Caveat Lector

The day after Oxford, we hopped on a bus to Trafalgar Square, which is quite impressive in good strong daylight, with all the ex-colonies’ embassies around it and Nelson’s Column amidships (so to speak). I confess I was relieved to learn that the rather horrid sculpture to the north of the National Gallery is only one of a string of temporaries. They can’t get rid of that thing soon enough.

We strolled down Whitehall past Downing Street and the Queen’s Life Guard, one of whom was having a bit of trouble keeping his horse still in the face of gawping tourists. I insisted on giving the poor animal a wide berth, but I expect its opposite number, standing good as gold despite the fuss, was probably a more steadying influence. Security is everpresent in the area, though no more than around the Mall in DC, and the self-important cell-phone conversations of government functionaries fill every available silence—and there aren’t many silences available.

Despite my mother’s enthusiastic recommendation, I found Westminster Abbey a difficult place to visit, and should I return to London, I don’t believe I will return there. The church itself is well-built and handsome, but its graceful old bones are impossible to see for all the plaques and busts and sculptures and coats-of-arms and regimental flags and inscriptions and decorated tombs and every other imaginable memorial created by the hand of man tumbling all over each other and fighting for attention.

Many of them would be quite beautiful, were there enough negative space around them to let them breathe. As it is, their tawdry overcrowding (combined with the sad tombstones effaced by years of being trodden underfoot) crushes the spirit with insistent reminders of not only death, but insignificance. Many interred there led thoroughly uninteresting and undistinguished lives, landing in Westminster Abbey by virtue of exalted birth or exalted wealth. Saddest of all to me are the many women whose tombs only remarked on their husbands or sons.

Dampening the experience further are the Abbey staff, who are clearly caught in a deeply unpleasant dilemma: tourists are their bread-and-butter, but they hate tourists, hate the hundreds of profane feet defiling sacred ground. Not a good mental space to be forced into, and they don’t hesitate to make their distaste known.

That said… I did like to see the memorials purchased for a soldier or an engineer or a musician by his friends and colleagues, or for a wife by a husband, his grief plain in the words that break out of the formulas. I liked paying my respects to Newton and Darwin and Vaughan Williams and Ben Jonson and Purcell and too many others to list. I also liked the garden, surprisingly peaceful considering its surroundings, and the kids in one of the Abbey schools playing kickball on the other side of the garden gate.

After leaving the Abbey, we traipsed through St. James Park, greeting the greylag geese like old friends because of a pair who somehow made their way to Madison’s Lake Mendota to rear a brood one summer. Pelicans and moorhens and swans (both white and black) and grebes and herons and several different sorts of ducks (including the really quite striking eider duck, and the formally-besuited tufted duck) paddled in the lake and padded about on the shore; David wisely had his binoculars with him, so we got excellent views.

We waved at Buckingham Palace (Her Majesty appeared to have been in residence, judging from the royal standard) and walked down The Mall back to Trafalgar, where we picked up a late lunch to defend from the pigeons. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the National Gallery, which we did not by any means manage to see all of.

Our bus driver had barely pulled away from our stop when he was stopped by a bicyclist banging on the side and yelling about having been cut off. And so we saw the famous British bobbies in action; one stepped onto the bus, swiftly ascertained the course of events, diplomatically calmed the agitated cyclist and sternly warned the bus driver, and had the bus on its way again in under two minutes. Impressive.

We were honestly too tired to forage for dinner, so we collapsed into bed. Given that I would sprain my knee the next morning and my husband would have to manage the move via tube from King’s Cross to Kensington, probably just as well.

You know how on takeoff, an airplane bumps and jolts and veers and careers and generally does stomach-turning stunts until it gets through the cloud layer and hits clear air?

Yeah. Welcome to my 2006. I knew it would be like this; the takeoff-phase of a new career can’t not be. Doesn’t soften the bumps, not really.

From a strict career-advancement point of view, tearing up my Honorary Guy membership card was pretty stupid; I threw away a lot of opportunity. From an accidental-techie point of view, it was even stupider; prompt, knowledgeable tech support is to be prized above rubies. From an inveterate-feminist point of view, who knows? I might well have made more of a difference if I hadn’t taken my toys and gone home.

