Caveat Lector

So a lot of pixels are being spilled on datasets and credit for datasets. Nothing wrong with that. It is all to the good.

What makes me boggle rather is the pervasive idea that putting together a dataset is “not science.” Science is what comes afterwards and gets written up in a paper.

I’m just bewildered by that, honestly. If it usefully advances knowledge, who the hell cares whether it’s a dataset or a paper?

Academics do, apparently. Guess that’s another reason I keep refusing to be one.

’Twas another car-rental weekend. Yesterday, as I was in the mood for a longer drive, we tooled up to Necedah National Wildlife Refuge to look around a bit.

Highway 12, most of the way up. How hard could that be? Alas, I did not take into account that unlike the interstate, Highway 12 goes through the Wisconsin Dells. The Dells look merely kitschy from the interstate. A few oversized waterparks, a few oversized electric billboards—local tourism making good, you know what I mean? No big deal.

As $DEITY is my witness, I will never drive through the Dells again ever. As far as I’m concerned, Highway 12 has a big fat sinkhole between 33 and County J. The Dells are vile. They are giant piles of soul-sucking fake plastic experience marketing. They are the perfect setting for a game of Kill Puppies for Satan (warning: not for the easily offended). They are the worst parts of the Vegas Strip and the Anaheim House of Mouse all incestuously rolled up together. Plus, the traffic is horrible.

There just isn’t enough WTF in the world. Never again. I swear it. And that’s enough of that. Boy, is it ever enough.

We arrived at Necedah without further incident and drove most of the auto trail. We stopped off at the Sprague flowage, where we made the acquaintance of a super-cute green-and-brown leopard frog with a mighty hop. Another frog swam to the surface of the water, but plooped right back down as soon as it noticed us.

Eventually we reached the refuge headquarters, parked the car in the shade, and tore through lunch. A little way away is one of their (few; this is a wildlife refuge, not a state park) official hiking trails, which has a short observation tower and a blind a little way further on. We saw a huge flock of geese, as well as half a dozen trumpeter swans (including one youngun) and two sandhill cranes standing elegantly above the scrum, knowing they own the place.

We then made a slight strategic mistake—well, I did, actually—deciding to walk to the other hiking trail instead of picking up and driving there. It turned out to be a long, dusty walk on a hot (though thankfully not humid) day. The redheaded woodpeckers, didn’t mind, though; they were everywhere, alongside the bluebirds and warblers. Near the beginning of the walk, a doe stopped to watch us, graceful tan body beautifully framed between a tree and tall vines. It was a good ten minutes before she decided she had other places to be and sprang away. We startled a couple of great blue herons out of the marsh and watched them sail sulkily away, remarking peevishly to each other that the neighborhood was going to the dogs. We also interrupted the sun bath of another little leopard frog; we made sure to shoo him off the road before we let him be.

There was a reward at the end of the walk, though we were too tired (and needing to husband water) to actually walk the trail once we found it. Through our binoculars, from the little wooden deck at the trailhead we saw a group of sandhill cranes—and three bright-white whoopers! Can’t complain about that; whoopers are rare, and a sighting much-prized.

David managed to navigate us around the Dells, fortunately for my sanity. A wild turkey in a ditch hunkered down to attempt invisibility when we stopped to look at him. I do love driving through Wisconsin countryside; it’s restful and pleasant and fifty times more picturesque than it has any right to be. I’m a city-kitty and probably always will be, but I do understand the appeal of living there.

I was plenty tired and achy when we made it back to Madison, so we stopped at Noodles and Company for a quick dinner before we reached home. We’d wanted to eat in Prairie du Sac, but it appears the Blue Spoon doesn’t open on Sundays.

There are quite a few state parks up Baraboo way that I have on my list of places I want to go. At this rate, I’ll have to live in Wisconsin the rest of my life to get to them all!

Fortunately, I don’t have any problem with that idea. None whatever.

A goldfinch, bright spot of yellow against the blue bay, clinging tight to a tall thistle swaying in the breeze, little black beak pecking into a purple bloom for seeds and sending bits of thistledown sailing.

