Caveat Lector

When I came to interview at George Mason University a year ago, I was struck by the energy of growth and change. This was a young place, too young to have any ways to be set in. This was a place still stalking its niche, all elbows and knees and scrappy attitude.

Not polished, not at all; institutions with many decades of history behind them don’t brag about Nobel prizewinners, especially since anybody who is anybody in academia knows that Nobel prizewinners are trophies to be bought and sold. Snagging a few and parading them about is the act of an insecure arriviste.

But I sensed during the interview and still sense that Mason genuinely wants to live up to its own hype about itself. The place doesn’t just want to seem good; it wants to be good. And that’s an ethos I can live with, even as I cringe at how it plays out sometimes. (We’re not free of creeping adjunctivitis. Heck, we’ve got it as bad as anyplace and worse than many. And no, we do not deserve a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.)

Some of my own colleagues, even, privately sneer at the institution’s opportunism and quick shifts of mood and strategy. Myself, I’m just as happy to be somewhere that crosses borders, fills in gaps, turns on the occasional dime. I saw the polar-opposite stance firsthand in one of my other interviews, and it didn’t make me happy at all. I can relate to an institution that tries hard and learns fast, but now and then chases the wild goose or doesn’t remember to behave with old-school decorum. I’m like that too, after all.

Our basketball team’s grand chariot turned back into a pumpkin last night. That’s all right by me. What’s impressed me all along hasn’t been the on-court action, but the impeccable class and irrepressible joy exhibited throughout by players, coach, and school. Even after the loss—disappointment, certainly, but no spite, no anger, not the least lapse of sportsmanship or in the school’s support for its team. An awful miasma of crass idiocy surrounds college sports; Mason kept free of it this tournament, and that’s something to be proud of.

I’m proud to work at Mason. I have been since I started here. It’s a fine school.

Rochelle Mazar is my long-lost twin. (I’m the evil twin, of course.) That is all.

One of these days we need to fetch up at the same conference, except it would probably cause some immense reality-twisting matter-antimatter implosion or something.

I was reading through Indiana University’s answer to the University of California’s future-of-cataloguing doc (grotty Word doc) when I ran into a widely-repeated nostrum that I think is completely bogus requires further thought.

“Catalogers will create metadata in formats such as MODS, EAD, VRA Core, and TEI,” it says (page 11). Um. Yeah. One of these things is not like the others. One of these things is not the same.

TEI contains metadata, as librarians and even cataloguers generally understand metadata, in the so-called “TEI header.” The bulk of TEI, however, is not metadata in that sense. It’s document markup, is what it is. It’s closer to editing or book design or typesetting than to cataloguing. You can’t do it just by examining the title page.

This isn’t to say that cataloguers can’t learn to do TEI. Of course they can; doubtless they can do TEI immensely better than I do MARC. But if they think working with TEI is going to be like working with MARC, they seriously need to rethink. It’s just a completely different beast.

Today I uploaded a fairly large website (book-length set of translations from the Italian) to DSpace. It did not (she said sheepishly) exactly go smoothly, partly because I was too dense to realize that the restrictions on website import explained in the DSpace system docs boil down in practice to “flatten out the entire website hierarchy before you import.” So now you know what I didn’t.

DSpace handles a multi-file website by asking the system $DEITY to set the site’s entrance-point, the so-called “primary bitstream.” This can be done through the edit-item UI, but if you have forty-gajillion files, that page is a heifer to load (especially on Firefox for OS X, and can anyone explain why that is?). If it’s too big (again, on Firefox for OS X), changes you make to it don’t take for some reason.

So skip it. Make the fix in the database instead. Here’s how, starting with an item handle of (for illustrative purposes) 0000/72:

1. Figure out what number DSpace assigned to the file you want to be the primary bitstream. There is no easy way to do this; there are only more or less annoying ways. One way is to query the database for the filename of that bitstream: select * from bitstream where name = 'myfile.html'. This won’t work if you have a bunch of files by that same name, obviously. Let’s say you found that it was 987.
2. Figure out what the database-internal ID for the item is: select * from handle where handle='0000/72';. Note the resource_id in the resulting line; we’ll pretend that it was 123.
3. Find the item’s bundles: select * from item2bundle where item_id = 123; You should get at least two lines back; note their bundle_ids. One of these is the license bundle. If you uploaded any pictures, the thumbnails get a bundle. And one of them is the bundle you want, the one that holds your HTML and other files.
4. Run each bundle ID through the query select * from bundle where bundle_id = [bundle_id] ;. (If your bundle IDs are in a nice sequence, which they generally are, you can just do select * from bundle where bundle_id between [first_bundle_id] and [last_bundle_id] ;.) You’re looking for the one whose name is “ORIGINAL.” We’ll say it’s 222.
5. Set the primary bitstream: update bundle set primary_bitstream_id = 987 where bundle_id = 222;.

And now surf back to your item’s page; all should be well. This blogpost brought to you by the Department of I Don’t Want To Forget This Next Time. And yes, there are probably ways to combine all this into one gonzo SQL statement, but my SQL-fu is not that strong, and it’s easier to explain if I string it all out anyhow.