But ulcers are not a career tool, and I proved to my own satisfaction some time before I became a librarian that I need to hang with people I trust to respect me. Not everybody needs that, and more power to the ones who don’t because they change the world, but I do need it. So, regrettably, the membership card had to go.

I wrote a fair bit this year (outside CavLec, which is more of the nature of a habit—take that however you please—than a professional duty). None of it was earthshaking. Some of it was competent professional writing. What’s clear from this year’s output is that I write too slowly to distinguish myself by the sheer quantity of my writing, and I write too poorly to distinguish myself by its quality or impact. This is an unhappy conundrum. I need to do better.

I also need to wake up and smell the rooibos: a podcast and two presentations did far more for me this year than all the writing I forced myself to do put together. I’m a solid speechifier already, and only getting better from observing extremely talented presenters like Jonathan Zittrain or the Adaptive Path crew. Next year, more talk proposals are in order.

There’s a conundrum there, too, though, because I have a curiously split reputation. At MPOW, I am regarded as uber-techie; some of my colleagues don’t believe I talk about anything else. The truth is, of course, that I rarely give techie-talks these days—the real truth is that I hardly ever have. The one I did do this year alongside Tim Donohue turned out quite well, and I’ve no objection to more tutorials and training sessions along those lines, but unfortunately DSpace-geekery is a fairly limited market, as is XML-document geekery, and the social-software beat (which is the other geekspace I can reasonably authoritatively inhabit) is quite full up.

Repository-rat space doesn’t need me either, which is a pity, but it’s the truth. I am going to Open Repositories 2007, and I did think about what I could possibly submit as a talk proposal, but I came up completely empty. I’m a decent rat. I do my job. I just don’t do it any differently from the other rats I know. I don’t have any particularly incisive technical or management or metadata or preservation insights. (Dublin Core sucks. We knew that already.) I have some moderately original suspicions about the social milieu IRs exist in, but I can’t support them (even anecdotally) well enough to hang a talk on them.

What that leaves, and where my real successes both written and spoken are pointing me, is big-picture crystal-ballism of various sorts. You have no idea how this irks me! I am a rat. I am a peasant. I properly ought to have my feet on the ground and my eyes on my feet. Landscape surveying, predictions, how-did-we-get-here, where-are-we-now, and where-are-we-going, that’s not for rats.

But I’m good at it. No two ways about it. I’m good at it. Good enough that I can pull it off outside my obvious area of expertise. Good enough that I can explain my area of expertise and its significance to those who don’t share it. Good enough that it’s what people are coming to me and asking for (hello, TLA ’07!). Good enough that when I see other people who are good at it, they remind me of, well, me.

So, hell, what can I do but play to my apparent strengths?

I didn’t just do worky-things this year. I got New Librarian out of her pity-party parade and into a job, and she’s doing just fine, and I’m proud of that. I got back into music, and I’ve remembered just how hard it is for me to sing well—good musical performance is an endless constellation of tiny pinprick details that have to be brought together all at once, and I’m really quite bad at getting them all correct because very few of them are as automatic for me as they ought to be—but I’m better than I was when I started, and I’m proud of that.

David’s deep in dissertation-funk, and it’s been a hard year on both of us because of that, but we’re still together in spite of it, and given what’s been happening in my circle of friends this year (as well as what I’ve seen dissertation-funk do to other marriages) I’m both proud and relieved. We’ll get through this. Do your worst, academia; you can’t break this pairing.

For next year… I’d like to find some clear air, if that’s not too much to ask.

My Chanukah present from David was the third season of Babylon 5, which I have happily been wolfing down in large chunks. (“And they made a very agreeable thump!”)

Tonight we were rescreening “Passing Through Gethsemane,” in which a character searches for information about himself. (This is me, avoiding mega-spoilers.) “Four hours,” the computer says, after the character inputs his query (by voice, of course; this is the twenty-third century).

“Google works a lot faster than that,” David remarked.

“Well,” I said, “I figure it’s a metasearch problem. Computer has to send the query out to all the different [subject] databases on all the different planets and colonies… there must be some heinous latency involved, never mind the communications lag.”

My name is Dorothea, and I am a shrieking-geek librarian.

