Caveat Lector

I was elected welcome wagon for a librarian who started at MPOW today by virtue of all the other candidates withdrawing from consideration by, er, not showing up at work today. That ate a considerable portion of my first workday after vacation. I am almost caught up.

And here at home I have two TAG clients and my small-mitzvah beneficiary beating down my door, so expect reduced blogging this week.

Which is actually annoying the heck out of me, because Dans Cohen and Chudnov are writing great stuff that I want badly to respond to. Well, maybe if I get annoyed enough, I’ll get this stuff off my back faster. Let us hope.

Things that deserve to be linked, but that I haven’t got time to comment extensively on:

• The University of California’s suggested faculty response to the scholarly communications crisis. I cannot begin to express how much I love this. Marvelous, wonderful, and I wish I could stand to live in California, because let me tell you that’s where the action is. If I have time I’ll blog and comment on some choice quotes.
• There’s no housing bubble in the DC area. Yeah. Right. (I am so very continuing to rent.)
• The CURES Act. It is a good thing. Write your congresscritter.
• Dan Chudnov on barriers in libraries. The money quote: “If anything, we might guess from the fall of the wall in Germany that barriers will fall… The choice we librarians need to make about the fall of our own barriers — and, I’ll predict, 2006 is the year to make our choice — is whether we wield the hammers ourselves, or whether we read about it online.” Hell. Yes. And I have some thoughts on this in a DSpace context, which I’ll have to keep saving up for later.
• Hold on to your hat… somebody’s gettin’ eaten alive for even thinking of running a repository on Windows. (I happen to agree that this is an inane idea, but I kept my hands off the keyboard because I didn’t care to be quite this, er, emphatic.)
• Locals: c’mon to the Fairfax Choral Society auction. A couple copies of David’s book are on the auction-block.

I was about to say that the email I reproduce below is a complete novelty, but of course it isn’t. I have heard all the sentiments in it before. O ye readers who have felt or expressed them, know that ye be not alone. This is the company ye have found:

Dear Madam,

I am a mathematics graduate student. I am only in first year. Perhaps I do have a lot to see. But I cannot believe in the honest truth of all your allegations and rantings at “misconceptions” among academics. I do concede that your writing style, clarity of thought and approach do reflect very well on your abilities. Yet, it appears to me that you have done yourself no favour by looking only at the negative side of things. At times, the points you make, especially the one about the non-phd instructor at UNCH do not make much sense to me. Would you say the same about a quack doctor who gets along well with his patients? It is certainly possible to get along with a very modest medical practice after having spent two yrs in med school or so? Learn some terms- how to prescribe for colds, flu, viral fever, etc; my mother is a doctor; i could pretty much prescribe them myself from what I heard at home about my mom’s work! That said, it must be admitted that you did face a lot of bad luck, but surely you will not disagree with me saying that more merit lies in overcoming difficulties than in bowing out and then expressing bitterness on a web page(?) You might go all the way and claim that you are not bitter, that you have never felt better and the like; but your mammoth effort in building up the webpage speaks for itself. There is an iota of guilt left in you, a little something that tells you that people have faced greater odds and come out trumps and that you should have persevered. Easier said than done, though. I just hope that I do not have the kind of luck that you have had. There is a certain something that strikes a chord with me- yes my profs in undergrad school wanted me to stay back, but I wanted to be a ‘man’. Hopefully I have not made a big mistake.

And one more thing: please tone down your attack against academia: only the imbecile can exult in their failure. Why not accept one’s failure? Yes, it is obvious that the academia did not live up to its professed ideals in your case. There is a lot of injustice in the world. Yet, you have a misconception as well; “Earning a Phd SHOULD BE only about scholastic abilities”. What makes you think so? Why did you not start out in grad school with the assumption that you will be pitted against odds of all kinds: academic, financial, social; that there will be people out there to exploit your abilities? Is it not the way in every other walk of life? Your error lies in the fact that you presupposed that academia would be holy and pure, unscathed by all worldly follies. That is why you feel bitter about academia now. If you had started out with the idea: this is my “career”! There will be vultures out there and I will give them a good fight. Then you could have said: well, I did not have the abilities to win the fight. What I am trying to say is that one should perceive a PhD as an all round achievement, not confined to scholastics alone. In your case, you had all the academic ability on your side, but not the fortitude and certainly not the luck. That should take care of all your ‘grievances’. It is pointless to have grievances against fate, you can do nothing about them.

