.)
• Finishing writeups for the researcher-data-practices report I’m writing part of. (Five down, three to go.)
• Revamping readings, assignments, and topics for 644. (Goodbye, RFID; hello, e-science.)
• Setting up a Drupal install for 644. (I’ll use campus’s evil, convoluted, crashy course-management system when campus puts a gun to my head. Not before.)
• Moving my web presence off Dreamhost, because I’m so sick of their downtime I could spit. In the process, working up a refreshed design for CavLec and (if I’m really lucky) moving all the blogs I host to WPMU for easier management.
• Scaring up co-PIs for the IMLS 21st-Century Librarianship grant I have in mind. Writing said grant.

There may be some other stuff for fall; depends on whether SPARC accepts my proposal to talk about the BibApp in November. But I’m not thinking about that. Too much else to do!

Meredith asks if anybody’s thought about archiving blogs.

Well, I have, and I can prove it. Dan Chudnov had a blog-preservation infrastructure he was kicking around, but I don’t know what happened to it.

Here are the chief barriers I see:

1. Rights barriers. If getting a license from the blog owner weren’t hassle enough, consider the problem of third-party-owned designs.
2. Respect barriers. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard this: “Libraries exist to preserve the filtered, reviewed, authoritative scholarly literature. When we step outside those boundaries, we damage our reputation for purveying credible knowledge.” I’ve heard it about IRs. I’ve heard it about data curation. I’ve heard it three times over about blogs. Even those of us who see value in blog preservation can’t move forward while our libraries still think like this.
3. Technological barriers. DSpace is very poorly-suited to acquiring serials of any description. It doesn’t have any kind of harvest or cron-job mechanism. This could be hacked, but nobody’s hacked it. Until someone does, don’t talk to me about blogs; I don’t have time to do manual grabs once a month or whatever.
4. Priority barriers. I am one person responsible to 26 campuses. Where am I going to put my energy? Capturing peer-reviewed literature? Data curation? Open-access journals? Grey lit? I’m sorry, blogs are pretty far down the list.

That said, if I had it in mind to bootstrap a blog-preservation program, I tell you what I’d do: write a grant proposal, probably to IMLS. Focus on law blawgs, because there’s already scholarship indicating that they’re being cited in law reviews and the rest of the legal literature, so like it or not, they’re part of the scholarly record. Promise an ongoing collection project and a survey of the rights landscape as well as an open-source collection tool (that plays nice with SWORD and OAI-ORE, natch) to help other libraries archive blogs.

I think that might be a winner.

It is a measure of the degree to which my brain is unutterably fried that I find myself doing open-access data-curation filks. I’m so ashamed…

This one is almost performable. Find me a backup band and I’ll do it at a conference.

A DESULTORY E-SCHOLARSHIP PHILIPPIC
(with cringing abject apologies to Paul Simon)

I been Peter Subered, Stuart Shiebered.
I been Project Bamboo’d, D2C2’d.
I been EPrinted and DSpaced till I’m blind.
I signed author addenda, really scary,
There’s data curators in my library!
If the data ain’t peer-reviewed — well, never mind!

I been Caveat Lectored, resurrected.
I been Steve Harnaded, D. Scott Brandted.
Well, I paid all the tolls I want to pay.
So I marked up dust with Murray-Rust,
And ARROWs and DARTs won’t hit Les Carr,
SPARC trots out Cliff Lynch several times a day.

I knew a publisher, their work so small,
Weren’t cited by no one at all.
Not the same as PLoS.
They don’t open access. They’re so unhip that
When you say Alma, they think you’re talkin’ about Alma, Wisconsin…
…wherever that is.
PRISM ain’t got no culture,
But it’s all right, ma,
Everybody wants OA!

I been Steve Hitchcocked, been Leslie Johnston’d.
Jan Velterop, won’t you walk my dog?
Been golded and greened, been ETD’d,
Been PMH’d and ORE’d.
I just discovered somebody’s hacked my blog!

E-scholarship.
I just lost my cyberinfrastructure, Heather…

I gotta get off the road, y’all. DSpace has blown up twice in the last two days, and as some of you noticed, CavLec blew up too. I swear the damn servers know.

Anyway. CavLec is back. Hi.

For UW-Madison SLIS folks: Yes, barring extreme weirdness, I will be teaching 644 again this fall. There are 40 slots. Twenty-seven are full. I don’t know if the first-years have been slotted into courses yet… but it’s looking likely the class will be full.

If you’re hesitating, SIGN UP NOW to hold your space. You can drop the course if you hate me.

(I’m getting nervous about this, honestly. The buzz last fall was great, but it may have been too great; I’m not sure I can live up to it! And teaching 40 students is a very different proposition from teaching eleven.)

I’m at data-curation bootcamp, which is doing me good. Some things I’m learning. Some things I’m learning the shape of, and where the holes in my knowledge are. (Who knew there were so many data-curation-specific format standards? I didn’t.) Some things I’m discovering I’ve known all along, which is heartening. I’m meeting neat people (and people who remind me startlingly of, well, me), and trying not to spaz about DSpace going boom, and trying to sort out where MPOW and I go from here.

Back tomorrow night.