Canoeing on Lake Wingra, lake-weeds and pond-lilies hissing against the bow. A kingfisher perches on a dead branch over the lake looking for fish, spiky crest high. A scattered flock of cedar waxwings shrills batlike, as its members flit out over the shallows for insects.

A friendly cat, dirty white with a black-striped gray tail and a few spots of similar shading, trots up to be petted, particularly liking scratches under its collar. “I have to go to work,” I tell it after a bit. It follows me in front of me. “No, I really have to go to work.” Sprawl at my feet, pleading look up. “Oh, all right.”

A rust-brown muskrat chewing on clover in Brittingham Park.

A green heron in its distinctive kiwi-like hunch on a boat launch. It extends its neck for a moment, then hunches up again. Less than a minute later, another green heron flaps by overhead, to the noisy consternation of one of the ubiquitous gulls.

In case anyone thought I had forgotten how much I love this place.

I live in the middle ground of technology savvy in libraries. At the upper end of that middle ground, I daresay, but nonetheless.

I’m so over Computers in Libraries. For some people, it’s great. It teaches me nothing… and it is the state of the tech-education art as mass library conferences go, I’m afraid. That’s not a slur on those conferences, just a recognition that I’m well beyond the audience they’re aiming at.

I’m not limited to consumer-level tech, on or off the Web. I can install and configure software. I can even (occasionally) do so from the command line, though I need a recipe for that, and if it fails, I have to have recourse to Google, because ant and maven and make are blackholes to me. I’ve been a cargo-cult sysadmin. I’m a tolerable jackleg webmonkey, though don’t ask me to do complicated CSS grid layouts. I can edit Other People’s Code. Sometimes. If it makes sense to me. Java, with its highly abstract programming patterns, fails to make sense to me as often as not; I’ve hit a lot of brick walls looking at DSpace and Manakin code. I can write big ugly inefficient SQL queries; I know nothing of query optimization. I can write text-munging code in Python, pretty badly because parsers and lexers are foreign except as terms. I grok more markup than most, though even I get lost in the jungle of specs around XML.

That’s it, really. That’s what I can do. Techier than your average bear, but not a true techie… and the mark of the true techie is being able to move on, self-propelled. I’m not good at that. All these years, and I still can’t write a simple webapp. What is up with that?

The middle ground I’m in is large. It contains multitudes. It is not well-served by the current state of professional education in librarianship. People like me can take programming classes that aren’t oriented to libraries, and I’ve done that, and it’s been valuable—but it hasn’t gotten me over the real humps holding me back. Context matters.

Turning us loose in the wilds of IRC isn’t going to do the trick either. Middle-grounders tend to be exactly the kind of n00b that your average IRCer will have a grand old time kicking the crap out of. There are also matters of culture to consider; a lot of middle-grounders have enough geek-culture cred to get by (I’ve never had any difficulty in that regard), but not all of them by any means, and it’s hard to integrate into a typical IRC community without that.

Besides, a lot of us middle-grounders are women. ’Nuff said, for now.

So it seems to me that the problem, and therefore the solution to it, is tripartite: contextualized training in tools and programming techniques that work for typical library problems, conferences and other professional-ed opportunities aimed at middle-grounders, and a loose network of colleagues to ask questions of when the inevitable brick walls loom.

I like the BarCamp model of advance organization for the first and second problems, quite a lot. Let folks decide what problems they have and want to solve; someone will turn up who can do the training. Or a trainer will throw out some ideas, and what sticks, sticks. BarCamps are also cheap (to run and to attend) by design, which is important, because your average middle-grounder needs a lot of different kinds of help. My own laundry-list is grotesquely long.

Conferences are a harder nut to crack for middle-grounders. You can’t propose a BarCamp-style “whatever people want” pre- or post-conference session to a conference, because the conference just won’t bite. If you suggest something specific, you’re gambling that sufficient librarians needing that specific thing will actually attend the conference; if a pre- or post-conference doesn’t generate enough attendance to cover its costs, all the conferences I’ve taught at cancel it ruthlessly. (Which isn’t a practice I argue with. Conferences aren’t charities.) We’ll probably have to do our own events, which is a pity, but the world is what it is.

