QOTD
Quoth the marvelous Karen Markey: “Giving users a Boolean-based system to search digitized texts is comparable to giving Captain Kirk a Mercury-era space capsule to travel the galaxy.”
Karen wins the Intarwebs. That is awesome.
It’s a great article, too, with which I am wholly in sympathy. Check it out. (Apropos of nothing, it seems as though nearly everybody writing intelligently about library catalogues is named Karen. I can think of four without even scratching my head. How did that happen? If the OPAC is the unit of suck, then perhaps the Karen is now the unit of sense?)
If you are a repository-rat, you are required to read Sale’s now-published explication of the Patchwork Mandate. Sensible stuff, although I would like to see it reformulated by someone who understands what power and influence librarians do and (more importantly) don’t have in the university setting.
The key question to my mind goes something like this: “Okay, I went to ten decision-makers. Three think it’s a good idea, but aren’t going to bet their relationship with their department’s faculty on it. Five are wantonly clueless and don’t want to avail themselves of a clue-by-four. One is actively hostile to open access. One is on the point of retirement and doesn’t care as long as she doesn’t have to actually do anything. What do I do now?”
Add to this that influence hierarchies in academia are weird, as weird as—well, as they are everywhere else. It’s not clear at all to me that going to department brass is the automatic right move; for one thing, department brass rotates frequently and may have only a tangential relationship to actual departmental power. Sale’s good about identifying some other possibilities (such as high-output faculty), but it’s not as simple as that, either (what if high-output faculty are actively resented in their department for the height of their output?). And how much influence, leaving aside actual reporting hierarchies, do faculty in a single department or a single institution really have on each other, anyway? Isn’t the discipline a greater one?
But that leads us to intransigent disciplinary leaders, and… sigh. It’s never quite as easy as it looks. That said, I hooked a department chair myself last week, and I’ve every intention of putting the ol’ patchwork-mandate screws on.