Caveat Lector

I have found it. The cure for jet lag. (Well, if you’re able-bodied, anyway.) Works like a charm. Don’t bother with melatonin pills. Skip meals only if you feel like it. No need for nap on arrival.

Just go climb to Arthur’s Seat in Holyrood Park.

Well, yes, that does require that you come to Edinburgh. What, you thought jet-lag cures came cheap?

My travel karma on the trip out was pretty favorable, all told. Not a single flight was late. I had an entire row to myself on the way to Newark from Cleveland, and while I was booked for a middle seat (ugh) to Edinburgh, I was able to switch to a window (score!) by virtue of agreeing to move so that a brother and sister traveling without parents or guardians could sit together.

I did manage to grab a few winks on the flight, which is more than I usually do; I daresay I’d have slept quite well if the North Atlantic hadn’t decided to bounce us around a bit. Those neck pillows are pretty nice! Only trick is, wear them backward. I arrived in Edinburgh without even a crick.

Passport control in Edinburgh is absurdly simple. Wait in short line, get called up, hand over passport and landing card, “business or pleasure? how long are you staying?” and then they wave you off. They’re very careful to tell you “that’s all, enjoy your stay,” probably because Americans are so used to TSA nonsense it’s hard for us to believe UK efficiency!

I’m staying in an 18th-century manor house, a sandstone confection of a place; my room is reached through a twisty maze of little blue-carpeted passages, all alike. More American hotels ought to have towel warmers, that’s all I can say. To my considerable relief, my room was ready when I arrived despite it being two hours until official check-in time.

So I dumped my stuff, changed into my trail shoes, and toddled off down Holyrood Park Street to Holyrood Park. This is, all the guides will tell you, the “hard way” of getting up to Arthur’s Seat. Maybe so. After you enter the park, you are soon faced with a fork. The right-hand path is, I think, the truly insane way up; I didn’t try it. Go left. Left leads you fairly gently around the saddle and upwards through a profusion of flowers (Queen Anne’s lace, gorse, other yellow stuff, purplish trumpetflowers, other purple things which I don’t know what they are, and of course thistles, this being Scotland), bees, butterflies, and magpies. Then you can pick one of the goat-tracks up to the Seat.

It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t as hard as the climb David and I did in Perrot State Park. Assuming able-bodiedness as before, if you’re not completely sedentary, you can do this the “hard way.” The views on the way up are worth it!

I cheerfully grant that this was an incredibly foolhardy thing to do on an injured ankle, and I advise a good deal of caution on the goat-tracks, especially on the way down. The hill-spirits had mercy on daft American tourists today; I stressed my ankle about to its limit and had one close call, but I didn’t actually injure it. Walked back to my room for a much-needed shower feeling absolutely grand, if somewhat rubber-legged.

Arthur’s Seat. I’m telling you. Kills jet lag dead. Don’t let on or they’ll all want one.

Well, I am sitting in the Madison airport, travel zen having firmly taken hold. Because I am occasionally remarkably absentminded, I printed a bunch of travel documents at work yesterday and… left them at my desk when I went home. No worries; my flight isn’t until late morning, so I just hopped a bus to work with my luggage, picked up the stuff, hopped another couple of buses to the airport, and here I am.

Of course, as I got onto the first bus I realized I’d forgotten my power converter. Hey-ho. This is what airport concessions were made for. I think there’s a Law of Compensatory Cleverness lurking out there somewhere in the world. I thought I was being very clever by packing two bags, checking one, and making sure I have a full outfit in my carry-on in case of lost luggage. I’m guessing my luggage will get through just fine now, seeing as how I stupidly forgot my power converter.

I do have my passport. Does that help?

To add insult to injury, my presenter’s mouse is dead as the proverbial doornail. I’ll try to acquire another one, but if I don’t, I’ll manage… just without some of my regular peripatetic panache. (Though I should probably be careful about wandering too much. I’ve packed heels for the keynote, despite my not-quite-healed ankle.)

(Later…)

There being about a three-hour layover in Newark, I’m springing for some internets while I wait. Road-warrior mini-power-strip duly plugged into the wall, I am multitasking merrily, picking up Flickr photos for a last-minute slideshow for the Fringe, reading my work email, avoiding reading my Gmail because I just can’t cope with DSpace squabbles at the moment, and getting in a few moves in my journal games.

I used to pride myself on being a bare-bones road warrior. No longer. Creature comforts all the way. I’ll never take a lengthy flight without noise-cancelling headphones ever again; they reduce a headache-inducing propeller roar to a tolerable murmur. Right now, my fleece cape is keeping me from freezing to death underneath hyperactive air-conditioning vents, and I’ve a neck pillow and eyeshade in my bag.

