Caveat Lector

I have to make conference plans for 2006–2007. (Yes. Now. Even though most of next year’s small conferences haven’t even been announced yet. What I get for being in a niche part of the profession, I guess.)

Open Repositories is back in the US, so I’m going to have to conquer my plane-aversion and go. The month after that is the next code4libcon, which should be inexpensive enough that I won’t be horribly out-of-pocket (which I will be for OR, no question).

I know nothing about this year’s DASER, not even if there is a this year’s DASER, which means that if it’s not local again, I probably can’t make it. That nothing whatever has been announced (not even a call for papers) may well indicate that DASER is no more. Pity. Last year’s was awesome.

In JCDL 2006 news, a conference wiki has been started, with little fanfare. I’ll try to put together a dinner or two.

I am horrendously spoiled. I’ve managed to get through the day despite on-the-fritz broadband, but mostly it served to remind me how horrendously spoiled I am.

Not to mention paying a thousand bucks in dentistry last month (Kaiser dental sucks) plus choral-society dues (which aren’t small), ending up six hundred fifty in the hole for the month, and basically not having it matter.

That is spoiled. Absolutely spoiled rotten. May I never forget it.

Not dead yet. Really. Just been flustered over the last week, getting the JCDL presentation ready (with the able and completely panic-proof Tim Donohue), dealing with a teapot-tempest or two at work, and writing up the report for the task force I’m chairing BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE…

Not panicking. Really not. The task force report’s handed off now anyway; I promised to get a clean draft to someone else who can handle last-minute edits and turn it in while I’m gone next week, and I have duly done so.

The slides and handouts for JCDL are done, and they look pretty darn good even if I did design them myself. (Probably shouldn’t have printed them double-sided, because one of my design elements gets eaten on verso, but oh well. They’re plenty good enough.)

Now it’s just packing and last-minute stuff-into-the-repository stuff and remembering not to forget Nova’s video adapter and grabbing a copy of my train-ticket receipt just in case… and NOT PANICKING. Not. Just not.

In passing, one of the reasons I feel happy is that my two favorite SLIS professors, Kristin Eschenfelder and Greg Downey, have both achieved tenure! This augurs excellently well both for them and for SLIS. My heartiest congratulations!

I think I’ll go for a walk…

The logistics for this conference are… um, yeah.

Dad (who kindly drove me to Chapel Hill) and I had trouble finding the building the conference is in, because UNC’s signage absolutely bites. We did, however, find it, and I went in and registered, thinking I had plenty of time to get to my tutorial room, meet my co-presenter, and get set up.

I reckoned without the fifteen-minute walk between the registration site and the tutorial room. (Might have been a bit quicker had I not been hauling one bag full of laptop, one bag full of conference swag, and one box full of tutorial swag.) Not to mention that the conference schedule saith naught about what room anything is in, so I had to wander the building disconsolate as a wraith (and dripping sweat, this being June in North Carolina) until I happened upon Tim in a stairwell.

Nonetheless, I was on time, did get the tutorial swag handed out (and twelve copies turned out to be the magic number; everybody got one, Tim and I each have a copy for our files, and aside from that there are none left over!), and did control my temper enough to throw myself into matters tutorialish.

I think it went well, but I am obviously the wrong person to ask. If you missed it and wish you hadn’t, keep an eye on the DSpace wiki and MARS and IDEALS, because our slides and handouts will be showing up there after the conference.

I will say that the conference swag is pretty good. Nice bag, nice water-bottle, and an extremely spiffy LCD booklight gizmo. Geeks get the best swag!

My schedule for the conference proper looks like this (should be attending all plenaries, so won’t list them):

• Monday: Named Entities 1, Augmenting Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories, Digital Preservation.
• Tuesday: Digital Library Curriculum, NDIIPP Preservation Network, Supporting Education
• Wednesday: Metadata in Action, Usage and Relationships

Jane reminds us, rather sadly, that not everybody is fond of the whuffie system in academic librarianship. It’s “mandatory fun” for some people. Sure, they want to contribute, but on their schedule, not a tenure committee’s.

Yeah, I sympathize. I do. Mandatory fun isn’t. Plus, this conference stuff gets expensive. But you know what? We’re stuck. The whuffie system is what it is. If you ask me (which yeah, yeah, you didn’t), you treat it like any other part of your job that isn’t your favorite part of your job. You budget time and money for it, you find the least objectionable way to fulfill your obligations, and you get on with your life.

