Caveat Lector

A year ago yesterday, I landed at Dulles with a husband, two Goth-kitties, and some suitcases. A year ago tomorrow, I proceeded to start drying the space behind my ears as a Digital Repository Services Librarian (whatever that is; I’m still not entirely sure, to be honest).

And hey, they ain’t made firing-me noises yet, so I can’t be bollixing things up too badly. (Hold that thought, though. I go up for reappointment the end of this year.)

Listening to the cohort of librarians who graduated when I did makes me humbly grateful to be in the job I’m in. I have met a few roadblocks, but they’ve been minor and absolutely unrelated to my lack of longevity in the profession. I have all the freedom I need to do my job as best I know how—which includes making mistakes and going on from them. The World’s Coolest Boss still is. My colleagues are energetic, personable, and helpful. Damn, y’all, I got it good here.

I wish I could have accomplished more this year, but I’m not entirely unhappy with what I have done. I have allies, supporters, and a few early adopters. I have policies and a plan. I did a DSpace redesign that got me fan-mail from Britain. (No kidding. Surprised the heck out of me, too. My head can’t swell too far, though, because one or two people at MPOW loathe and abominate the design for not being blingy enough.) I learned enough command-line Unix, Java, Tomcat, Postgres, and Apache to fix bugs, admin the system on my own most of the time (the WCB has to lend a hand now and then), and figure out a few shortcuts to make my life easier. I wrote some stuff and presented some other stuff, and did not as far as I know embarrass myself in so doing.

For the next year, I’ve committed to getting DSpace 1.4 and Manakin-UI (assuming a timely release) up and running, as well as corralling as much as I can of the research authored at MPOW that’s already kicking around the open web. For that last, if I can get some kind of halfway-reasonable workflow set up, I’ll be all right—but it’s hard when there’s only me to handle everything; stuff gets misplaced too easily.

Fairfax and I are more or less used to each other. I wish the Thai restaurant down the street had a more talented chef. I still wish there was a hardware store nearby! And of course I wish public transportation weren’t so scattershot, though I’ve learned to manage.

I miss our house in Madison, mostly its kitchen and its sense of space. The latter is silly, because we have all the space we actually need; it was just nicer when we had a bit extra for things like guestrooms and book nooks. Owning something here, despite the teetering market, is still out of reach at present, and is likely to remain so (or I wouldn’t have signed another year’s lease).

That said, I hardly ever managed to sing in Madison (auditioned for the symphony chorus once, got shot down, never mustered the energy to try again), and I must say that singing for Doug Mears with the Fairfax Choral Society has been most excellent. In less than five months I learned more about performing contemporary music than I would have thought I’d ever learn. Maybe this year I even pick up my recorders again, now that my hands are strong enough.

It’s been a good year. I am looking forward to the next one.

I had a grouchy weekend, filled with Googlebot blasting my DSpace installation into smithereens not once but twice (how much does Dorothea hate Java, boys and girls? A LOT, that’s how much) and a TAG markup project that led to the growl following.

People who understand books and book production understand that individual aspects of typography are overloaded. Overloaded in the programming sense, I mean—depending on context, a given typographical embellishment may have a different meaning. Overloaded, polysemous, ambiguous—whatever word floats your boat.

Take the humble italic font. It demonstrates emphasis. It sets off the titles of books and other extended-length works of art. It sets foreign terms apart from surrounding text. It sets biological genus-species names apart from surrounding text. It delineates ship names (but not, curiously, aircraft names).

It can also be used just because somebody thought italics was a good idea at the time. Colonial-era American typesetters were absolutely notorious for this. If you can extract rhyme or reason from their type choices, you’re a braver woman than I.

Italics, in other words, are a cue. They don’t unambiguously tell the reader the reason for their existence; the reader picks from a mental list of what she’s known italics to signify in past reading, and happily goes on from there.

The neat thing about markup is that it permits various uses of italics to be disambiguated behind the scenes, if desirable. If I’m writing a biology textbook, it’s probably not a bad idea to disambiguate genus-species names from other uses of italics—that makes it possible to create a handy-dandy index of organisms named in the book.

Understand, though, that this disambiguation doesn’t just happen. Somebody’s got to actually do it. Trust me, that somebody is not going to be anybody in standard book production. Italics is italics, end of story. (You might get a clueful copyeditor. I wouldn’t count on it, though—and the clueful copyeditor’s work is wiped off the slate when the book hits print anyway.)