Here is wishing you the very best of luck. If you think that I have a point, i would be grateful no end to hear from you.

My father was the first to say these things, as it happens.

So I saw the big three-hanky tearjerker movie today. Bawled like a big baby. Such a sweet love story.

Yeah, yeah, you all know I mean King Kong.

Boy, I haven’t seen a work of art this meta since I quit reading intentionally meta-tastic fiction after my comp lit degree. Wow, meta. Hugely meta. This movie didn’t miss a single chance to comment on itself, right down to completely undercutting its own final line. There’s simply no way to believe a single word that character says by then. He could say his own name, and I’d run to the court records looking for stolen identities. And, of course, we’ve had ample evidence contradicting the line.

Linguists both pro and am should see this movie; I contend that language and sincerity are the flip-bits that turn Kong and Denham into opposites. Even the Skull Islanders (as David well knows, though I was right about his lack of a credit) have language—though all in all, I think I agree with Jackson that the most one can do with that portion of source material is use it as little as possible.

(The ultimate source, of course—the book, not the 1933 flick—is stunningly racist from soup to nuts.)

I liked it. As many others have said, I could have used a bit less of the creature-feature, but Jackson is a creature-featurer from way back, so if that’s the price of a smart script otherwise, I’ll pay it.

David just brought an issue of American Libraries up from the mailbox. On the cover was a pasted-on insert proclaiming in panicked typography that it was my VERY LAST ISSUE unless I renew my ALA membership now, right away!

Ha. I only wish I could find the right address to send the sweet sentiment in the title of this post to.

ALA gets nothing from me. Not membership money, not time and effort, not publication, not conference attendance, certainly not conference participation. Not now, not ever. That’s what happens when you royally hack off the newbies, guys. I have thirty-some-odd years of career left to go, and ALA won’t benefit from a single solitary second of it.

If ALA had a whisker’s worth of relevance, mind you, that decision would hurt me too. Guess what. I don’t think it’s gonna.

I suppose some radical reinvention of the association might catch my interest again. Guess how likely I think that is.

I once sang under a prominent composer/conductor (who will remain nameless) who may have been the world’s most wonderful orchestra conductor (though I seriously doubt it), but who simply did not understand that choral conducting is unlike orchestral.

If you put your fingers in the right place on a tuned violin and stroke the bow correctly, you’ll get the right note even if you don’t know what that note is. Choruses don’t work that way, because most singy-people don’t have perfect pitch. We have to hear our note in advance in order to produce it correctly.

A good choral conductor does not, for example, harangue a chorus for five solid minutes and then expect them to come in at measure 53 without any introduction, pickup, or other note-notification. It just doesn’t work that way. The conductor I’m thinking of frustrated both himself and us almost past bearing with shenanigans like that—there was talk on both sides of a walkout, until the morning’s rehearsal was handed to a different man who knew how to handle a chorus and the worst snarls got worked out.

Maurice Ravel is just as ignorant of how singy-people function as that conductor was. This Daphnis et Chloe thing is hugely frustrating to learn because of it. I honestly think the thing to do is learn this puppy a cappella, because the choral lines and the orchestra really haven’t got a damned thing to do with each other. Frustrating.

Unless, of course, you have perfect pitch. Which I emphatically don’t.

There’s a call out for strategies for attracting content to institutional repositories. I thought about answering it, but “strategy” is such a businesslike, buttoned-up word… I was embarrassed to.

I don’t have a meticulously-planned capital-S strategy on a pretty Gantt chart with milestones. I don’t even have a minuscule-s strategy scrawled on a cocktail napkin.

I can suggest some capital-S strategies that don’t actually work, though. Limit your repository to peer-reviewed material, and don’t forget to sneer actively at everything else your faculty produce. Play copyright cop, or content cop, or all kinds of other kinds of cop. (No, I don’t actually recommend ignoring copyright, though I wish I could. I’m just saying that copyright ally is a far more pleasant and useful role than copyright cop.) Make everybody sign licenses and memoranda of understanding and any other bits of paper you can shove in front of them. Talk at any opportunity about Dublin Core and OAI-PMH and DSpace over Tomcat on OSX. Mm-hm. That’ll bring ’em runnin’.

