Caveat Lector

At MPOW, to buck for promotion in rank one must organize one’s professional accomplishments since one’s last promotion into The Binder, which one submits to one’s committee to be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered. (Ooh, I probably shouldn’t have phrased it in those terms… but I can hope my committee’s never heard of Patrick McGoohan.)

Since I have not been previously promoted, I am allowed to use materials from before my tenure at MPOW to make the case that I am a good librarian really truly and deserve promotion because of it. I have to make this case extra-special hard for myself, because I do not have the three years of professional librarian experience normally required for the rank I’m trying for. (It isn’t an absolute requirement. I read the Librarian’s Handbook. Very, very carefully. It ISN’T.)

I tell you what, it’s a good thing I’m a digital pack-rat. (Boy, am I ever in the right job, I tell you what. Digital packrattism isn’t just a job for me: it’s a way of life!) I wanted my “Page and Screen” talk that I haven’t given for five years for The Binder. Drill down in a few folders, and there it was, no problem, and in three versions no less… and beside it I found a presentation for NIST’s eBook 2001 that I’d completely forgotten I ever gave.

Boy, I did amazingly ugly PowerPoints in those days. Whew. I’m talkin’ plug-ugly. Tufte would die of apoplexy on the spot.

I wasn’t stupid, though, I’ll give myself that. Bit callow, no doubt. Very unaware of the social context of computing. I was very, very right about what was wrong with publishing workflows, and why markup wasn’t fitting in. I was very, very silly to think that better-designed technology was the answer.

Eh, well. It’d be scary and upsetting if I hadn’t changed and grown in five years. That, at least, I needn’t worry about.

Which is good, because I’ve enough on my plate just worrying about The (expletives deleted) Binder.

Meredith just announced the participant lineup for Five Weeks to a Social Library. It’s a phenomenal group. I may say that it is a travesty that there is no systematic push to get continuing education to people like this, just a handful of shoestring operations staffed mostly by volunteer idealists.

We had a rough time evaluating our hundred-odd apps. Spreadsheets flew, animated discussions were had, and we had to do a fairly involved tiebreaker. It was not easy, not easy at all.

I note with a touch of uneasiness a number of applications we got from people who honestly didn’t need our course. They were clearly experimenters who understood the tools and what they could do with them. Did they lack confidence in their own skills? They shouldn’t.

I’m sure you’re waiting for the gender-and-technology crack from me, but this time I don’t have it, because the above category contained both male and female applicants. Maybe it’s a librarian thing?

Said this before, but it bears repeating: Be confident. Experiment. Beat things with rocks and see what happens. It’s a great way to learn!

Working on the book today, I found this in an interview with Angela Carter:

It’s not very pleasant for women to find out about how they are represented in the world. They find out much more about what their real existential status is from pornography, and it’s very unpleasant. It really is. It’s enough to make women give up on the human race.

No, I didn’t use this quote in the book (I used a bit on specfic further up, because it was a most excellent bit). But it hit home, and I thought I’d share.

The thing is, we typically don’t find these things out through actually reading pornography (or whatever you care to call it, wherever you care to find it). We find these things out because the view of women promulgated by pornography leaks out into the rest of the world, including places it absolutely does not belong. I don’t have a personal problem with porn per se, though I’m aware of and deplore the myriad problems in its production. I have a serious problem with porn as a filter on the world I have to live in, and I run into many, many men too many who employ such a filter and either aren’t aware of it or will defend it to the death.

Bloody frustrating, that’s what. Carter captures that beautifully.

Call for papers. Please distribute widely!

We have recently started Open Access Research (OAR) <http://ojs.gsu.edu/oar>, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that will enable greater interaction and facilitate a deeper conversation about open access, including topics such as:

• open access journals
• institutional support for open access
• open access publishing services and software
• open access repositories (both institutional and subject-based)
• electronic theses and dissertations
• the impact of open access on scholarly research and communications.