This brings us to HTML, where back in the day, <i> was <i>, and that’s all she wrote. But this is bad! cried the semantic generation of HTML designers. <i> doesn’t mean anything! We have to have tags that mean things!

Which is a complete misunderstanding of the problem. The problem is not that <i> is meaningless. The problem is that it means too many things. The proper solution to this problem, given HTML’s problem domain, would have been to add tags for the commoner uses of italics on the Web and perhaps to insist that <i> be embellished with a class attribute for less-common uses that HTML cannot be expected to anticipate. (I don’t think many practicing biologists sit on W3C working groups, so a separate tag for genus-species names was probably never in the cards.)

What happened instead? <i> was deprecated—people were told not to use it!—in favor of <em>, which means “emphasis.” So let’s step back. Web folks used to tag things ambiguously. This is sometimes necessary (perhaps I don’t know why something is italic!), sometimes not great, but can always be lived with; we’ve lived with it in print for centuries. Now, with the blanket replacement of <i> by <em>, Web folks are demonstrably tagging many things incorrectly, because not every use of italics is for emphasis! This is an improvement? I think not.

I spent much of the weekend wincing at (and either fixing or actually performing) tag abuse of <em>, <strong>, and <q>. And checking my work email every hour or so to make sure DSpace hadn’t run out of memory again. No wonder I’m grouchy.

Thanks to the indefatigable Open Access News, I now know about and subscribe to two Spanish-language blogs on open access. It’s indescribably gratifying to see word getting out.

OA News also posted details about a blowup at the Canadian Medical Association Journal that led to a new open-access journal with a similar theme. To me, this points to another reason to expect the scales to tilt slowly but surely in favor of open access: journal churn.

Journals fail. New journals rise. Journals get bought and sold. Journals move. Journals break apart because of editorial dissension. Every time this happens, there’s another opportunity for a new (or newly-) open-access publication. It’s not even necessary that a journal go gold, though I’m certainly not against that and it does seem to be happening more frequently these days. Whenever a journal changes hands, someone reviews editorial policy, which is an opportunity for journals to go green, either by allowing self-archiving when it wasn’t previously permitted or by making self-archiving rights more explicit to authors.

The CMAJ/Open Medicine case looks on the surface like other editorial-board revolts, but I see a new wrinkle. Previous revolts (such as Donald Knuth’s from the Journal of Algorithms) took place specifically over access policies, usually too-high subscription prices. The CMAJ revolt, however, had to do with editorial freedom; open access for the new journal is a byproduct, a side benefit.

Why did that happen, and will it happen again? Worst-case, open access was the natural outflow of this specific situation only, and we should not expect other journals to follow Open Medicine’s example. Open access might simply be earning some rebel chic, in which case we can expect a few more examples like Open Medicine, but no widespread change. Or, best-case, the world has changed (or is changing) such that open access is now a natural choice for fledgling and metamorphosing journals.

Time was, someone wanting to start a new journal naturally looked for a society to fund it. Not so long ago (judging from what I hear around me at MPOW), a new journal bootstrapped itself as best it could in hopes of a buyout from one of the big publishers or aggregators. That, I am told by someone at MPOW who used to work for a society publisher, doesn’t work any more; the big publishers own so much of the journal market that a small subscription journal can’t accumulate enough cachet to be worth buying.

So it seems to me a new or breakaway journal has two choices: manage itself indefinitely as a bootstrap operation, or find an ally that isn’t a society or a big publisher. Both options strike me as open-access–friendly. It’s just plain easier to bootstrap an open-access journal than a subscription one; subscription journals have to build a money-handling infrastructure that an open-access journal doesn’t. And I believe libraries, who have their own reasons for preferring open access, are the up-and-coming ally for new journals.

Indeed, the CMAJ/Open Medicine case should have librarians perking up their ears. One way to assure editorial-board independence is not to ally a journal with an interest liable to compromise that independence. In all likelihood, a library won’t—or, perhaps better-stated, a library is far less likely to allow ideological ax-grinding than a professional society or even a scholarly society. (For those of you who don’t already know, librarians are specifically and explicitly trained to avoid letting our personal ideological biases get in the way of collection decisions. That doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally do it anyway, but training does tell.) So library-supported publishing efforts are a natural haven for beleaguered knowledge producers. That’s a structural advantage—societies and big publishers can’t just wish it away—and in my opinion a telling one over time.

