Caveat Lector

So for the second time in as many months, I got an email asking if I’m interested in writing a book about institutional repositories.

Honestly? Not right now, no. If a silly slideshow goes hopelessly out of date in less than six months, imagine how bad a book is going to be by the time it actually appears!

Open access is a bad enough thing to write about, things are happening so fast. But open-access advocates live in a fairly rarefied sphere: they can often talk in glittering generalities that hold true for more than a few months at a time. IRs are where rubber meets road, just that the rubber keeps rubbing off.

But if you’re a repository-rat, you can write, and you’d like to write a book about IRs, drop me a line and I’ll connect you up, because why not?

I’m shocked that nobody is calling me names. Instead, a productive discussion is starting about open access to the library literature.

This makes me happy. One of the hard parts of my job is that other librarians—even other librarians at MPOW, sometimes—don’t really understand what I do or why they should support it. Most of the library literature about open access talks about open access vis-à-vis “faculty.”

Faculty or not (some of us are, some aren’t, some are somewhere in-between like me, and I’m not getting anywhere near that discussion right now, thanks), the costs and benefits of open access apply to us librarians too. We certainly have overpriced journals and trade publications. We certainly have journals that sold out and saw their prices soar. We certainly have journals and trade publications that ask us to sign ridiculous copyright-transfer agreements.

We certainly have a large disenfranchised constituency of librarians too resource-starved to read our subscription journals or attend our conferences; that’s why my unindicted co-conspirators and I are doing Five Weeks to a Social Library. The History Librarian points out quite correctly that the disenfranchised are disproportionately public librarians, such that there is a disconnect between available open access resources (which are mostly geared toward academic libraries) and those who most need their resources to be open access.

I don’t know if I’m as exercised about this as the History Librarian, though. I could be wrong (and welcome correction), but I don’t think the interesting stuff specific to public librarians is showing up in the formal library literature, especially since public librarians have much less of an onus to publish compared to academic librarians. I think the lion’s share of good stuff for public librarians is showing up on blogs and wikis and listservs and webliographies, all of which are open to any librarian with an Internet connection.

That said, public libraries and academic libraries aren’t so far apart as all that, so I do think there’s value to public librarians in opening up what we can of the formal literature. I just think there’s more value for us, in the long run—it’s called “eating our own dog food.” We can’t reasonably go out and evangelize self-archiving to faculty when we aren’t doing it ourselves. We can’t evangelize open-access journals when we don’t publish in them. We can’t evangelize open-access search engines and materials if we don’t use them. In other words, if you make a point of paying attention to open access, you’re helping me revamp the publication system (as well as keep my job), and I appreciate it.

I mean, our very own guidebooks militate against open access! I was reading the publication chapter in The Successful Academic Librarian last week (ambitious, that’s me) when I ran smack into (paraphrased) “There are open-access journals, but they aren’t well-known, so most librarians consider them dubious publication outlets at best.” Oh, great; thanks ever so, O Molder of the Mind of the Young. That isn’t even true, for $DEITY’s sake! Find me a techie librarian who doesn’t know about D-Lib and Ariadne. One.

So what is a librarian who publishes in the library literature to do? At a minimum, I suggest the following:

• Read all copyright transfer agreements. It’s flat-out irresponsible not to. If you don’t like what you’re reading, ask if that’s the only agreement available, and be prepared to detail your concerns.
• For those agreements that do not appear to allow self-archiving or do not address self-archiving, ask the editor “May I self-archive this paper?” Editors and publishers need to hear that their authors want to do this; we mustn’t let publishers hide behind “but our authors don’t care!” Just asking the question is not going to kill your acceptance chances (especially if you ask this after your paper is accepted!).
• Whenever possible, submit your work to an existing open-access journal. Gold-OA has a chicken-and-egg problem; authors won’t submit to OA journals unless other authors do, and Molders of the Minds of the Young won’t give credence to OA journals until they know people (good people!) who publish in them. We don’t necessarily need to start more OA library journals. We need to utilize the ones we do have fully. (That said… watch this space.)
• Know OA resources in our field. Use them, and point other librarians to them. I’m at DLIST all the time these days.

Want to go a little further? There are ways.

