Caveat Lector

I met Les Carr (and he doesn’t remember this, though I do) at the evening poster session at Open Repositories 2007: a big, genial man with lashings of personal presence and the most eye-searing pair of reflective silver lamé pants that I will ever see.

I say this because it was a goal of mine to wear something to the second day of Repo Fringe that would be louder than Les’s trousers, and I am proud to say that I succeeded. Of course, Les was a bit off-form, wearing mere black-and-white zebra stripes, but my Biblical coat-of-many-colors vaulted me to victory.

Les, because he is Les, met me at the Playfair Library with a sincere compliment on my coat. I had ado not to laugh.

I can rib Les like this because I like him a lot and he likes me at least a little and he is his own man with his own way of being in the world, with which he is obviously very comfortable. (His blog only occasionally hints at what he’s like in person; this seems to be a common thing among bloggers of English extraction. The tongue-in-cheek slogan “EPrints: Sucks Less Than Hotmail” gives you some of the flavor of the man, though.)

And I remark on all this at all because I seem to have built a similar niche for myself in professional circles: mildly, not altogether unpleasantly eccentric, and generally worth talking and listening to. In my way, especially on a speaker’s podium, I’m even more flamboyant than Les, to the point that some people find me overwhelming. (It’s a false impression; I’m quite a bit less thorny during one-on-one interaction than I give the sense I will be.)

I’ve been pondering whether I need to soften up and polish my approach. In some ways… yes, I think I do. But you know what? There’s a place for me even now, just as I am, and I can’t help finding that rather gratifying.

So for me it was a remarkable two days. My keynote didn’t go over quite the way I planned, mostly because I did not manage my time well, such that the much more upbeat second half of the talk got rather short shrift. I’m considerably irritated with myself about that. However, everyone who spoke to me was incredibly gracious and complimentary, so despite my irritation, I’m chalking this one up a moderate success.

The title, for those of you who haven’t clicked over to the Repo Fringe site, was “Le IR, c’est mort—vive le IR!” Since I had to rush through the vivats, what people mostly came away with was the first part.

This led to presenter Niamh Brennan of Trinity College, Dublin proceeding slowly down the aisle of the Playfair Library the next day with a laptop shrouded in a white “toga,” laying it on the floor with a “look! the body in the library” quip, and delivering Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar over it, words altered to suit, in her lovely graceful Irish-accented voice.

You had to be there, I guess. But I laughed until I cried. It was a beautiful, beautiful piece of spur-of-the-moment performance art, and I am justly proud to have inspired it. (Also, Niamh has issued me a standing invitation to Trinity College, and I want to get that down in pixels so she can’t back out! She says that Dublin is fond of eccentrics and I will do well there.)

Niamh and I and Christopher Gutteridge (who is an ubergeek after my own heart) and Patrick McSweeney (who is clearly destined for greatness) caught a show called “Sword of Maximum Damage” at the Edinburgh Fringe that night. You might have to be a tabletop RPGer to appreciate it fully, but Chris and I loved it and laughed heartily—great riffs on gamer intensity and what can become war between in-game and out-of-game relationships, plenty of suspenseful dice-rolling, and a mandolin. (Hey, Damon? I bet this one would play in Madison…)

I also mended some fences with Richard Jones and Graham Triggs, which is all to the good. There is, however, a record to be set straight: Graham let me know rather vehemently that contrary to my offhand slap a while ago, BioMed Central has in fact chucked quite a lot of code over the fence at DSpace. I’m happy to correct myself on that point. I’m also quite chuffed at Richard’s new “Foresite” OAI-ORE project, and I’m hopeful that I can use it to solve some real-world problems I have, and that the code I generate in doing so will be useful to others.

Going to a conference in Scotland about repositories is a depressing proposition for an American repository manager, honestly, because we are so far behind, so under-resourced, so powerless, so isolated compared to our English and Irish and Scottish counterparts. I did, however, make the point loudly and clearly in my keynote that the global repository community needs to do a much better job spreading successful innovation more widely, and from what was said afterward, that bit was heard. So chalk that one up in the credit side of the ledger as well.

I’m not depressed, though. (Just tired, whew! More on that in a bit.) I met so very many lovely people (and I haven’t even mentioned half of them by name), and I was privileged to speak in just the loveliest and most imposing setting imaginable to a substantial gathering of my peers and (mostly) my betters, and I couldn’t feel any luckier if I tried.