We rousted ourselves out of bed too early for breakfast, and hopped on the bus to Victoria station (leaving out problems with the ticket machine that cost me a one-pound coin, sigh—for all its congestion problems, London doesn’t seem to want people to use public transport). Found the Oxford Express no problem, and sat back to watch the grotesquely horrible traffic. Traffic is even worse in Oxford proper, there being far too many motorum borum for comfort.

Our Host was waiting for us as we alighted, and she whisked us off for a quick walking tour that included bits of the Bodleian (Our Host being a reader there), the Sheldonian Theatre, the cavernous basement of Blackwell’s, and a little pub tucked so far away in a back alley that I can’t imagine how it stays in business—but it looked prosperous enough, indeed.

The Bodleian clearly has not gotten the memo circulating in American libraries about patron service—or else they believe they’re above that sort of pandering. I found every Bodleian official we met to be sniffily disdainful and dreadfully bureaucracy-minded, and one or two descended to outright rudeness, even to Our Host, who is neither American nor an Oxford outsider. Eh, well. Eventually I daresay they’ll decide to name themselves something else, since clearly the modern conception of “library” as a place for actual people is shockingly lowering.

Anyway, Our Host then treated us to a delightful bus tour; the weather was warm enough that sitting outside was no hardship at all, and brilliantly sunny, showing off Oxford’s golden sandstone to best advantage. We switched tour guides mid-trip, and our second guide, by the name of “Jane,” was an absolute delight—sharp and funny and clearly in the business for ages. We lunched at a little tapas place, and stopped in at the famous Eagle and Child on our way to the Ashmolean, because, you know, David couldn’t keep his Tolkien cred if we went all the way to Oxford and failed to look in at the Eagle and Child!

(What I’ll remember best, though, is the group of earnest young Oxfordians at the next table dutifully swotting their Xenophon. Too cute for words!)

Our Host being a provident woman, she had made arrangements beforehand to get us into the print room at the Ashmolean. This is not a difficult thing, mind you, but it must be done in advance. It’s well worth the effort; I got to drool (not literally, of course) over some lovely Burne-Joneses. (Aubrey Beardsley? Total poseur. Burne-Jones is the real thing.) And beside us, someone was examining some sketches by Raphael. The Raphael.

The Ashmolean is an odd little place, full of bits and bibelots that don’t bear much relation to each other. If instrument-making is of interest, you really should stop in; likewise glass, clockworks, and silver, of which the Ashmolean has large collections.

When the Ashmolean closed, Our Host took us through the Covered Market, where I picked up some chocolate for my coworkers; bringing treats from foreign parts is traditional at MPOW. We then rested our feet at a pub across the way until it was time for evensong, which we heard in Christchurch. If you go in winter, don’t shed all your winter gear—the churches are cold.

Clearly the Christchurch choirmasters believe in training by experience; a couple of the boys in the front row were four-year-old apprentices learning their trade, joining in only on the most familiar responses and placed next to star singers. The choir was beautifully trained, of course, with some voices to die for. They quite naturally achieve dynamic effects that poor Dr. Mears spends hours on end trying to get us lazy sods to produce.

Dinner was at a to-die-for Lebanese place where Our Host and her partner are regulars. For once, I didn’t have to carry the conversation; David is usually very shy with people he’s only just met, but Our Host and partner were just the kind of people who draw him out and get him talking. Extremely pleasant dinner, and not just for the food!

We got back on the bus to London quite late, but traffic at that hour was merciful, so we were able to tumble into bed about one in the morning. I did notice one odd thing about the buses—is it just me, or are the seats too short? Quite wide enough, even for my ample caboose, but much too short to slouch in, as I am accustomed to do in buses when I’m tired.

Our Host endeavored to explain the Oxford system to us; I can’t say that I grasp it fully, but what I do understand of it strikes me as a not-uninteresting play of checks and balances that might not do badly in America at all, were it to be tried. It does expect a great deal of self-direction and motivation from students, but I’m hard-pressed to see that as a bad thing on the undergraduate level. Wouldn’t work for everyone, assuredly, but might well have done better for me than the system I graduated under. It’s also a much less rigid system for faculty, and I cannot but approve of that.