If you are engaged in research relating to open access, or if you have an article in mind, please contact us. OAR’s first issue will be in August, 2007 and will subsequently be published three times a year. Submissions received by March 31, 2007 will be considered for the August issue; subsequent submissions will be considered for future issues.

Send inquiries to:

William Walsh
Head – Acquisitions
Georgia State University Library
100 Decatur St. SE
Atlanta, GA 30303
wwalsh@gsu.edu

Editors-in-Chief: John Russell (University of Oregon), Dorothea Salo (George Mason University), William Walsh (Georgia State University), Elizabeth Winter (Georgia Institute of Technology). Please see our website for a full list of editors and editorial board members. Open Access Research is published by the Georgia State University Library using Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) software.

The big news in DSpace geekery these days is the new XML/SAX/Cocoon user interface called Manakin. Eventually, DSpace is going to transition off Java Server Pages to Manakin. It’s in beta now, and is expected to go gold in a month or so.

I’ve heard some sotto voce moaning about performance issues, which I can’t speak to. I can say that I will be thrilled to get away from JSPs, especially in DSpace’s current implementation thereof. If we could put a stake in Tomcat, I’d be even more thrilled, because Tomcat’s operation is opaque to me even after a year and a half and I hate depending on a technology I don’t understand how to run, but as I understand the matter that’s not in the offing.

It doesn’t hurt that I grok XML and SAX. At a stroke, I’ll suddenly feel far more in control of the application my job depends on. And of course I’m also looking forward to more flexible design of pieces of DSpace. Over the last year I’ve had a number of requests to customize the view for a particular community or collection, and I haven’t been able to oblige. As I’m an obliging sort, that’s bothered me.

I expect that transitioning from JSP to Manakin will be fairly horrible, but worth the effort. And when it’s in… there are things I want to do. I’d take a stab at doing them in JSP, but it’s hardly worth the bother, is it?

Right now, DSpace is a very “clicky” interface. You do something, then you click, and DSpace tells you it did it, whereupon you have to click again to get anywhere useful. Perhaps this doesn’t bother casual users, but when I have a load of items to check, the umpteenth repetition of “This item has been saved and given its identifier; click here to go back to your My DSpace page” does not improve my temper.

Blog software (well, WordPress at least) has this licked. There’s no such thing in WordPress as an “I did something; aren’t you proud of me?” page. For example, when I click the “Publish” button on a post, WordPress sends me right back to a blank compose-a-post page, with the addition of a message telling me the post was published and offering me a link to view it. This is what I want DSpace to do. It shouldn’t be hard to add a “message” object and pass it around between pages.

Pulling back a little bit, it seems possible to go through the DSpace user interface and designate a few “destination” pages, default places to send people after they’ve done something. My DSpace, of course, is an obvious one; it should probably be the default destination page for anything done in the administration interface. Alternately, one could go through the UI and sort out where the dead ends are, the places where the UI pauses and says “okay, the user has done something; what next?”

Just please, please, no more “aren’t you proud of me?” pages! They’re just clutter.

I don’t get sick. Go figure. I’m fat and out of shape and everything the health thugs love to hate, but I don’t get sick. David has gone through two nasty colds in the last month, but me? Not so much as a sniffle.

I get occasional headaches, and now and then a case of the one-day blahs. That’s really about it.

A good friend of mine was just diagnosed with uterine cancer. It’s bitterly unfair. She is a generous and loving person with a husband and child who depend on her, and a wide circle of friends who love and value her for her unselfish benevolence. She takes good care of herself, always has.

This is not supposed to happen to women like her. It’s supposed to be women like me. Damn, if I could take it from her, I would. But here I sit, disgustingly healthy save for a still-healing knee, and there’s nothing I can do.

If that weren’t enough to reinforce a sense of helplessness before the world’s ugly caprices, a number of my coworkers were immediately present today when this happened. I was due to meet with a couple of them a bit later on in the afternoon; I was quite prepared to postpone, but they overcame shock and dropped by anyway.