As always, my crystal ball is murky at best; take this analysis for what it’s worth.

I just got added to the book-review panel for a newish journal, during which process I learned a thing or two.

One: gee, it wasn’t hard! I saw a call for reviewers, looked over their list of books, emailed the review editor my CV with a link to my HigherEdBlogCon paper as a writing sample, and that was that—I was in. My first book to review (and a couple-three bloggers’ ears should be burning right now) is coming in the mail as soon as the review editor gets it.

The length and time limits on reviews are such that I’ve got three weeks to write a typical CavLec blogpost (minus the typical CavLec snark and sentence fragmentation) on each book. I can do that. Thinking about it, I realized that the snobs who decry bloggery for its brevity aren’t considering an awful lot of writing forms and venues in which brevity is a virtue.

Two: The open-access situation in library-related journals is bad, but not hopeless. Almost none are gold, but plenty are green. ALA, for example, offers two licenses for its divisional journals and newsletters, one of which (the “license agreement”) leaves copyright with the author. Putting my repository-rat hat on, I note that the other one (the “assignment agreement”) appears to forbid placement of material in institutional or disciplinary repositories, and so I urge folks to use the license agreement.

Haworth is green. Elsevier is green. Emerald is green. That plus ALA is a big whacking lot of US library journals right there. So if you’re writing in these venues, but you’re not using your local institutional repository, E-LIS, or DLIST, you should be. No excuses. Just do it.

I looked this up because I have obvious ethical and career concerns about contributing my work to journals that are passively or actively working against open access. I absolutely wouldn’t contribute to an Elsevier journal despite its greenness, for instance, because Elsevier is lobbying the living daylights out of Congress to keep FRPAA from passing. Nor I won’t contribute to a journal that yoinks my copyright and leaves me nothing, neither—but a green journal is all right with me; I don’t require gold.

(If anybody’s got a good list of the anti-FRPAA lobby and its contributors, I’d surely like to see it.)

Three: Walt Crawford’s First Have Something to Say should be on the desk of every librarian who wants or needs to publish but is nervous or lacking in clue about it. This short, reassuring volume systematically treats publishing venues, guidelines for different kinds of writing, the roles that librarians can fill in addition to authoring, how to get started before you’ve made your name, and how to avoid publication pitfalls. I was particularly gratified to see a chapter on speaking, since I still think that a neglected skill in librarianship.

It’s written in Walt’s kindest and most approachable style. Regular blog-readers (of his blog or many others) will feel immediately at home with it. It’s also notably honest; Walt isn’t afraid to explain where his knowledge ends or where he differs from received wisdom. I picked up MPOW’s copy of the book, but I am inclined to grab one for myself when I next have a few spare shekels.

No, this isn’t the kind of review I’m going to write for the journal—but y’all are my friends, so naturally I write differently for you. Ignore my non-leet reviewing skillz and go pick up the book, hm?

So I’ve got this one collection that the sponsoring body doesn’t want people idly browsing. (Yes, the items are already off-limits, but even the browse pages are spoilerrific.) Okay, um, maybe I can hack the JSP, let me see… yes, I can. Grab the collection handle, test it against the proscribed collection, if it’s the proscribed collection kill the browse links. Easy-peasy.

(Yes, I know that smart people could hand-construct a browse URL, and the items can still be picked out of all-of-DSpace browses. If anyone’s willing to work that hard, fine. When I told the collection sponsor this, he was fine with it too.)

Except. It. Didn’t. Work. It didn’t kill DSpace. It didn’t break anything. It just plain didn’t work.

WTF?

In any decent language, my first attempt at the if clause would have worked:

<% if (handle == "1234/5678") { %>

But this is Java, which regards decency toward programmers as a matter for its inferiors, so we can’t use ==; we have to use the .equals method on the string. Oh, and heaven forbid the incorrect == syntax should, you know, fire an error or anything, because of course Real Programmers never need to know where they’ve screwed up. Silent failure will be just peachy.

For the record, though, <% if (handle.equals("1234/5678")) { %> worked fine, and the collection is now off-limits to casual browsing.

Java. Is. Teh. EEEEEEVIL!

I swear, I didn’t write yesterday’s Java growl to get attention. Get it I did, however, and in spades—a month’s worth of CavLec-related email, all to tell me that in Java, strings are objects, and == applied to two String objects checks to see whether they’re the same object, not whether they contain the same string.