The network is probably the hardest thing of all to arrange, because middle-grounders have such holes in their knowledge. There’s more than a small chance that one person with a specific expertise will be swamped by everyone else’s need—and that’s if the network coalesces in the first place, by no means a given. I don’t have the magic pixie dust to make a middle-grounder community. I don’t know who does. I just know that they don’t seem to emerge the way that the code4lib community did, or the loose confederation of (mostly) public-services librarians I’m on the edges of in Twitter and FriendFeed.

I do have the beginning of a solution, or at least a suggestion, for the whole Woman Question. (Yes, I know. Me? Solutions instead of whinging? Miracles do happen.) I am a partisan of the Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project & Gentlemen’s Auxiliary (see its genesis here), and I’d be happy to see something like it become common in areas where women can’t necessarily expect respectful treatment. I’ll bring (or mail) the buttons to a face-to-face event. I’ll wear a website badge. And I will pledge to overcome my personal cowardice and speak the hell up, online and in person alike. Enough to start with, perhaps?

I linked Steve’s post above, but I’ll link it again, because I’m interested in seeing his ideas realized, and if some critical mass can be achieved, I’d gladly pitch in.

Call me an unabashed Stuart Shieber fan. His video on this page shows him at his droll, persuasive best. I can see how he won over Harvard faculty. Can we clone him?

(The other vids are good too; Kevin L. Smith’s doesn’t really need slides, so it’s easy to run as the soundtrack to your other work.)

The Edinburgh experience left me with a complex observation that I tried unsuccessfully to get across to one person who was pressing me really hard to identify “successful” repositories in the United States. (No, it wasn’t “define success,” though that was a tempting question. The reality is that success for institutional repositories is defined—by the people who matter, anyway—in terms of items deposited.) It’s an important enough point, and I made it inarticulately enough at the time, that I think it deserves a piece of a blog post.

Videlicet and to wit: There’s an understandable tendency to look to “successful” repositories for examples the rest of us should follow. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself. Problems arise, however, when one assumes first, that unsuccessful repositories have nothing to teach; second, that the successful repository experience is the norm; and third, that the locus of success lies within the repository and its staff.

Because it doesn’t. (Okay, yes, a lousy repository manager can sink you. A good one is necessary but not sufficient, is what I’m saying.)

Successful repositories have sufficient backing from their libraries and their university administrations to make something work. I can’t make it any simpler than that. Without that support, the best repository-rat in the world will not succeed. With it, you don’t need an Einstein.

Exactly what successful repositories make work varies quite a bit, according to the talents and creativity of the staff involved and the nature of the support provided. This is why it’s impossible to write the “winning recipe” for a successful IR. At Minho they instituted bribes. At Rochester back in the day, they hacked up some researcher pages. At Ohio State they have a well-established mediated-workflow system. At Harvard they’ve got a mandate.

(Oh, and a word about the Shieber presentation. Shieber expresses considerable embarrassment that Harvard doesn’t yet have an IR. Dude. It’s okay. Really. Harvard did things the right way ’round. I opine that if Harvard had had the standard unsuccessful IR, it would have faced considerably more hassle instituting those mandates, because too many faculty—namely, any at all—would have had negative interactions with the repository. What this means for institutions who want a mandate but already have a less-than-illustrious IR will be left as an exercise for the student.)

The other thing that successful repositories have is leave and resources to experiment. They have to. The standard repository software package, as I have argued ad nauseam, is wholly inadequate to fuel a successful repository program. This means that the well-dressed repository manager has some combination of elbow room in her job description, developer time, student help, librarian alliances, and administrative weight to work with. Again, the exact combination will differ from institution to institution—but a manager without any of this might want to rewrite her résumé before her current job tarnishes it.

So much for the successful repository. Let’s talk for a moment about the typical repository. If either of my two(-plus, if you count my contribution to a consortial IR) repo-rat positions is any example, the typical repository is running on a wing and a prayer and the dedicated efforts of one FTE or less. I say “dedicated” for a reason, because it’s next-door to impossible to garner impressive results from the voluntary efforts of scattered librarians who don’t have any kind of imprimatur from above for their repository efforts.

This is no way to run a program, folks—and yet as best I can tell (pace Les Carr) it’s the typical way it’s done. These repositories cannot be successful… yet they are the majority case! What does that say for the repository movement?