Mary Renault in The Praise Singer has Simonides comment that he is not unlike his paid mistress, the hetaera Lyra: he, like she, is paid for favors. “Like Lyra with her lovers,” says Simonides, “I want to be free to pick and choose.” That’s the way to think, I think. If you must be a lady of the night, set standards for how you’ll do it.

There’s only so much whuffie anybody needs. Figure out how much that is for you, and once you’re there, you can stop if it’s not your thing. I mean, in the first-year librarian whuffie sweepstakes, Meredith’s got me blown outta the water. Just no comparison. But that’s cool. I’ve got HigherEdBlogCon, JCDL, TechEssence, a book chapter, and a book contract (with a coworker). That’s plenty whuffie for me, and then some. Meredith isn’t setting a standard I have to live up to; she’s just being Meredith. I get to be me.

Me, I’m playing to my strengths and my personal style when I give tutorials. I’m an experienced teacher, public speaking doesn’t rattle me, and I have an energy level that lets me keep going for three hours at a time (though I tell you what, I could get used to this co-presenter thing). I even enjoy it, feel a satisfied sense of accomplishment when I’m done. The whuffie’s the same as any other presentation, so why not?

Writing-to-teach is also the kind of writing I do best and enjoy most. I enjoy TechEssence as much as I do because that’s the kind of writing I get to do there. (And if anyone was wondering, yes, I put TechEssence on my CV. I’ll blog for whuffie—I just won’t do it on CavLec. Any whuffie I get from CavLec is strictly informal.)

But I’m me. You’re you. Maybe you get a charge out of megaconferences. (I don’t. I’ll go long distances to avoid ’em. The smaller, more specialized conferences are where it’s at for me.) If you do, great! Bypass DASER and go for Computers in Libraries instead. Maybe you dig survey research. (I’d rather eat rats. I’ll take surveys; I won’t design them or crunch their numbers.) Awesome. Journals dig survey research too. The University Librarian at MPOW will love you for it; he’s a quantitative-research kind of guy.

Point being, there’s a ton of ways to earn the necessary whuffie. Lots of niches to fill. I don’t think anybody needs to feel completely at sea about it.

Not that it’s a bad idea to stretch yourself. Formal writing longer than blog-length is like pulling teeth for me. I hate doing it. I procrastinate a lot, I second-guess myself, and it hurts my head. Still, I gotta book chapter to do and I’ll do it. Maybe someday it gets easier.

I still have to find my service niche. I’m thinking it may be conference work; a conference is something solid and tangible with clearly-defined needs and quality metrics. I can do that. Standing committees—well, I’ll do ’em if I have to, but it’s not my thing.

We all have things, you know? Figure out your thing, plan your whuffie-collecting accordingly, and then you don’t have to go all angsty about it.

Sitting in the JCDL 2006 plenary listening to Google and OCA talk about their mass scanning projects.

Then Cliff Lynch got up and nailed ’em to the wall. “What about the OCR piece?” he asked, and he talked about the same concerns I have about it. Human intervention versus error rates. Algorithms. Typesetting issues.

Google guy talked about “what the challenges are.” He says 98-99% accuracy is often good enough. (Yeah, for his purposes. But for a human?) Says it’s the most computationally expensive part of the process. (And what about non-Latin character sets? says the person next to me, cogently.)

Mentions long-s versus f as a “very embarrassing” mistake source.

They are doing language-specific computing on the scans. “More obscure” languages (Arabic is obscure? oh, please) cause even more problems.

Library guy: Not uncommon to have somebody come in looking for the one word you got wrong! (E.g. textual scholarship.)

Cliff: Multi-lingual issues (Chirac of France going ballistic), “likes the idea of nations competing to digitize” cultural heritage. Even just from five research libraries, you get plenty of multi-lingual, multi-national stuff. How to diversify the content base?

OCA guy: OCA is opportunistic; they digitize what they can grab onto. Latin scripts only! They want to do more (but can they?).

49% of the material from the Five Partners is English. Hundreds of other languages represented. Google can do Cyrillic, Greek, Latin scripts; working on Chinese, Japanese, Arabic. Google doesn’t want to play the cultural imperialist; “doing it for them” hubristically ignores that they want to do it themselves. (I agree.)

OCA guy: let’s provoke the French! and the Russians! and everybody! more digitization is good!