I won’t forget it again. Believe me, I won’t!

The best explanation I have for yesterday’s attack of pure stupidity is that I imprinted on string-related programming. I was a text wrangler. Regular expressions and fancy search-and-replace tricks and splitting strings up and jamming them back together, that was what I did. I once wrote a program that decomposed Quark’s XPress Tags to translate them into CSS. I swear I did. It was a heinously bad program in hindsight (I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout writin’ no parser), but it worked. It even understood defaults and left them out of the result—no background-color: white; color: black outta me, no sir!

And I did it in Python, which kindly treats strings as basic data structures. You compare two strings, you’re comparing two strings. None of this object nonsense to get in the way. Because really, how often do you need to check whether two String objects are the same object? Compared to how often you need to know whether they contain the same sequence of characters?

I mean, sheesh, even strings being objects isn’t necessarily a barrier to sane comparison behavior. If you were to implement strings as objects in Python (and for all I know, they are implemented that way; I’ve never peered that far under the hood—I doubt it, though, because I suspect that stuff is all in C), you could simply make == Do The Right Thing with a smidgen of operator overloading—

Oh. Wait. Java doesn’t do operator overloading. (As far as I can tell, anyway. Google says that people have been talking about it since 2001 or thereabouts!)

*headdesk*

I give up. Sorry, y’all, Java is still Teh Evil. I do appreciate the efforts of all my Java-aficionado readers to teach me the One True Java Way, however.

I had a post all ready to go in response to Rachel’s query about private reactions to public questioning of sexism in library technology. It was an outspoken philippic in the best CavLec tradition of unabashed, fiery candor.

After writing it and saving it as a draft, I got up, walked around the apartment a bit, hopped on the exercise bike and drove it the fastest mile I think I’ve ever driven it, walked around the apartment some more, did a stretch or two, ate some tortilla chips by way of comfort food, sat down again, opened a new post window, and started transplanting the least-inflammatory segments of that draft into this post.

For the record, Rachel, I noticed exactly the behavior you did. I’ve gotten email aplenty on this subject. What’s more, when I politely urged some of my correspondents to take their aptly-expressed concerns and experiences public (for mailing-list values of “public”), what I heard without exception was, “Oh, I can’t—I have to work with guys like that. It’ll play merry hell with my daily worklife.”

I talked last week with another library blogger who’s written on this subject. She’s leery of writing more, though she said she’s got more to say. She’s got plenty of work and personal crises on her plate; why should she sign up for one more crisis?

I explained in my own prior post on the matter that I’d kept another fine, fiery post in draft instead of publishing it. I explained why I did that. It’s worth noting, I think, that after the post I did have the cojones (thanks for the mot juste, Karen!) to publish, two #code4lib members, wholly independently of each other as far as I know, told me that my “airing dirty laundry in public” (direct quote) had angered a third member. Would I please smooth it over, asked one. Next time I ought to talk to the principals first, said the other.

Is it a coincidence that Rachel was the first to ask publicly about the public-private divide in women’s behavior around this? I don’t think so, not at all; Rachel doesn’t work in a library. I do. I surely do fear for my career if I stir up the kind of tornado that I was about to, the kind of storm that if you ask me, this problem deserves.

There’s a pattern here, I will make bold to assert. It’s not just that female systems librarians who have dealt with misogyny and sexism (and I’ve rarely met one who hasn’t) are leery of speaking up about it, though goodness knows that’s hideous enough. It’s that we are actively being silenced, even by extremely decent people who mean nothing but good.

That’s just ugly. Silence doesn’t fix this. Pluralistic ignorance (“oh, nobody else is complaining, so it must be just me”) doesn’t fix it. Fear doesn’t fix it—not fear of saying it, and definitely not fear of hearing it said.

And so now I’ve silenced myself, too. Twice now—quite a bit more than twice if you count the experiences I’ve shut up about, never mind the stories I’ve heard and would like to retell. I’m so frustrated and angry about all the things I want to talk about but don’t dare to—crazy ironies, jawdropping disrespect, absurd defensiveness, common and damaging pushback—that I’m ready to shed burning, acid tears. I want to talk; I want to be heard. I’m deathly tired of this knot of sorrow-laced wrath that wound itself up somewhere underneath my sternum months ago, churning destructively away ever since.

