Friends and rails
I thought I saw a green heron while I was walking to work on Friday. As I drew closer, though, I saw that the bird didn’t have a heron’s neck. What it did have was great long toes that it set down with immense deliberation, foot over foot along the metal edge of a pier whose wooden planks had already come up for the winter.
I had to consult with my boss (a notable birder) to confirm my guess that it was a rail. I couldn’t see its coloration at all—on sunny mornings the birds are between me and the sun, so all I can see is their shape—but the length of beak suggested a Virginia rail. I hadn’t ever seen one before, so I went home pleased.
Which was something, because I had had one of Those Days. We all get them, and this one wasn’t anything especially notable or ominous, just a personal defeat that stung worse than bees, because I’d put a lot of effort into a project I’d had high hopes for that came to nothing in the end. Nothing to do but curse myself (sparing a moment or two to curse DSpace for its rigid uselessness as well) and commence unwinding the project’s affairs. These things happen.
In the generational strife one sees written about nowadays, the generation after mine is often accused of demanding undeserved external validation. I can’t really say whether that’s true. I just know what my own yardstick for myself is: tangible, unassailable evidence of accomplishment. I was an inveterate grade-grubber as a child, to the point that it felt odd to be praised for anything else. What else was there? And I would never ask to be validated. Validation comes with accomplishment. How else? If you have to ask, you don’t really deserve it.
Even for me it’s not quite that simple. I’m proud of my part in the Puerto Rico Census Project, though nobody would ever think to praise a data-entry drudge. That was important work, resulting in a dataset that will fuel worthwhile demographic and historical insights. I’m glad I worked on it.
Still, it does mean that institutional repositories, notable for their paucity of obvious accomplishment, or indeed any accomplishment at all, are a hard row to hoe for me sometimes. Friday was one of those times. I did something I hardly ever do—in fact, can’t remember ever doing. I said to my far-flung librarian friends, “I am having one of Those Days. I feel useless. Somebody cheer me up.”
And damn if they didn’t. It is a good thing to have far-flung librarian friends. It is also a good thing to see Virginia rails on the bay.