Cliff: Preservation. Cliff asks for confirmation that brittle materials are not being targeted for scanning. Preservation-worthy surrogates, or not? Is Google a disaster-recovery plan (floods, war, whatever) for libraries?

Library guy: Michigan has been pushing a digitization agenda. Only Michigan (of the five) is allowing access to brittle materials. Ongoing negotiation with Google.

Google: did not design a process for high-value, extremely brittle materials. Google is okay with that; other people can handle it with different techniques. Digitization quality: standards unclear. Some say Google scans are good enough; some don’t. Scalability of digital-preservation requirements; debate is changing from how to handle a specific book to how to handle whole collections.

OCA: think of it as part of collection-management decisions; for some highly redundant, low-use stuff, 98% accuracy is plenty good enough. The aim is to avoid costs on the redundant stuff, so that resources can be spent on the special stuff.

Google: preservation of artifact is different from preservation of the information content. Most users want the info content, not the artifact. (Yep. Book-smellers are a minority, and they need to get over themselves.)

Cliff Lynch: Google can do massive computation on its massive datastore that other people can’t. That could be a pretty serious business advantage, a serious research advantage. Why is the access to the datastore so private? How can it be opened up?

Google: Send email, tell Google what research you want to do! Hope is not to hinder the advancement of scholarship. Where is the balance? NYPL won’t be able to make that corpus available for research algorithm; too computationally expensive.

OCA: huge free-rider problem. Notes that UMich can do as it pleases with its own copy of the data (subject to restrictions e.g. from publishers). Will the restrictions relax? Too early to tell. It is a serious problem. How do we platform this stuff such that the research can happen? “A blessing and a curse” to be involved.

Google guy: SETI@Home as an example of how to make big computation on big datasets possible. Supporting that kind of environment a non-trivial problem.

Opened to audience questions.

Post-1923 public domain works: OCA is not trying to research this. Orphan works are an even bigger headache. Google isn’t trying either, and is being very conservative about potentially copyright-governed stuff. Maybe a community effort to clear rights, but what evidence of out-of-copyrightness can Google accept, since there’s no central authority to sign off on it?

Who owns, preserves, manages annotations and other value-adds? Google: whoever does it and puts it on their servers owns it, but who owns a link? Can’t answer; can only restate question. NYPL: it’s being talked about. OCA: this is one of the problems (like copyright checking and copyediting) that’s “too big” to tackle.

Good session. The first Google-book-project session I’ve ever witnessed or heard about that didn’t devolve into brain-dead hysteria. Go Cliff Lynch!

My parents have a cat. Her name is Gigi, and she is completely psychotic. All cats can manage baleful stares when the occasion warrants, but Gigi goes all the way beyond baleful to bileful. When she stares at you, you stay stared at.

She’s a handsome animal, a gray Persian, but don’t be tempted by that soft fur. She whacks any hand that gets near her unless it’s got a cat-treat in it.

But I’m not deprived of cat-affection. In addition to psycho-kitty, there is Neighbor Bob the tuxedo-cat. Bob is not my parents’ cat, but my parents feed him. He doesn’t live in my parents’ house, but can usually be found outside. He is delighted to hold a conversation with me while I pet him… and yesterday, I sat down on the front steps to scratch his somewhat misshapen head, and damn if he didn’t just crawl right into my lap and make himself at home.

I miss the Goth-kitties, but I’m just fickle enough to enjoy Neighbor Bob’s company.

JCDL 2006 has closed, though there’s a “metadata party” tonight that I will probably be attending. This has very much been a “get looked over” conference for me—a lot of people wanting to meet me, doubtless to reassure themselves I’m not an axe-wielding maniac. Since I’m not, I don’t worry. Much.

The papers I liked best fell into a category I have just invented that I am (for the next five minutes) calling “technical ethnography.” (Technography? Ethnographic techosophy? I dunno.) Essentially, it’s technological insight acquired via observation of human behavior.

(Rather than bog-standard survey work, which I am really starting to loathe, especially as presented at conferences. Hey, presenters of bog-standard survey work? Don’t tell us about your methodology; we already know how surveys function. Don’t do a lit review during the presentation; if you’re talking about something of interest to us, we’ve already read the papers, and if we haven’t, we can read your bibliography. Tell us why we care about yet another bog-standard survey, then tell us what you found out from it, especially if it’s cool or anti-intuitive. Then shut up and let us ask questions. Honestly, though, if I ever run a conference survey work will be relegated to poster sessions, period. In passing, do ARL libraries have to hire a Survey Librarian just to answer all the bog-standard surveys they get?)