The thing is, just telling repository managers “You need developer time, student help, willing librarians, and administrative support” is a useless way to behave. This message doesn’t need to go out to repository managers; we know already, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Again, we don’t have the administrative support to garner all that other stuff. The message needs to go to research-library administrators, many of whom have yet to hear it. We have sufficient reasonably successful examples now that we can say this with authority. So let’s.

SPARC, CNI, JISC, even ACRL, this is your job. Please to be doing it. Thank you.

(What? I did my bit. I wrote Roach Motel. What do you want from me, blood? If I have to write Roach Motel again, you might get your wish, at that.)

Another note on success reporting. I admit that I have tended to roll my eyes at “x000 items archived in the IR!” PR puff pieces. I mean, if I archive x000 things, that’s just me doing my ruddy job, right? Reference librarians don’t write PR puff-pieces about x000 questions answered. Instruction librarians don’t write PR puff-pieces about x000 classes taught. So what is this about?

I’m afraid it’s about visibility, and I’ve given up sneering at it. We have to make the plays we can. Just today I sent a routine email letting an administrator at MPOW know that I’d followed up on a repo contact, and that they’d signed on. Lo and behold, said email was forwarded to a library-managers’ listserv, which sincerely gives me to think about how often I don’t send out success stories.

So what the hell. If I can’t beat ’em, I’ll join ’em. We’re thirty-odd away from 7000 items.

I’m home from Edinburgh, having arrived about dinnertime yesterday. I waded through some of the sleep backlog last night, but I think there’s more to go.

I’m enormously grateful to Robin Rice, Claire Knowles, Les Carr, and everyone else (lots of people!) who helped bring me to Edinburgh and show me such a lovely time while I was there. I hope I lived up to billing.

As I tend to do, I woke up much too early on departure day, killing time downstairs where the wireless works (someday I will remember to have an Ethernet cord with me always, but that day is not this, apparently) until it was time to check out and go. Edinburgh taxis are quick and efficient, especially early on a Sunday morning when hardly anyone is on the roads. (I love that about Edinburgh. Cities that are permanently on the go just sort of depress me, really.) My cabbie on the way into town last Wednesday was a fount of useful, if occasionally dour, information about the city; I didn’t catch him out in a single inaccuracy. (Especially about the new Scottish Parliament building. That thing is a travesty. If I were HRH the Queen, I’d kick up a fuss about such a Fortress of Uglitude sitting across from my very nice palace.)

At the airport, I joined a queue from the Continental desk all the way to the door. No way would they be able to process us all before the 9:20 scheduled departure. This turned out not to be a worry, because the flight was delayed an hour.

I thought I was all right. I thought I had a three-hour window between flights. When I finally reached the desk, I found out this was not so; my window was only two hours. With a one-hour delay, that left one hour only to get through passport control, customs, and another round of TSA Security Theatre. The operative words are “not a chance in hell.” And there wasn’t another flight to Madison until the next morning.

Travel zen came to the rescue. There are, after all, worse fates than a night at an airport hotel, even in Newark. I calmly gave up my original flight for lost and determined on seeing whether the Newark agents could get me to Milwaukee or Chicago, whence I could catch a bus home. Worst case would be that airport hotel.

I am going to try to avoid flying Continental internationally in future, because they don’t make any particular effort to cater to vegetarians. Enough said about that (except that this was my mistake and not my hosts’; I chose the flights). I arrived in Newark hungry and tired, kicking travel zen into a new gear to cope with passport control (quite efficient, actually) and customs (argh). Landed at the bag-recheck area and told the guy that I’d probably missed my flight. He yelled for a check on the flight number, and—travel zen wins! My flight to Madison was delayed an hour. I could still make it!

So I rechecked my bag and checked the monitors for the flight gate. The said flight didn’t appear on the monitors. Yay. So after a Keystone-Kops montage of TSA Security Theatre as well as terminal and gate changes involving trams, buses, and a whole lotta walking, I found myself in a crowded and noisy Terminal A waiting for my flight, which had been delayed another half-hour while I wasn’t looking.

No worries. None. I would get home. That day. Anything else was gravy.