I got caught twice in yesterday’s gullywashers and came home with soaked feet, an unhappy stomach, and a fiendish disposition. Then I went to bed and found out that somebody somewhere in this building has put out some piece of metal (or perhaps it’s one of the gutters?) that sets up a bizarre and very loud whistling moan in a stiff wind—which we had a lot of last night.

I’m not at work today. I got up, emailed the World’s Coolest Boss my regrets, and slept in until a disgusting hour. Right now I’m taking care of some financial chores (no, not that financial chore; all our taxes are in) and the odd bit of TAG work whilst humoring my still-disgruntled tum and monitoring my work email.

For those of you who are local, I have a bit of a deal available to me on tickets to the Fairfax Choral Society’s “Cathedral Echoes” concert the evening of Saturday May 20. Buy four, get two free—but there is a catch, in that I have to provide FCS with your contact information for their mailing list. Still, I’ll share the discount if I can snag it (and I have to buy a ticket for David anyhow), so if you’re interested, drop me a line.

(Normal ticket prices are $23 a seat; the discount brings it down to $15 and change. Not too bad.)

Come on out and hear Divine Grace dancing!

Think this may be mild food poisoning. Ugh. Really feel cruddy. Have started forcing fluids; we’ll see how it goes. MedlinePlus says I should be okay in a day or two from symptom onset, which would be last night.

One of the nice things about the LazyWeb is that there are people on it with a lot more SQL-fu than I have. To fix yesterday’s primary-bitstream problem, find the bitstream’s ID as discussed in step 1 yesterday, and then do this (again, pretend the bitstream ID is 987 and the handle is 0000/72):

update bundle set primary_bitstream_id = 987
   where bundle_id in
      (select bundle_id from item2bundle
         where item_id =
            (select resource_id from handle where handle='0000/72'))
      and name = "ORIGINAL";

See? Nothing to it. And thanks to the person who kindly lent me some fu.

Well, this is about as naked as I get online. See why.

Golly, said ALA. There’s small libraries all over the country who need low-cost librarian assistance. And there’s a ton of young eager-beavers with MLSes who need library experience to land their first Real Jobs. That gives us an idea! Let’s…

… ask our retired post-career people to work for free! Yeah, that’s the ticket!

I could try to find words for this profession-destroying folly. I could try. You would not want me to try. Even on CSS Naked Day, the words I would find would be too much for a mostly PG-13 weblog. Go read the commenters at Jessamyn’s; they found a few words.

Let’s settle for “unconscionably stupid and counterproductive.” If you want any kind of profession at all in fifteen or twenty years, you need young people, not post-retirement people, doing professional work in libraries. If you want any kind of profession now, you need not to give away professional labor; the decree of capitalism is that an employer not pay for whatever labor he can get for nothing.

But that begs a question. It assumes ALA wants a profession. I don’t know that ALA does, frankly. Its actions, speaking as always louder than words, point toward inexorable deprofessionalization in public and school libraries. Academic libraries are likely to hold out longer, but academic librarians aren’t immune either; we’re starting to be replaced with the Ph.Ds displaced by deprofessionalization in academia. (Funny sometimes, how the threads of my life weave together, innit?)

Sucks for librarians, but hey, library schools stay full (until prospective students find out that the emperor’s nekkid, anyway) and libraries get the same dedicated people half-off their already low, low prices! And it is the American Library Association, let’s not forget; it is explicitly allied with our trainers and our employers, not with us.

Lordy, I do hope UW-SLIS has the sense to tenure Greg Downey. I’m gladder than ever to have taken his Information and Labor course. I wish SLIS would see fit to let him offer it online; I would make all my friends take it, so I would! And hey, all you ALAers, I have an idea too—let’s make the course a prerequisite for running for ALA Council! A profession is more than a set of ethics and ideals, damn it, it is an economic construct, and it’s past time ALA figured that out.

Look, librarians, let’s not be patsies, okay? If you’re a young librarian in ALA, figure out what your complaint options are and use them. If you’re a young librarian outside ALA, tell ALA that this kind of crap is why they don’t get your money. (ALA, this kind of crap is why you don’t get my money; you suck unbelievably at defending the value of professional librarianship, if indeed you believe there is any value to it at all. There, I just did.)

If you’re a retiree, don’t just give away your work, your prestige, and your experience, as though you were some wet-behind-the-ears intern! Demand that ALA vouchsafe you the respect you deserve. Then tell the program officers for this ALA travesty (starting with LITA exec director Mary Taylor, mentioned in the RFP) what ALA should be doing: offering internship opportunities to the next generation. Even better, find a NextGen librarian who needs the experience (trust me, it isn’t hard!) and hold him or her up as an example.

Don’t let ALA put a bullet in librarianship’s back. Please.

I am sitting home warm in my fleece bathrobe while the rain it raineth just outside my balcony.

A lot of people are downtown doing their best to hold a parade for the cherry blossoms. I suppose there’s no such thing as a “rain date” in Washington DC?

Poor souls, they’re really doing their best. I salute them, from the sane and dry environs of my living room.