Did a mental dry-run through the keynote in the airport in Madison. Adjusted some builds, added some tidbits, the usual last-minute stuff. Deep breath… because I want to be worth people’s time and attention.

Repository Fringe has a mostly fleshed-out schedule up.

Y’know, I could fall flat on my face and this would still be an awesome two days. I am ashamed to admit how much better that makes me feel. (Me? Nervous? Well, um… yeah, actually.)

Don’t panic, y’all; I have twenty-odd slides and most of the patter done. I respect and admire the people who do rapid-fire heavy-image slideshows, but it’s not quite my style yet. My visual sense is so atrophied that it takes a lot of time and work for me to find images I like and use them well. Still, my shows have been getting prettier over time, and I like this one for a certain coherence (though not boring unanimity) of visual approach.

And there’s stuff in there that will unquestionably be novel even to people who follow CavLec and have read Roach Motel. And I think I’ve pitched it at a good place, a hopeful place, a place that should (I hope!) spark some hallway conversations and send people out with some ideas and the confidence and enthusiasm to work on them.

If I can do that, I’ll be happy with it.

Back in May, I went out to the Midwest Library Technology Conference, at my own expense and on vacation time. The week after, I was headed to UIUC’s Data Curation Institute, again at my own expense and using vacation time. What with the eScience colloquium and Project Bamboo, both of which MPOW sponsored me to attend, I just didn’t feel I could push my luck, given that MPOW has had word from On High to cut travel as much as feasible.

Two lessons here. One, that I get way more vacation time than I can actually find ways to use. (I had a lot held over from early 2007, and… look, it’s a long story, okay?) Two… the library conference and continuing-ed scene may have an interesting shakeup coming because of travel restrictions.

The LibrarianInBlack spoke cogently about refusing even to consider an important ALA program because of the travel requirements involved, travel that her workplace can’t fund. There’s always been a travel divide in librarianship—that’s part of why Five Weeks happened—so what she says is really nothing new. What’s new is that the circle of non-travellers, if MPOW is any indication, may be expanding quite a bit in the near future.

There are more-or-less blanket exemptions to MPOW’s new semi-official, not-exactly-set-in-stone travel policy. If it’s more or less local, you’re probably okay. If you’re presenting, you’re probably okay. If you’re on a committee that’s meeting, you’re probably okay. Everything else, you better be prepared to make a good case.

Partisans of electronic participation in ALA may want to consider what incentives the above policy (which I sincerely doubt is unique) gives conference organizers. If I were organizing Midwinter or Annual with a view toward revenue maximization, I’d push as many committees as I possibly could to insist on face-to-face meetings; it’s only sensible. Partisans may also want to consider incentives for librarians: I can’t be the only one who believes that some librarians join committees so they have an irrefutable excuse to go to Midwinter/Annual. It might even be true, despite my believing it!

Personally, I think the sifting and winnowing of ALA committee members that would occur if electronic participation became a standard option would be earthshaking—and highly salutary for ALA. I am, of course, notably and notoriously jaundiced, so I will leave further opining on this question to others.

The next question is what happens to conferences in general. I’ll tell you my answer: I dunno. I do, however, have some guesses, which all and sundry are welcome to test.

The smart nationwide conference will try to be one that large circles of friends go to. Many, many librarians I know seem to make this a key determiner in which BigCons they go to—and, crucially, return to, even when they themselves admit the conference content isn’t terribly compelling. I find this weird—look, as much as I love my far-flung librarian friends, there ain’t enough incentive in the world for me to endure an otherwise-useless BigCon—but I accept that I’m atypical. So that same smart conference will try to find the Gladwell connectors among its target audience and invite them to speak. Information Today seems to do this very effectively.

If you’re looking to speak at a BigCon, it is probably worthwhile to evaluate your own market value in terms of the number of people you would bring with you, and to increase that value if you can. I’m just ornery enough an iconoclast that I don’t care, which is doubtless why BigCons pass me over despite my good qualities as a presenter. I see indications, however, that Repository Fringe may have made a smart bet on me. Whether I knock the ball out of the park or lay an egg (and hell, I don’t know which I’ll do) is irrelevant to this analysis. What matters is that I’ve seen signs that my participation is helping raise awareness of and interest in Repo Fringe. Which is great, and I’ll take it—while trying not to lay an egg on the day, of course.