Well, having them lose my checked bag in Newark isn’t exactly, um, gravy. But I was the happiest person in line at Madison to put in my lost-bag claim, I’ll tell you that much!

The bag hasn’t turned up yet. I have a feeling it’s been sent to the wilds of northwest Arkansas or something. But half the people on my flight were in the same case, so I expect it’ll be found.

The one postcard I desperately wanted is the one photograph nobody seems to have taken, possibly because it’s difficult to find a good vantage from which to take it: Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags taken from the vicinity of the Edinburgh First dormitories, where they really do outline a lion crouched over Edinburgh, looking over Holyrood Palace toward the Firth of Forth and downtown.

If anybody has that picture, I would cheerfully pay for a good print.

Edinburgh is a city I can imagine falling in love with, just as I fell hard for Holyrood Park the day I got here. It’s a city built on a human scale: walkable (even the hills), courteous, inviting, with a welcome sense of long history that never becomes stifling or snobbish. Though it’s currently jam-packed with tourists owing to the Fringe and sundry allied festivals, it isn’t hard to see the quieter workaday town underneath. The person most responsible for inviting me here, Robin Rice, graduated from UW-SLIS and worked in Madison for a time afterwards; she went to some trouble to move to Edinburgh, and I can completely understand why.

It does rain here and it does blow, so an umbrella is better than nothing and rain gear is better than an umbrella. It doesn’t do all-day rains, though; half an hour and the rain is over, or so it’s been since I’ve been here.

This morning, after another excellent breakfast from the kindly and hospitable staff of my hotel, I set out a-wandering through the Old Town. I got slightly lost, but happily so, as I wandered past the imposing Herriot School and the marvelous view from Keir Street behind it. I landed at the Grassmarket at last, which was set up for a half-art-fair, half-flea-market; I found a little something-something there I think David will like.

Edinburgh Castle is an immense old pile, on an even immenser cliff. It’s all done up with a makeshift stadium for the Tattoo, so I decided to pass on touring it and make my way down the Royal Mile instead. This is… well, tourist kitsch is what it is, I’m afraid, but there are tidbits of interest here and there, notably St. Giles’s Cathedral (which, like Edinburgh itself, is humane rather than imposing) and a kirk halfway down with a rather remarkable graveyard in back.

I detoured up the North and South Bridge (such views!) to New Town, taking in the Sir Walter Scott memorial (pretty good for a novelist, I thought!); I elected not to climb it, as I knew I’d be coming back Holyrood Park way. I dallied through the Princes Street gardens and some of the side streets, managing to locate a Sainsbury’s for a quick and cheap lunch to take back to the gardens.

Reaching the bottom of the Royal Mile at length, I decided to tour Holyrood Palace and its ruined abbey and its gardens, which are honestly worth the rather steep admission fee. Mary Queen of Scots, James VI/I, Charles II, Bonnie Prince Charlie and his sad death, and any number of other royals have set their marks on the place. (Also, a plaster cast of the skull of Robert the Bruce has grisly pride of place in a display of curiosities.) Magnificent tapestries are everywhere, and although they are clearly partly there for pure convenience (they keep out cold), that doesn’t stop them being beautifully woven. The gardens are sedate, well-tended, green as green. I do hope Their Royal Highnesses enjoy the place; it deserves to be enjoyed.

The remarkable display of Italian Renaissance art in the Queen’s Gallery is a testament to the treasures piled up by the crown. You wouldn’t believe how many da Vinci cartoons it is claimed belong to the monarchy if I told you. I quite liked a Pallas Athene (not by da Vinci) with brooding dark eyes in a luminous face.

I could have just walked around the Queen’s Walk back to my hotel, but Holyrood Park was calling, and despite my sore feet, I could only answer it. I didn’t climb anything this time, as I hadn’t the shoes for it; just walked on the path through the valley between the Crags and the Seat, listening to bees and birds and delighting in the beauty around me.

And now, exhausted but perfectly content, I’m sitting and blogging and thinking about packing for the trip home. I missed out on quite a few things I’d have liked to see, but really, I think that’s only right. One ought to leave a city as fine as Edinburgh feeling as though it had more to offer.

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.