• Look up your publisher on SHERPA/ROMEO. If they’re not some kind of green, ask them why not. If they don’t appear (hello, Information Today, where are you? though I should mention that I have a book chapter in press with them, and my contract permitted self-archiving without my having to ask), ask them why not.
• Get accounts on DLIST and/or E-LIS and your local IR if you’re lucky enough to have one. Use them. Self-archiving is easy. I do it, and I’m not all that bright.
• Get familiar with the SPARC Author’s Addendum. When the occasion seems to warrant, use it.
• Avoid publishers who aren’t playing nice. Elsevier’s lobbying against FRPAA. Emerald is reputed to have bought some journals and jacked up their prices (can anyone confirm? I haven’t been in the field long enough to know). Be open about what you’re doing and why; peer education is a good thing.
• Ask your colleagues to self-archive their stuff. “Hey, I heard you wrote X; mind putting it in DLIST where I can see it?” This goes for conference presentations too; they’re becoming increasingly important.

And if you’re full-on gonzo rebellious, by all means start your own OA journal. (As I said, watch this space.) I got Open Journal Systems running, and I’m not all that bright. It’ll install on a lot of cheap webhosting plans, since it runs off PHP and MySQL. (Hey, maybe Blake could be convinced to offer it. Combined with DLIST or E-LIS for preservation, that would be as bulletproof a publishing solution as any.)

If we care enough, and we should, we who publish in the library literature can make sure all our colleagues have access to everything we write. If not us, who? If not now, when?

(No major spoilers for Discworld books in this post. Extremely minor ones if you don’t know about Cheery Littlebottom and Carrot Ironfoundersson.)

I used to hate the Discworld character Cheery Littlebottom. She annoyed the daylights out of me: a character who didn’t have to behave like a girl who nonetheless wanted to. Dresses, makeup, the whole silly act. Why on earth would anyone…?

Finally I got it. I got what Pratchett was driving at. And it’s so beautifully subversive and clever that I just have to share.

Cheery is a dwarf. Pratchett’s dwarves are a takeoff on the famous note in Tolkien about dwarf women being rare, bearded, and almost impossible to distinguish from male dwarves. Dwarf biological gender in Discworld is so difficult to distinguish in normal interaction that even the dwarves usually aren’t sure who’s which.

A one-gender society could conceivably be behaviorally indiscriminate; all members would say and do things that in gendered societies are associated with different genders. (LeGuin hints at this in some of her Earthsea tales, when male mages who have grown up in all-male Roke do “women’s work” quite naturally, because they’re used to it and don’t realize or don’t care that outside Roke work roles are gendered.) They wouldn’t care about how humans gender behavior; why should they? Nobody needs to know whether the dwarf swinging the axe or rocking the baby is male or female. Dress could also straddle the divide; why not?

But Pratchett doesn’t do that. From a human point of view, dwarf society is exclusively behaviorally male. Dwarves wear their beards proudly, swing axes and throw waybread (a riff on Tolkien’s cram, of course) at the least provocation, ponder gold and mine for it, swagger and brawl and wear lots of spiky metal and generally act in ways that code them male. The only time you see a Pratchett dwarf doing something coded feminine is when Pratchett can make a joke out of the contrast between the male presentation and the feminine social position—e.g. dwarf barmaids.

Check it out, though! Dwarf maleness isn’t what they biologically are, because a lot of dwarves are biologically female! Dwarf maleness is what they do, how they act, and it isn’t just humans who code dwarves male—it’s dwarves themselves; they call each other “he” and “him” and insist that gendered folk like humans do likewise.

Feminist scholars have a phrase for this: “gender as performance.” It’s a viciously hard thing to get people to agree happens, since folks are so invested in the idea that biology determines gender-specific behavior. But Pratchett slips performativity in like medicine in candy. It’s beautiful. My hat’s off to the guy.

Just to reinforce the point, Pratchett highlights the performativity of dwarvishness in the person of Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson. Biologically, Carrot is human; he’s six feet tall and beardless, and was born of (biologically and culturally) human parents. Culturally, he’s a dwarf; he was raised by dwarves, self-identifies as a dwarf, and is accepted by dwarves as a dwarf (though some humans do roll their eyes a bit). Dwarvishness: it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.

And along comes Cheery Littlebottom, who is a dwarf. And biologically female. And decides that she wants to perform femaleness as well as inhabiting it. Do the dwarves accept this, seeing as how they have a one-gender society that is theoretically not limited in its behavior by gender?

