Caveat Lector

In the past two weeks, I’ve received a number of emails and phone calls asking my advice about various aspects of running a repository.

This is ludicrous. I’ve been doing it for six months. I don’t know squat, I don’t pretend to know squat, and frankly, anybody who tells you that they do know squat about this job is either Stevan Harnad or lying or both.

The whole thing is reminiscent of HR-penned job ads in 2001 that used to ask for five years of XML experience. (Clue: XML hadn’t existed that long.) DSpace the software is three years old. Repositories were at the gleam-in-the-eye stage ’round about five years ago. When university libraries started opening repositories, they didn’t hire people like me to run them; typically they took a “we built it, so they will come” attitude and loaded the repository responsibilities onto an existing job description.

(It didn’t work, and such repositories languish un-deposited-in. But that’s another story. Two ways the story can end: we hit a tipping point such that faculty everywhere clamor to fill repositories, or things go along as they are, and unused repositories wither and/or are absorbed into consortial efforts. I’m not laying bets either way. All I can do is work for that tipping point.)

So genuine repository-rats are indeed rarissimae aves, but that’s got nothing to do with how special we are and everything to do with the way things have played out in the larger publishing and library contexts. None of us rats entirely knows what we’re doing yet; we can’t, we haven’t been doing it long enough. We’re still at the spaghetti-throwing stage.

I should observe at this point that my remarks are limited to the US context. Europe and Australia have been at this game a bit longer, and know more about it than we do here. I got asked a while back about conferences for repository-rats—it’s no surprise that the good ones are overseas. Over here there’s DASER, and… and… well, if you’re lucky there’ll be a session or a BOF lunch at a conference with a different focus entirely. I’m not counting scholarly-communication conferences; they’re fine, but they tend to focus on high-level concerns that are well beyond the daily grind of your typical repository-rat.

What are you to do if you need to hire a repository-rat? Well, you have some options. You can try to raid the few universities who have created them. I doubt you will find that easy at this juncture. You might luck out and find an overseas librarian who wants to move to the States, but I wouldn’t count on it. You could run into established librarians who cherry-picked a new and interesting task, in which case you’ll have to offer major incentives; if they can cherry-pick whatever they want to do, why on earth would they move? You could be looking at a reference or coll-dev librarian who took on the repository under protest and without enthusiasm, but why would you want to hire that? Or you could run into tyros like me, who have poison-pill contract provisions and early-career issues to deal with. In two to five years, we tyro rats will have our first review/promotion cycles under our belts, and may even be looking at our first career moves. For now, we’re inaccessible.

(Yes, I have a poison pill in my contract, and I knew that when I signed it. If I leave before mid-July, I have to repay MPOW the relocation allowance they handed me. Didn’t bother me, and still doesn’t—in a way, that clause was a certain amount of reassurance that they’d keep me for at least a year!)

You can take a step to the side and hire a digitization librarian—there’s a fair few more of those, and they’ve got the skills a repository-rat needs. (They may have to change focus a little, as digitization projects have heretofore focused on doing the digitization rather than preserving the results, but that shouldn’t present a major problem.) And those who were hired as tyros are just about hitting the time for the first or second big career move. Again, though, this won’t be cheap or even necessarily easy.

What I’d do, if I needed a repository rat? Honestly, I’d do what MPOW did: nab a newly-minted librarian with decent evidence of aptitude. Experience and connections mean diddly-squat at this stage of the game; if they mattered, why would anyone be calling me asking how to run a repository?

Mind you, tech aptitude isn’t necessarily what someone who wants a repository-rat should be looking for. Helps, sure, but it isn’t nearly the whole package. A repository-rat spends a lot of her time evangelizing (both internally and externally, to change-averse librarians as well as clueless faculty) and coping with copyright hassles. She’d better be able to handle it.

Anyway, the reason I got onto this particular rant is that I am hearing whispers of a very intriguing upcoming opportunity for a repository-rat. If you want to be one, you could do worse than shoot me a copy of your résumé.