Anyway, the conference Clever Boots award goes to the guys who bootstrapped name-disambiguation software for Citeseer (which desperately needs name disambiguation; I loathe Citeseer metadata more than I can even begin to tell you) with the observation that people cite themselves. That’s just bloody brilliant, is what that is. Human behavior informing a technological solution to a metadata problem. Love it.

I also liked the winning student paper, about PDA software for specimen identification in the wild via cleverly-implemented dichotomous keys with a side order of easily-accessed photos and drawings. I want an EcoPod for hiking, I do—and that’s what’s brilliant about it. It ties into a basic hiker desire: “hey, what a cool critter! what is it?” Ethnographic technosophy, again.

The winning non-student paper both amused and frustrated me. Carl Lagoze talked about the National Science Digital Library, and how it was believed that the Magic Metadata Fairy would use OAI-PMH to build a beautiful searchable garden of science, and how everyone ended up with an ugly, weed-choked, cracked-asphalt vacant lot instead.

This? Should not be news. There is no Magic Metadata Fairy, any more than there are Magic Editing and Typesetting Fairies in publishing. Metadata is an artisan’s job. If you want artisanry, pay an artisan, damn it.

Does that mean never accepting author-created metadata? Nope. But it means accepting that much author-created metadata is going to be crap, and building workflows that proceed from that assumption. Lordy, people, I was writing about this back in 2003, and now it wins conference paper awards?

I’ll be blunt. The solution for NSDL’s problem is hiring cataloguers, or metadata librarians, or indexers/abstracters, or whatever you want to call ’em, to clean up the incoming garbage. Ideally, OAI-PMH would be a two-way protocol, so that nice cleaned-up metadata made its way back to the repository that had spewed the garbage in the first place. That, however (despite all the jaw-flapping about frameworks that went on during JCDL) does not seem to be in the offing. It should be.

Yes, this is feasible; your cleanup artisans aren’t creating records from scratch, and existing cleanup algorithms can be run before they see the data they’ll be correcting. (Not to mention that their presence will improve your cleanup algorithms no end.) Besides, a lot of records will be okay to begin with.

The other answer, discussed during JCDL, is lowering the technical barrier to participation so that participants can focus more on metadata quality. This is good and I’m all for it; let’s just not pretend that it’ll solve the problem, is all. Most metadata sucks. Learn to work around that inconvenient fact.

This and other JCDL tech-ethnography got me pondering my own ethnographic inquiries. I think (along with many others, I should say) that a lot of the problem with attracting faculty contribution to IRs resides in the “this is not part of our normal workflow” problem. I would personally love to offer services that insinuated the IR into that workflow, but without some ethnography, I’m not sure what those services should be.

My sense is that a research-collaboration aid would help a lot. Such an aid would look a lot like a networked hard drive with bolted-on access controls. Researchers need somewhere to stash all the digital stuff they accumulate while they’re working on something—research results, downloaded literature, datasets, digitized stuff, Endnote citations, drafts and so on. They need to let their collaborators in and keep everybody else (except me, of course) out. The beautiful part is that if I’m in ultimate control of that drive, then it’s trivial for me to pick up the preprint or the publisher’s galleys for deposit into the IR.

Anybody want to go halfsies on an investigation into researchers’ digital workflows?

The Greenstone guys are the runners-up for the Clever Boots award; several excellent and useful demos of cool things to do with Greenstone. I dearly wish the Greenstone-DSpace integration project would hurry up and finish, because I’m dog-tired of coming under attack for DSpace’s UI ugliness and inflexibility.

JCDL 2006 was a solid conference. I doubt I’ll be flying to Vancouver for the next one, but it’s definitely on my list of conferences I’ll happily consider when they’re in my general vicinity.

Reputation, distance; consistency and change; perspective; these are a few of the themes running through my head after a week with my dad and at a conference with people I now consider friends. (Not that I didn’t like them before, but for whatever semantic or sociological reason it is easier to attach the “friend” label to someone I’ve shaken hands with.)

I got from DC to Raleigh via the good offices of someone who lives locally and was driving down to JCDL anyway. I was (and still am) fully prepared to split the cost of a tank of gas, but I wasn’t asked to. It so happens that not long ago I was involved in getting the driver a new (and so far, better) job.