I anticipate a stable niche also for targeted regional conferences, the key word being “targeted.” These conferences are smaller, obviously, so they can’t try to be one-size-fits-all or there won’t be enough for anyone and therefore no one will come. These are shorter than BigCons (two days, typically), they often depend on local talent, and if they find the right local talent, they can give phenomenal bang for the buck. What I saw of MidLibTechCon (which I admit wasn’t much) indicated that it was a paradigm for the genre. Our local WiLSWorld conference runs along similar lines.

So who loses? Well, I think there’ll only be room for one national conference in many niche areas, a simple matter of critical mass. In my own niche, for example, I’m not worried for Open Repositories, but I don’t think DASER will ever be back, and I’ll be interested to see what happens with some of the stuff SPARC sponsors. JCDL and ASIST Annual will survive, but anyone trying to compete with them should rethink.

Some of the BigCons may be in trouble, especially those that are default conferences for a lot of relatively less-engaged librarians, just because the BigCons need such huge attendee numbers to remain viable. I know that MPOW isn’t sending the numbers to default BigCons that it has in previous years. I doubt MPOW is alone. ACRL, PLA, even Midwinter/Annual may see some falling-off. Ordinarily, I would think that any dropoff would be cushioned by people eliminating other conferences in favor of a BigCon. Money is getting so tight, though, that I’m honestly not sure which way that coin will fall. State library conferences may benefit, if the BigCons have indeed managed to price themselves out of the market.

The most interesting opportunity I see is for BarCamp-style participatory conferences both virtual and face-to-face, because these leverage the circle-of-friends model. But more on that in another post, because I have quite a bit on my mind about them.

The APA has pulled down the notification I posted about yesterday and is apparently rethinking things.

Veddy veddy interesting. I hear through the grapevine that librarians were going to faculty who edit APA journals and asking whether they liked what they saw. If that worked, which is admittedly still to be determined, it suggests that such outreach should be standard procedure in cases like this. Find the editors on your campus, lay out what’s going on, ask whether it’s all right by them.

Which I like. It’s the same grassroots impulse that makes campus permissions mandates impossible to stop. It’s not coercive, not even propagandist; it’s merely informative. What faculty do with the information is their business.

I think I’ll settle back with some popcorn and watch the show…

Edited to add: And a lovely idea for an editorial cartoon by my esteemed colleague, who giveth me to hack on XSLT.

I’ve talked about recalcitrant publishers before, but only theoretically. There had been grumbling and pushback among the publisher ranks, but little more.

Now there’s more.

The American Psychological Association has declared the following:

Authors publishing in APA or EPF journals should NOT deposit, personally and directly, Word documents of APA-accepted manuscripts or APA-published articles in PubMed Central (PMC) or any other depository. As the copyright holder, APA will make necessary deposits after formal acceptance by the journal editor and APA.

(snip…)

In compliance with NOT-OD-08-033, APA will deposit the final peer-reviewed manuscript of NIH-funded research to PMC upon acceptance for publication. The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university per NIH policy. Deposit fees are an authorized grant expense. The article will also be available via PsycARTICLES.

That’s pretty clear, but I’ll summarize: If you want to comply with the law demanding deposit in PubMed Central for an article we’re publishing, you pay us $2500. Do not complain, do not pass go, do not deposit the article yourself (which is free).

Well now. I didn’t see this particular flavor of recalcitrance coming, I must say. I suppose I ought to have done, because it’s logical and brilliant. The slumbering behemoth doesn’t actually care about publishing until its funding ox is gored. That’s the whole point of the NIH policy in the first place: threaten their funding, they fall into line. To hit back, quoth the APA, we shall simply threaten their funding another way.

(They are not the only ones playing this game. I have it on pretty good authority that the APS is considering a similar scheme.)

This is the acid test, NIH. This is where the loophole you left in your policy gets tested. If you don’t come down on the APA like a ton of bricks, let me tell you, they’re all going to do this. There’s no risk in it for them until you create one.

Good luck. You’ll need it.

Today we tooled up to Kettle Moraine State Forest’s Southern Unit to do a little hiking. On our way out Highway 12, a pair of sandhill cranes swung majestically over the highway just in front of us. Not a bad start!

Signs of the recent flooding in this area aren’t difficult to come by. They must have closed County N in Jefferson County at some point; even now the water in one spot is nearly up to the road shoulder. The Rock River banks are still more than a little flooded as well.

We had meant to try the Emma Carlin trails this time around, but we took the Ice Age Trail in the wrong direction. Not feeling any driving need to correct ourselves, we simply kept going. Word to the wise: if you’re going to do this, take serious bugspray, because the mosquitoes are just evil with all this water about.