My strategy? I throw handfuls of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Honestly. Messy metaphor though it is, that’s my strategy.

I have put an incredible amount of effort in the six months I’ve been employed into strategies that have gone absolutely nowhere. Formal lectures? No good. Trying to weasel into faculty meetings? Practically impossible. Presence on the library’s home page? Totally useless (though there being no tooltip to explain the acronym doesn’t help). Has anyone actually read my painstakingly-composed propaganda pages? I wonder.

What’s worked? Informal contact. Sure, I have to make ten or twenty informal contacts for every one that actually turns into content—but that’s still a better track record than most of my other attempts. If you’re a repository-rat, carry your card with you everywhere and give it out at the least opportunity, along with the fifteen-second version of what the repository’s about. I may have hooked somebody today at lunch, a completely unplanned contact.

Another tactic I’ve had decent success with is paying attention to events of scholarly interest happening on campus. Contact the organizers, ask if there will be any print or multimedia results of the event, and ask whether you may archive them. I’m running a 50% success rate on this right now (not including the event I’m currently pursuing for which the jury is still out). That’s huge, in repository-land.

The next handful of spaghetti I throw at the wall will include involvement with campus tech-training sessions for faculty, flyer distribution (thank you, self-archive.org), and perhaps trying to chase down some campus webmasters. Oh, and theses and dissertations, of course.

What will stick? I’ve no notion. Part of the frustration of being a repository-rat is that repositories’ tipping point is largely outside my control. I can’t do much to shove the CURES Act along. I can’t singlehandedly wrench the entire faculty into supporting open access; in fact, I expect a battle royale from MPOW’s book-smellers over ETDs, even though our proposal actually splits the difference.

Patience. Patience and spaghetti. Those are the strategies that work.

One of the participants in a workshop I’m archiving emailed me to ask if she could include a credit statement with her entry, since (she said) she was basing her syllabus on material available in textbooks common in her area.

Oh, crud, I thought to myself. I’d already had to expurgate an entry with a bit too much quotation. So I pulled up her PDF to see what was going on.

She hadn’t quoted anything. She hadn’t so much as quoted anything! All she’d done was list titles of pieces in anthologies that she would use to teach the subject matter at hand. I mean, sure, if she wants to credit the textbooks, great—that’s good information. But nothing in the copyright regime says she has to.

It’s enough to make a repository-rat go feral, I tell you what.

Okay, LazyWeb, I need a Tomcat-over-OSX expert.

I have the same problem this guy posts about. I cannot for the life of me cut JBoss out of my OSX servers’ technology stack, much though I do not need it and wish it would go away and die quietly in a corner. Telling ServerAdmin not to use JBoss does absolutely nothing.

Is there something about configuring Apache or Tomcat that would solve this problem that I’m missing?

I caught a little flak in the comments to this post at Blue Skunk Blog for rudely thumbing my nose at ALA.

So let’s just burn a couple of homines straminei (erm, genitive plural… hominum stramineorum? that doesn’t seem quite right, somehow) before I go on.

ALA may not realize this and certainly has no incentive to acknowledge it, but they aren’t the only game in town for a professionally-active librarian. They’re not even an especially desirable organization to join for librarians with a techie bent, LITA or no LITA. Me, I’ll be happy to produce my nice new ASIST and VLA cards on request. (And before anybody asks, VLA is on trial. If they seem to be worth my money, I’ll stay a member. ASIST hooked me fair and square with DASER.)

I also write my congresscritters (CURES Act, do you hear me? it is a good thing; write your congresscritter now!) and funnel odd bits of money in the direction of Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both of whom do political work that is relevant to my professional interests. So I’m not over-pleased with the insinuation that I’m a professional and activist slacker merely because I told ALA to take a long walk off a short pier.

Let me fire that smelly fish back, shall I, then? In my experience, there is a not-insubstantial subset (mark me well, a subset: I don’t need piles of angry “but I’m not like that!” email) of ALA members who are essentially serving time. They need something to put in the “professional involvement” section of their résumé. They need conferences to go to, and aren’t any too picky about the subject matter. They need committees to serve on, and the less work they actually have to do, the better. They are passionless, uninteresting drifters, and (again, in my experience), ALA has got a lot of ’em.