I stuck to my knitting. What else could I do? Asking for details is ghoulish, and I didn’t want details anyway. They were outwardly completely collected (which is a feat I’m not sure I could emulate); asking after their mental state might only have brought back what they were trying to get away from. So I stuck to my knitting. I hope it helped.

The proper response to all this is supposed to be gratitude. There but for the grace. Count blessings. Well, I’m not grateful, damn it. I’m upset, because I don’t like these things happening around me, and I’m scared, because how long can my lucky streak last, and what horror is going to break it?

Just to let people know that a repository-rat job is open at a great university library. North Carolina State is looking for a “Data Repository Architect.” (Go to their job site and search for library positions, and I wish the software vendor who makes this job-app suite would buy a clue and make sure jobs have semi-permalinks!)

This is the same NCSU that turned the OPAC upside down. The same NCSU that employs Andrew Pace, Emily Lynema, and similar stars. The same NCSU that brings in the best and brightest out of library school for two-year internships.

It’s a great place. If you’re thinking about ratting, this opportunity is not to be missed.

Monday was Fairfax Choral Society’s first post-holidays rehearsal, and as had to be, it was a sight-reading run-through. As a group, we’re moderately good sight-readers; we wouldn’t make it as a real Hollywood chorus (do they even get rehearsals?), but we do all right.

The next concert is Hollywood Goes Choral II, a sequel to the highly successful function a few years back in which (I have it on good authority) our esteemed conductor showed up onstage in full Darth Vader drag complete with lightsaber to conduct a Star Wars suite. I’m not sure how he’s going to top that. I suspect he’s going to try.

Harry Potter is inescapable; we’re doing the John Williams hack of Shakespeare’s witches’ incantation. (In case we should miss its origin, Mr. Williams kindly offers the meaningless tempo marking “Witchlike.” Retro me, composers who get too cute.) I think the same thing I thought when I saw the movie (don’t you start with me; it was a with-friends outing), which is that the chorus in the movie was excellent and should have been given better music.

(I don’t think we get to bring toads onstage. Too bad. I could catch some at my condo complex!)

When I told my husband we were doing a piece from That Asinine Sinking-Ship Movie, he turned a look of horror upon me and gasped, “Celine Dion??” Good heavens, no. No, no, no. The gooey-saccharine choral bit we’re doing is bad enough, but if our conductor tried to get FCS to cover something by that woman, half the choir would quit. Including me!

That’s it for music I could live without. The rest is above-average decent stuff. A gentle Welsh-inspired lullaby from a movie I’d never heard of plays to our strengths as a chorus, I think.

As a high school senior, I fell utterly in love with Henry IV Part I. Loved it loved it loved it, wanted to play Hotspur (for all his manifest faults) as a trouser role, wrote about it and its sequels at length on the AP English exam. (They fired us an essay question about father-son relationships in literature. How could I lose?) So of course I went to see Henry V when it came out, and of course I fell in love with its “Non nobis,” and of course I’m just tickled that we’re singing it. So that Sir Laurence Olivier doesn’t feel left out, we’re doing a couple of pieces from his Henry V too.

And then there’s a short ton of Russian: a piece from Hunt for Red October that’s every bit as bombastic as you’d expect (but in a fun, not-to-be-taken-too-seriously way), and Prokofiev by way of Hollywood, the Alexander Nevsky suite. Again, nothing unexpected there: Prokofiev cheerfully ripped off Russian folk music and gave it a nationalistic gloss, just like many before and after him.

(You can take the librarian out of linguistics but… I immediately started scribbling Cyrillic above the transliterated text in my score just to see if I could still write it after $DEITY-help-me more than fifteen years. I can, but I’m rusty. I’m going to try to finish the job, though, because it’s honestly easier to read Cyrillic than a transliteration of it.)