We spent a truly magnificent day in Oxford, and I do want to once again offer my sincerest gratitude to Our Host, whose great generosity and kindness I shall never, ever forget.

And I thought I’d got out scot-free. No such luck. Baaaa.

Right. Five things you may not know about me. Baaaaa. Um…

1. I once fell off the back riser during a choral concert in St. John’s Cathedral in New York City. I blame the 1980s and Big Hair (not mine! I have never had Big Hair).
2. I have a grand total of two ex-boyfriends. I’m quite friendly with one (oh, stop that; I’m just friendly, right?), and I’ve no notion where the other’s got to.
3. Three of my undergraduate grades were below an A. Two, a B and a B–, stemmed from the field geology summer camp in Montana I went to the summer before starting college. The third was an A– in “Calculus for Dummies Business Majors,” and was the last in a long streak of missing an A in math by one lousy point.
4. When I was 12 and scrawny as a baby bird, I played Bombur in The Hobbit thanks to frightening numbers of pillows. I could do much better at it now!
5. My first real crush was a lad named Álvaro Gómez. He was just another face in a remarkably dull English class in Guadalajara until the day before term-end, when he brought his classical guitar to school… mmm, I still remember. He sat on the desk in front of mine and made that instrument sing. Never saw him again, after that day.

There. Satisfied? If you think I tagged you, I did. Go for it.

David was so chuffed by the British Museum that he came home with all sorts of plans for the next day. We’ll walk down here and see that and then walk there and see those on the way, and then we can…

I thought he was, shall we say, overstating things a bit. So I started figuring out bus and Underground routes, thanks to free wireless and the Transport for London website, which is really amazingly useful.

Here’s something I didn’t know that you should if you’re going to London. Get an Oyster card before you go. Oyster cards will be familiar to DCites; they’re London’s analogue to the Metro SmartCard. In London, they save boatloads of money (because public transport, like everything else, is expensive: at roughly two dollars per pound, non-Oyster fare is three bucks per bus trip and six bucks per Tube excursion!), but it’s all but impossible to get one while you’re actually there. This site will let you grab one online, and you absolutely should.

So anyway, David didn’t even wake up on time to start his monster let’s-walk-all-of-London trip, so we got on the bus (with a bit of trouble owing to road construction around King’s Cross) and went to St. Paul’s instead. The kindly gent at the entrance decided without our prompting that we were students and gave us the student discount; I didn’t argue, as it’s true in David’s case at least.

The cathedral is lovely, and refurbishment efforts of late have done marvelously well. It’s hard to do “ornate” without landing at “gracelessly loud and tacky,” but St. Paul’s manages it quite nicely. Do, if you go, look carefully at the names on the various statues; it isn’t just old war heroes. “Is that the Sir William Jones? He’s got Sanskrit on his book,” I whispered to David. And sure enough it was. A linguist in St. Paul’s, who’d have thought?

A lexicographer, too; you may make your bow to a statue of Samuel Johnson. And writers (John Donne’s effigy is the most famous), composers, statesmen (as opposed to politicians and nobles) and of course churchmen, all sculpted in fine style, though some of the subjects might have been a tad shocked at the dramatic flying robes. It does give one a certain amount of hope for the world, the enshrining of great scientific and artistic minds in St. Paul’s.

The monument to Wellington? Is miles over the top. Grotesque. But that’s only to be expected, and it is to the cathedral’s credit that it’s just about the only over-the-top piece on the main floor. The Nelson tomb in the crypt has a ponderous dignity that I find preferable, even if the thing is much too large.

We climbed the stairs to the Whispering Gallery amidst a swarm of French middle-school students, who gleefully demonstrated the space’s notable (and very much functional) acoustic effect. What impressed me even more than that, though, was that Wren’s design didn’t give me the acrophobic wiggins, though the Gallery is definitely a wiggins-distance (thirty yards or so) above the floor. I felt perfectly secure, and enjoyed the chance to examine the mosaics from a closer angle.

The Stone Gallery, too, is worth climbing to. Be prepared for the knifelike wind on the exterior roundabout, but don’t let it stop you—the view of London is awesome. (And don’t pick a rainy day to go to St. Paul’s! We were very much in luck, as the day we went was clear as a bell.) David hiked all the way up the dome to the last gallery; I balked, fearing the acrophobic wiggins. He says there isn’t much in it; the exterior views are much the same as from the Stone Gallery.