It’s a turnoff. I could volunteer for a committee, but how do I know I won’t be stuck with a passel of drifters? How do I know the committee isn’t just make-work to begin with? If it isn’t, is the larger organization going to get out of the committee’s way, or in it? Are presenters doing a given conference because they’ve got something they’re dying to tell the rest of us, or because they’re coming up for review in six months and need conference cred?

(Curiously, the preconference tutorial I went to at ACRL vastly outshone any of the actual talks I saw there. Perhaps an artifact of the amount of work it takes to put together a three-hour tutorial versus a twenty-minute talk? If you’re a résumé padder, of course you try for the talk. I admit to a certain amount of bias here, though; I’m an odd duck in that I vastly prefer creating and delivering tutorials to talks. Not that I don’t like to run my mouth on any excuse, of course.)

I don’t blame ALA for attracting drifters. As the default, faute-de-mieux professional association for librarians, they could hardly do otherwise. But the drifters’ presence is another reason to hunt for other (likely smaller and more specialized) professional venues.

Doug Johnson of Blue Skunk Blog asked me in email what ALA could do to win me back. Fair question. Here’s a start toward some answers:

• A huge financial audit, specifically one that speaks to organizational efficiency. I saw Meredith’s numbers, and so did you. I want an explanation, and additional comparisons to similar organizations. (No, Walt, “lobbyists” is not answer enough; Meredith’s comparison organization has lobbyists too.)
• An organizational assessment, or whatever they’re calling it these days when you don your hip-waders and start digging around the organization to find and eliminate blockages and excess. ALA’s too big for its britches, as Meredith’s figures demonstrate.
• More multiplicity of voices, fewer bully pulpits. If Gorman’s vile and disgusting hip-hop comment had met with vociferous opposition (dare I say, actual censure?), I would feel much less jaundiced about ALA. Certain tentative steps in this direction are happening, but a tentative step is not exactly a stride.

• More concern for librarians, many of whom (lest we forget) do not work in libraries. That, or more openness about the organization’s aims. I know it’s the American Library (rather than Librarian) Association, but let’s face it—there’s a conflict of interest there. When librarian interests conflict with library interests (e.g. over salaries, librarian deprofessionalization, coddling vendors, or entry-level librarianship), I know whom the ALA sides with, and it ain’t me.

  If library schools stay fat and sassy despite a lack of jobs for graduates, and library administrators pay lousy salaries because even with lousy salaries they’re beating off applicants with sticks—ALA seems perfectly content. Well, I’m not.

  The flap over treatment of conference speakers speaks to this point also. I think I can be forgiven for thinking that ALA runs conferences and prints publications in order to siphon off yet more money from librarians and libraries to itself—not least because, as I said, their finances are bloated and opaque. And speaking of publications…

• Open access to ALA journals. Now. Immediately. I’m shocked and disgusted by ALA dragging its feet on this. They should have been first on the bandwagon; it’s their duty to set an example for other scholarly and professional societies to follow! (C&RL, which is going OA, is a start, but it’s not near enough.) Book publishing is a different animal altogether, and I don’t have a problem with paid writing staying paid, so I’m not calling for open access to books at this juncture. Unpaid writing in journals, though? Should be open-access. What better use could ALA put its money to?
• Noticeably less hostility to computers and the librarians and patrons who use, program, and value them. Gorman’s got a posse, you better believe. I’d prefer “no hostility,” of course, but I’m realistic.

That’s my answer. I invite fellow ALA defectors to offer other and better answers of their own.

Another thing, though, as long as I’m in rant-mode. I don’t buy the “I pay dues so that I’ve got the right to kvetch” argument, at least where ALA is concerned. ALA listens to dollars, not librarians; the response on the Council list to the speakers’ flap (detailed over at Meredith’s) says that loud and clear. Continuing to write them checks despite serious qualms about them positively deafens their ears to your words. It’s a speech act whose perlocutionary force is “ALA right or wrong!”

The eminently logical response from ALA? “Sure, they whine, but where they gonna go? They can whine all they want as long as the checks clear.”

Talk with your wallet and your feet instead. I have. If ALA wants me back, they’ll have to earn me.