I’m lucky, though. This isn’t a workplace issue for me, thank goodness; it’s only come up in communities of practice. I think that’s what frees me to say as much as I’ve said, just as I noted that it frees Rachel. Sure, I worry about my future marketability, but at least I don’t have to worry about my present job!

I’m lucky to have gotten where I am at all, I now begin to understand. I’m so lucky that Allen and Jerry and Jon and Gene and James and the rest of the PSWG techies held to mannerly and honest standards of personal behavior. Their open respect for me led directly to what I now do, and I do, in spite of everything I’ve just said, love what I do.

I set myself up a bitsy MySQL database today to help me track all the stuff from MPOW’s school of IT that, luck permitting, will make its way into the repository. Needed a book to disambiguate some of the datatypes for me (does anybody use anything but varchar for text fields? if so, why?) and sort out how to add foreign-key constraints, but it’s up and working and I may even write some PHP around it.

(We all know I don’t know any PHP, right?)

And since I had a round tuit to spare yesterday, I spent it applying to said IT school as a nondegree student. I need another bloody master’s degree like a hole in the head, but should I get through their four “foundation” courses, I might consider a certificate or something.

Past time I garnered a real clue about some things.

I recently added Feminist SF — The Blog! and Written World to my home blogroll. Also don’t miss Girl Wonder if you’re a comics geek, and perhaps even if you’re not.

Some of the discussions in these venues can sound frighteningly like the current libraryland dustup over sexism, the latest episode of which is Karen’s. (Oh, and y’all? Don’t make this about feminism. It isn’t about feminism. It’s about sexism. Let’s kindly remember that, and not get distracted by waving red capes. Er, so to speak.)

Take, for example, this thorough dissection of a brain-dead remark by Marvel’s Joe Quesada about female representation amongst comics creators. Section II in particular is highly relevant to Karen’s post’s comment section, and don’t miss the quote by Laura Q of Feminist-SF!

I honestly wonder if Dr. Miller (and it is Dr., and I apologize for not having used the title previously; I wasn’t aware he held it) understands how insulting an “I can’t find good women!” claim is in librarianship. This is a majority female profession, for those following along at home. Mostly-male panels, mostly-male conference-speaker rosters, mostly-male administrations—they proclaim “A minority of men is smarter and more able than the majority of women.”

There’s no acceptable way to make this claim in librarianship. Just no way. If you’re not finding capable women in this field, you’re not looking or you’re driving them off. Even in systems librarianship where the gender ratio is skewed masculine compared to the rest of the field, if you’re not finding, you’re not looking. Laura Q just told you why you’re not looking, and Karen explained clearly in her post’s comments why sitting back and waiting for female speakers to fall from the nearest tree is a losing strategy. So go look.

I recommend a very simple weak-ties technique, for starters: when a speaker turns you down, ask him or her to recommend other speakers. Make a point of following up with this question if the speaker who turned you down is likely to have a significantly different professional network from you. Asking best buds for recs, especially if your network’s demographics are pretty much like yours and one of your goals is to broaden your speakers’ demographic range, isn’t going to expand your horizons.

I won’t comment on Dr. Miller’s “I won’t beg,” because if I did, it’d get ugly. It does, however, lead me a long way past Dr. Miller to the beyond-the-pale phenomenon that sends my blood pressure into the stratosphere, the phenomenon I was dismayed and disheartened to find in my chosen field: forthrightly misogynistic jokes.

I understand how representation issues become invisible. I do. I don’t blame Dr. Miller for getting caught out; he’s far from the only one, and I do believe given the exchange in Karen’s comments that he’s going to put some real effort into diversifying his corner of the library world. So go him.

I also understand knee-jerk defensive reactions. I have to talk myself down from them too, generally around issues of race or class (where I’m privileged and I know it). I’ve been hard on Dr. Miller about his in this post, because knee-jerk defensiveness is not (she said sheepishly) an attitude that wins friends and influences people. In fact, in my experience (on both the offense-giving and offense-receiving end of things) it magnifies an original error a hundredfold. At least.

What I don’t understand is how anyone can think that a sexist joke is acceptable in company containing strangers (never mind professional colleagues). Sure, stuff gets said around people you know well that in any other context would be out of line. But… around people you don’t know all that well… why why why? And yet it happens. When I say “tech-boy locker room” and “Cro-1337non Man,” y’all, this is what I mean. Oh, and, um, don’t ask me to be specific in public unless you really, really mean it, because I can curl your toes with some of the stuff I’ve personally witnessed, and some of my friends have experiences that make my toes curl.