The jewel of the concert is the suite from Triumph of the Spirit, which the composer himself is making the trip to DC to conduct us in. The moviemakers went to the trouble to get words written in Ladino—I rather suspect (based partly on what Howard Shore did to David’s painstakingly-composed words, partly on what I see in the score itself) that the original writing was somewhat maltreated in the composition process, but what’s left is mostly comprehensible as Ladino.

(I’m completely stuck on one word—I checked both print and Web Ladino dictionaries for it and every way I could think of that it could have been misspelled or mis-transcribed, but I came up empty, as did David when I asked him to try to find me a Hebrew cognate. Unfortunately, there’s not enough context for me to make an educated guess about its meaning. I also sent a substantial infodump about Ladino to our conductor, and queried a couple of places where I don’t think the text matches what I understand to be Ladino usage, because I’m persnickety that way—last vestiges of my ill-fated study of Hispanic philology, I suppose.)

It’s excellent music. Well-considered, well-orchestrated, emotional, smart music. I’m very much looking forward to working with its composer, and you should all come to hear it—the concert is March 31.

So who-all is going to Open Repositories ’07? I’m lucky they extended early registration, because I had completely forgotten to sign up, even though I’ve got air and hotel settled.

Drop me a line if you’re going and have no dinner plans. I have the beginnings of a dinner party, and wouldn’t mind adding some more people to it.

The basic problem with Neurotic Ex-Boss, I am coming to believe, was his stubborn belief that success was finite and limited only to a few people, and that it therefore came at the expense of others.

He came by the belief honestly. His boss, the Big Boss, was a credit-stealer; he’d been ghostwriting the Big Boss’s papers and presentations for ages, receiving zero credit and zero additional remuneration. All unknowing, I blew that game for the Big Boss; I put a little piece on the Web that earned me plenty of kudos and plums, such that even when the Big Boss brought it under company auspices (owing to me being naive and too easily flattered), he couldn’t separate my name from it. At this point, Neurotic Ex-Boss must have recognized he was getting a raw deal.

Unfortunately, that realization came too late for Neurotic Ex-Boss to change his thinking about success. He regarded my success as a threat to him, even though I was not remotely a suitable candidate to take his job (if I had even wanted to, which I didn’t), and he could have gotten far more mileage for himself by supporting me than he did by thwarting my every move and making me miserable.

So I left, first his department and then the company, and it’s water under the drawbridge now, but events over the last couple of days have brought it back to mind.

Those who believe that succeeding means climbing a hill of bodies to snatch the flag that makes them Monarch of the Hill, because there can be only one… these people are, not surprisingly, exceedingly unpleasant to work with, and quite dangerous to work for. You may and probably will be the next corpse atop the pile. And once a Monarch ascends, woe to all who even appear to be worthy of the flag. They are not to be fostered, brought along as aides or colleagues; they are to be virulently attacked and shoved off the hill.

This plays out in the blogosphere too, not just the workplace. If attention and honor are perceived to be finite, they must be both courted and hoarded, and woe betide anyone else who attracts them. I firmly believe this phenomenon lies beneath the entire RSS/Atom saga, never mind the tiresome and repetitive “A-list” wrangling.

But what if success is—at least potentially—infinite? The entire equation changes. You have to decide which flavors of the limitless abundance you care for, and you have to sort out for yourself how much is enough. At that point, you can happily and without the least whisper of personal loss lend a hand to others who are doing the same.

It is, if you ask me, a much safer, healthier, and happier way to live. Even if the premise on which it is based is incorrect—and I don’t think it is; I think success comes in uncountable flavors and textures, and not every flavor will suit every person—my lived experience and my observations of others indicate that living as though success were infinite, behaving with generosity and consideration, leads to more security and long-term prominence than the reverse.

The Big Boss lost his company, and (it would appear) considerable credibility along with it. Neurotic Ex-Boss was freelancing none too successfully, last I heard. Me? For all that I don’t always live up to my own high-minded ideals… I’m doing just fine, thanks.