Do they hell. They decide that their male-normativity is so important to them that anyone who doesn’t perform maleness threatens the entire dwarvish way of being. Cheery’s behavior causes a huge furor among the dwarves. Some of them (notably, the “deep dwarves” depicted as the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes dwarvishness) consider her non-dwarf. To her credit, she keeps doing what she does, and (minor spoiler) eventually the more cosmopolitan parts of dwarf society learn to cope with their feminine outliers.

If you’re not seeing parallels with the whole Honorary Guy thing, well, what’s wrong with you? Programming cultures, geek cultures, gaming cultures, many other online cultures—they’re theoretically ungendered, but they behave male, and any behavior that codes feminine is automatically suspect—even coming from a bio-guy.

As I suggested in my honorary-guy post, any attempt to question male-normativity in one of these groups automatically codes feminine, and is considered a threat to the group identity itself. The perp gets smacked down hard, if not kicked out altogether. How else to explain why a guy got jumped on for questioning a sexist headline? A little while ago in one of my comics blogs I saw an exactly parallel scenario commented on (and I wish I could find the darn link again!). I daresay most of my readers can dredge up more examples.

Pratchett doesn’t sugarcoat Cheery, and I applaud him for it. There is no mass dwarf regendering in Discworld, though a few brave dwarves do follow Cheery’s example. There is no vanishing of dwarf prejudice. What I love most about Cheery, actually, is that she is herself far from free of prejudice, and there’s more to her than her gender-performative rebellion. She feels whole and real, insofar as a secondary fantasy character can, and she doesn’t offer any easy answers.

There aren’t any easy answers, after all. But at least Pratchett helps frame the right questions.

Okay, writing for Elsevier is a serious matter, but this is just funny…

A few weeks back Elsevier sent a Scopus rep to MPOW. Seems whenever they do this, they hold a contest for an iPod nano, the said contest involving going to a special website and answering a few ready-reference questions with Scopus. MPOW’s Elsevier liaison was shocked that I don’t already have an iPod and encouraged me to enter the contest, so I did.

Except for the Scopus-dependent questions (“how many journal titles does Scopus index?”), I confess I used Wikipedia. Article databases are usually the wrong tool for ready reference. But anyway…

… guess who won the iPod? I must be one of the cool kids now. Or something. Poor Elsevier; I can almost feel sorry about the way they keep spending money on me.

Almost.

The theme of last Java lecture was “Linked Lists: Because Arrays Really, Really Suck.” Hey, I now understand how Python lists (with their indifference to the datatypes stored in them) must be implemented. Cool.

And that’s how things have been going in class; I pick up little jigsaw-puzzle pieces and fit them into my limited understanding of how programming works. I completely blew the last pop quiz because I hadn’t memorized my sort algorithms, but that’s okay—I’ll have ’em before next week’s midterm, and who cares about the grade anyway?

Big-O analysis isn’t something I’m ever going to do on a regular basis, but learning about it has already changed how I approach some problems. I’m putting together an immense (well, for me; a big repository would laugh at what I consider “immense”) batch import into the repository; to make my life easier, I’m going to write a little Python haxie to stash all the files into appropriate directories by filename (since that happens to work with this bunch).

Some of the papers have both a PDF and PostScript file; obviously I’m archiving both files in the same item. (If PDF changes past recognition, my guess is I’ll have much better luck re-distilling from PostScript than doing a PDF-to-PDF conversion. One day in the life of a repository manager; we worry about these things.) So I can’t just run down the file list and indiscriminately make a folder per filename; I have to check whether the folder’s been made already.

In the old days, I would have taken the easy way out and kept a running list of already-made folders. if filename in madeFolders: #use the existing folder But that’s awful from a Big-O standpoint; the program has to run through the entire madeFolders list for every file. Besides, the filename list will be sorted, so there’s no need to check against an entire madeFolders list—just keep track of the last file processed, and if its filename (minus extension) is the same as the current file’s, there’s a folder already, so stick the current file in it.

It’s a little thing, admittedly. But it’s a little thing that makes me a slightly less bad programmer than I was, so I’ll take it.

Sometimes a gal just needs a good old-fashioned starchy Southern dinner, you know what I’m sayin’?