The crypt is utterly fascinating; save some time to wander it. Again, one of the signal qualities of St. Paul’s is that later additions to it, such as the Churchill Gates, haven’t ruined it; later artists are either so awed by Wren’s masterwork or so micromanaged by cathedral brass that they don’t do anything stupid. This is a rare thing, and to be celebrated.

I did like Wren’s own epitaph: “Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.” That’s an artisan proud of his work, that is, and he had every right to be.

We picked up some sandwiches from the nearby mini-mart, and I discovered Wensleydale cheese, for which I shall have evil unholy cravings as long as I live. (It was probably faux Wensleydale, but oh well. Does anybody import the real thing? I would pay fancy prices to try it.) We then wandered down past the Museum of London, the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, and other bits of architecture and statuary until we got to the Tower of London.

It was far too late to go in—quite dark, though that happens early in London in late November—and honestly I think that’s just as well, because the place gives me the creeps. Tons of forbidding stone, tiny windows that hoard pain and despair, a Gormenghastly lack of architectural rhyme or reason… I have trouble contemplating human cruelty. I’ve lived near the Holocaust Museum for a year and a half now, and I can’t make myself go. I’m not sure I could tour the Tower for similar reasons. Sure, it spent a couple centuries as an inoffensive storehouse, but that doesn’t erase what it was before that.

We caught the tube back to King’s Cross and found a little hole-in-the-wall all-vegetarian Indian place for dinner. Absolutely no complaints; the food was excellent and the service kind. And so ended a day that turned out much less ambitious than planned, but probably more satisfying because of it.

A few links landed in my email this week that are more than good enough to share:

• Peter Brantley beat me good and proper to the Google-journals story.

• This interview from Genentech contains a lovely rant from an ex-academic researcher who moved into industry (scroll down to “page” 31):

  It’s even worse than that. So you send the paper in; they often send it back rejected. You work for the journals for free as a reviewer. They send you papers. You work many hours studying them and writing critiques. You don’t get anything for that so you’re working as a slave for free. You pay to publish the paper–you pay page charges. If you have a lot of color figures sometimes it’s thousands of dollars. [voice crescendoing] And then you pay them to subscribe to the journal! [laughter] They walk all over you: you work for free; you pay to publish; and then you buy the journal back. What kind of a system is that? Man, they have got it made, I’ll tell you. Anyway, that also was part of [my decision to join Genentech].

Wow. It’s seriously bad news when your basic source of labor thinks you’re a scam. As much as we whinge and moan in libraries, nobody thinks that badly of us.

I got asked for repository statistics today, so I spent far more time than I wanted to just getting DSpace’s statistics module to work right. (They changed the log format in 1.4, and there’s a patch, and we’d done some weird things with old logs, and… look, you don’t want the whole sob story.)

Perusing the result, I came upon these two curious little lines:

OAI Requests 54,106
OAI Error 42,289

Oh dear. I’m not sure what to think about that. I’m responsible for a few of those errors (the easiest way for me to experiment with OAI verbs is to hand-construct URLs, and I frequently make mistakes), but almost certainly less than a hundred!

Normally I leave memes over on LiveJournal where they belong, but this one was so classic I had to crosspost it:

Okay, okay, I admit last Saturday’s concert was not my most shining musical moment ever (just really out of voice for some reason), but this is just cruel!

If you run a domain on Dreamhost with just a few associated email addresses (as I do), and you think Dreamhost’s install of SpamAssassin is garbage (as I do), here’s a tip that has significantly reduced the spam I get:

Log into webmail. Go to Options, then SpamAssassin Configuration. Enter each legitimate email address on your domain under the “Add New Address” area, with a Whitelist value of 9. Then add “@yourdomain.com” (substituting your domain, of course) with a Blacklist value of 7.

What this does is let mail with a legit address on it through (note: spammers can and do spoof the entirety of a legitimate address, so this won’t catch every Joe-job) while blocking anything that’s spoofing just your domain in the email address.

It’s utterly shocking how much spam that is catching.