My involvement, mind you, consisted of a bit of serendipity (the job is repository-related and the employer got in touch with me first) and two or three emails. That was it. Honestly. Anybody would have done the same thing. I do understand, though, that from the other side that transaction looks a bit different—quite a bit more momentous—and so right or wrong, I wasn’t quite prepared to insist.

When we got to my house, we stuck around for a bit so that the driver could figure out directions to his hotel. That important task accomplished, he asked for a tour of the back yard, whose water-gardens and vined trellises and profusion of plantings represent thirty years of my parents’ labor. I hauled my stuff to my old bedroom, got whacked a couple times by psycho-puss, and went out back to see what was going on, in case my friend needed rescue from one of my dad’s hallmark political tirades.

Which he, um, did. I grew up with my dad. I know how he behaves. Some things don’t change. I was expecting another get-rich-quick scheme; I heard all about the latest one at Sunday lunch after the tutorial. I was expecting fulminations against his former place of work; I got ’em. I was expecting status-conscious praise; shortly before I left, Dad told me that he’d never imagined I’d be doing what I am, but he’s proud that I’m in the forefront of my profession.

I’m not. I’m not even in the forefront of my niche in the profession. How could I be, a year in? It’s not even a goal of mine. Kicking Elseviley Verlag’s butt to the curb, that’s a goal of mine (though if Springer keeps pulling stuff like this, I may have to apologize abjectly to Jan Velterop and find myself another bit of shorthand slang). Putting scholarly publishing and archiving on a sounder footing, that’s a goal of mine. More usable electronic texts, that’s a goal of mine. Fame, fortune, honorary degrees? Not so much.

And as for his imagination, he never once imagined me anything but a tenured university professor at a Research I. I daresay he’s trumping up my status to console himself for his deep disappointment in me. But if playing silly-buggers with my career helps him, I won’t argue it with him. I said “thank you” and shut up.

Funny thing is, couple days into the conference, my friend said to me, “Your dad—he’s a really cool guy!” Which put a new spin on things entirely. Maybe my dad isn’t the problem. Maybe his too-easily-embarrassed kid is the problem.

The day after the conference ended, another new friend emailed me to invite me to a party. Dad talked her into town over the phone when she got a little lost. So she and I went to the party, and we hit a comics shop and a coffee-dessert place afterwards, and I at least had a wonderful time. Dad didn’t say word one against it, though it was my last night in town. And she, too, complimented me on having a cool dad.

On the train trip home, I occupied two-thirds of my brain with Willinsky and Benkler and let the other third wander about considering how Dad and I are perhaps more alike than I like to let on, both for good and ill. And how he’s not such a bad guy. And how a little outside perspective is a good re-evaluation tool.

And things like that.

In honor of the DSpace 1.4 beta release today… Ever tried to Google something that you know is in a DSpace repository?

Yeah. I’m rolling my eyes too. The title that you get in your Google results reads: “DSpace: Item 1492/37.” Which tells you precisely nothing.

Fortunately, fixing this is an easy hack (now that I know how; it took me an hour and six Internal Server Errors to figure it out for myself, because my Java is just that bad). Pull up display-item.jsp. (The copy in your local folder, because you’re too smart to edit the default JSPs directly, right?)

Add the following line to the declarations near the top:

<%@ page import="org.dspace.content.DCValue" %>

Delete or comment out the following:

    String title = "";
    if (handle != null)
    {
        title = "Item " + handle;
    }
    else
    {
        title = "Workspace Item";
    }

Replace it with the following two lines:

DCValue[] titleValue = item.getDC(”title”, null, item.ANY);
String title = titleValue[0].value;

    DCValue[] titleValue = item.getDC(”title”, null, item.ANY);
    String title = “”;
    if (titleValue.length != 0)
    {
    	title = titleValue[0].value;
    }
    else
    {
    	title = “Workspace Item”;
    }

This relies on DSpace requiring a title for every item, which out-of-the-box DSpace does. If you’ve hacked your DSpace not to require a title, you should probably tell DSpace to fall back to the handle if the title is null.

I’ve got this running on my test server, and it’ll migrate to the production server shortly.

ETA: Bug, which the above non-deleted code fixes. A workspace item for which a title had not yet been established was causing Internal Server Errors. Shows what you get if you trust me to hack DSpace—though I will say in my own defense that this hack didn’t make it to the production server until I’d found and fixed the bug.