What makes a Cro-1337non? I won’t even speculate, though I’m fond of the “their folks didn’t raise ’em right” theory. It’s not that they’re single; I know married Cro-1337nons. It’s not that they’re youngsters; the ones I know are more than old enough to know better. I don’t know why they’re out there. I’ll just assert that they’re out there, and they’re a problem. Since libraryland’s Cro-1337nons are naturally concentrated in systems… I don’t need to finish this sentence, do I? Supply your own ending. Or three. Could Cro-1337nonist disrespect among library-software vendors be part of the problem libraries have getting what they want and need? I dunno. Could be.

I think part of the difficulty (and Mr. G-rm-n will have yet another reason to want my head on a pike after this) is that librarianship doesn’t have enough native-born techies. We find ourselves forced to import from the exterior, and the exterior is brim-full of the Slashdot demographic, prime examples of Cro-1337non Man.

Librarian techies don’t have to be female to fix the problem, though. If it accomplishes nothing else, sitting through an MLS will teach just about any guy the basic rules for coping with a roomful of women. A CS degree, not so much. And in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, guybrarians mostly aren’t the problem, though I’ve met one or two systems guybrarians I wouldn’t personally want to work with on this account, and other guybrarians I could name have been known to magnify existing problems with knee-jerk defensiveness.

Did I mention “Don’t do that?” with regard to defensiveness? Oh, good. “I acknowledge the problem,” “I’m sorry,” “I’ll fix it,” and “I’ll try not to do it again” are vastly more useful (and, of course, kinder and more courteous) reactions. A defensive reaction to a complaint makes the complainant, who was undoubtedly nervous and unhappy about complaining in the first place, feel many times more nervous, unhappy, and unwelcome. Been there, done that, left the T-shirt behind me.

And for heaven’s sake, if you want to avoid the Cro-1337non label, don’t whinge about how a given group was so much freer and nicer in the old days (before, you know, all those women started demanding some respect), how self-censorship is such a drag. (Yes, has happened.) That’s heinous. That’s saying that lousy sexist jokes are more important to you than the women around you. What self-respecting woman wouldn’t seek friendlier shores?

A particular pet peeve of mine is being asked to monitor a Cro-1337non Man, or a group that contains them, for faux pas. (Yep. Has also happened.) Often this is well-meant, but it still rankles. I don’t like to worry about other people’s behavior; I have enough trouble keeping tabs on my own! Never mind that I can’t relax and enjoy a social group if I’ve been cast as its den mother. Nor, I might add, can the other group members be entirely comfortable around me. How could they? I’ve been told to judge them!

The more fundamental problem, though, is that I’m being asked to solve a problem I didn’t create and bear zero responsibility for. I ain’t nobody’s mama, nor nobody’s nanny, nor nobody’s etiquette coach, and I decline to be nominated to these roles merely because someone else’s behavior shows a need for them. Cro-1337non Man needs to change his attitudes or at the least learn to self-monitor, and there’s plenty of reading material on and off the Web to help him. (I recommend the Women in Linux HOWTO, for starters.)

An awful lot of good work and good intent can be unraveled by one Cro-1337non. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s how it is—any techie woman you name has been dealing with Cro-1337nons for ages, and she’s learned to vanish when they turn up. That’s especially dangerous in librarianship, because nothing gets done in a library without a woman involved somewhere. Frustrated library techies take note; if you want change in libraries, you need women, so don’t tick ’em off over something as stupid and pointless as sexist jokes.

Whether we hunt down the Cro-1337nons or just out-compete ’em till they go extinct, the sooner they’re gone, the more gender-representative systems librarianship will be compared to the rest of the field, and the more pleasant it will be to be a female systems librarian. Believe me, I’m all for that!

I spent all day tussling with Eclipse and CVS, and I’m wiped. I swear to $DEITY I am starting to think that managing my own changes on my own filesystem is easier than coping with CVS’s labyrinthine organization combined with its byzantine options combined with its impenetrable messages. I am just finding it all remarkably frustrating.

But I swore up and down I’d get my DSpace mods into a CVS repository… so I’m guessing I’m going to have to start over (“plan to throw one away…”) and maybe possibly set it up right this time.

I’m really annoyed at the time I threw away rehacking mods in my incorrect setup, though. Grrrr.

Oh, yeah, and DSpace 1.4 is out finally.