But it was a nice walk through attractive woodlands, though I could have done without the pop-pop-pop of whatever godforsaken firing range that is thereabouts. Eventually, shortly after crossing 59 near S, the trail opened out into prairie… and that’s where I turned my right ankle first. Okay, it hurt, but no big deal, I kept going. Glad I did, too, because we would have missed the Northern Harriers sailing low looking for edible rodents.

Shortly before the trail hits County N, I turned the same ankle again and colored the air blue with my commentary on that occurrence. Still, I could walk, and the ankle’s range-of-motion wasn’t too impaired, so on we went down the County N shoulder, stopping off at Paradise Springs trails (which are misnamed; there really aren’t trails there, just trout fishing and basic amenities like pit toilets and water fountains, the latter of which was quite welcome). N deadends on 59, which we walked down to pick up the trail back at County S, through the mosquito-ridden woodlands and a few spots where the trail is rock-strewn and I—yeah, you guessed it, turned the ankle a third time.

It’s pretty much sprained, ordinary ankle inversion sprain; it appears to be “moderate” on the mild-moderate-severe scale. Still, it drove me home without much complaint, and I can walk on it if I’m careful. May take the bus to work tomorrow; we’ll see how it feels.

No regrets. I can live with a sprained ankle for the sake of sandhill cranes and Northern Harriers.

Because (remarkably) both the article due next week and the Repo Fringe talk are in moderately decent shape, I took a three-day weekend so we could do the car-rental thing. (Enterprise has nifty half-off weekend specials, but you have to rent for three days.)

So I says to myself, I says, Self, you are doing your very first keynote ever. This is not a small thing. It will not kill you to buy a new dress for it. I knew what I wanted, and a few minutes’ looking around online yielded the apparel stores’ name for it: “jacket dress.” I don’t look good in these things, because I don’t look good in anything, really, but I look as good as I’m gonna. I knew I wanted it in a summerweight fabric, as my wardrobe is (understandably, but even so) oriented toward wearability in the Frozen North.

Coldwater Creek came up dry; their designers have moved a little way away from my preferences, though I can still sometimes find something I’ll wear from them. Other usual suspects, likewise. So I went to… the mall. Let me tell you, greater love hath no woman for a conference than this.

Sears had nothing even slightly suitable, but I hadn’t really expected them to. It was Boston Store that really set my eyebrows climbing. The 1970s were not a sterling era for American women’s fashion, especially considering its colors and prints. Why, why, why do they seem to be making a comeback? Is it the economy? What? Because ugh, stuff I wouldn’t wear on a dare, even on Halloween.

And then there’s the prevailing wisdom that goes something like this: Fat Women Do Not Want Pretty Clothes. Seriously, that’s all I can figure, because whoa the ugly, it burns. Ugly colors. Ugly prints. Ugly cuts that flatter no one. These stores, they take their ugly seriously.

I did see one dress that I could have bought. It wasn’t a jacket dress, but it was in a tasteful plum with a subtle print in gold and olive, and it would have traveled well, and it was okay. I made note of it in case all else failed.

I then walked past all the morons who had hours to burn waiting in line for a new iPhone into JC Penney. Penney’s and I have a history, which is why I saved it for last; someone in their buyer’s department seems to know what I’m desperately looking for and won’t find anywhere else, everything from a honeymoon nightdress to my fleece cloak to… well, let me tell it.

The women’s department actually had jacket dresses, but I didn’t really like their selection. Sigh. I was walking out, reorienting myself so I could find the exit, when I saw it. Jacket dress. Short-sleeved, summerweight georgette. I’m washable, proclaimed a tag on the sleeve (I avoid dry-clean-only clothes when I can). Muted greens and golds in an abstract pattern on an olive base, very tasteful. Well, look at that, not made in China. And it was the last one on the rack.

No way. No way is it my size. Two up or two down, that’s the rule for these things.

Go figure. It was in my size. Tried it on, liked, ganked. And it cost about half what the purple number at Boston Store woulda.

I hope the Repo Fringe folks are grateful, though. I have SHOPPED for you people. Sheesh.

So I read the Recommended Practice Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group (PDF), and the terminology didn’t particularly bug or thrill me, but one thing jumped right on out of the diagrams near the end of the document: their terminology distinctions are based on the traditional journal workflow.

If open peer review or post-publication review catches on—anywhere—their terminology is in the toilet. Workflows are sometimes fragile.

In a time of experimentation, I’m super-extra-dubious about relying on workflow for terminology distinctions. (I’m also dubious about the publisher-of-record being the only party blessed to call an item “published,” but let that go for the time being.) I suspect this is good enough for now, but how long will now last?

I just did something I’ve never done before: cited an article of mine in another article I’m writing.

Feels weird.