So I mashed up some potatoes and I mixed up some whole-wheat canola-oil biscuits (the recipe is in Nava Atlas’s Great American Vegetarian, the earlier version of which is one of my favorite cookbooks), and I said to myself, “Hmmmm… gravy.”

My parents have pecan trees, and are very generous with the proceeds thereof. I have a gallon bag of pecans in my freezer. This (with a little help from Google) is what I did with them:

Soak 2 cups pecans in 2 cups water for an hour or so. Dump pecans and water in blender along with 2 tbsp olive oil, half an onion, 1 tsp salt, and herbs to taste (basil, rosemary, thyme is what I tossed in). Blend until pecans are pulverized. Add water until consistency is gravylike. Zap in microwave for a minute or two.

And it was very, very good.

I had to Do Lunch with a job candidate today. I have a Java midterm tomorrow. I’m going to a conference Thursday through Saturday. So what do I do?

Catch a cold, natch.

Thanks ever so, immune system. I’m sure everybody on the plane with me Thursday will be thrilled by your efficiency too. Ugh.

Spam weblogs (colloquially “splogs”) have discovered DSpace installations. Let us all rejoice.

Specifically, what they’re doing is calling the feedback page with a link to their URL in the fromPage parameter, in the fond hope that their garbage will get into some sort of referrer-page listing.

To see if this is happening to your DSpace installation (it definitely is to mine!), check its URL on Technorati or BlogPulse. Now, one thing that DSpace did to make this less useful is to kill its fromPage parameter in favor of checking the Referer HTTP header—but there’s nothing stopping a determined splogger from putting their URL in that header.

There’s probably a better way to stop this (in Tomcat or Apache, I assume), but here’s my way. Go into FeedbackServlet.java (it’s in org/dspace/app/webui/servlet) and add the following to the doDSGet method, right after the fromPage variable is set:

if (fromPage.indexOf('myu.edu') == -1)
        {
        //die, spammer!
        throw new AuthorizeException("You didn't get here from
a page on DSpace.
If you believe you received this message in error,
click on a link and try again from that page.");
        }

For “myu.edu” insert the appropriate domain for your DSpace installation. (Watch out if your DSpace is accessible from several URLs; make sure you use a string common to all URLs that land at your DSpace. This is why just using the hostname from dspace.cfg won’t always work!) Anti-spammer expostulations in comments are optional, but very satisfying.

At the very least, this will keep your DSpace feedback person from getting splog links in email (as happened to me once or twice before I kludged this). If anybody has a better idea for how to fix this, I’ll happily write up a patch for DSpace; right now I’m working on determining a least-common-denominator hostname from the dspace.cfg hostname.

ETA: I just submitted a patch for this. It’s still a kludge, but what the hey.

So I took the new iGizmo to work today to fill it up with music (since most of my digital music lives there). I dumped my entire work playlist on there and barely managed to fill it halfway. What do people do with the full-size iGizmos, I ask you?

(Okay, podcasts. I can see where they’d start to pile up.)

Late in the afternoon, I finished culling out all the rights-cleared material from the huge pile o’ stuff handed to me for the repository a while back, and I zipped it all to take it home on my key drive so I can work on the metadata while I’m out conferencing.

1.76 GB. Huh. That sure ain’t goin’ on no key drive. gzip -9 didn’t do much better.

Then I cast a speculative eye at the iGizmo sitting docilely beside Trogool the iMac on my desk. Can’t you use those things to…

Yes, yes you can, and the files now reside on Nova the PowerBook, all ready to go. I hereby declare that the iGizmo has earned its keep. I didn’t even have to delete any music!

I’m looking forward to having it with me tomorrow. As You Know Bob, I don’t like flying. I have historically preferred flights with available audio, since distraction is helpful. Familiar audio can only be better still.

I got an emailed reaction to my Library Journal article yesterday. The sender was, shall we say, not a fan. (Though a polite detractor, I must say.)

And I was thrilled. No, I really was! Because the negativity in every single word demonstrated past the least doubt that the sender believed everything I wrote that article to question—and if the sender bothered writing to me at all, I must have hit some kind of nerve!

Go me. I got my message across. That’s all I ask from my own writing.

I didn’t reply. In my estimation, there wasn’t enough common ground to create a productive discussion for either of us, and I don’t believe in unproductive sparring.