Caveat Lector

I just laid a major smackdown in a reply to a post on the SPARC/ARL mailing list. It was impolitic, I shouldn’t have done it, and I’ll take the lumps I’ve got coming for it. But people (especially librarians, as this individual was!) who get in my face (of all faces, mine!) with condescending know-it-all lectures about what libraries and librarians (and, it is loftily implied, my peasant self in particular) should know about and do for open access—these people really hack me off. They hack me off to the point of laying return smackdowns when they betray a serious lack of awareness about and respect for what libraries and librarians already do for OA.

And that is in large part why I ranted as loudly as I did about the notable absence of librarianship from the Chandos open access book. Leaving libraries out of the picture is insulting, and it’s practically universal (The Access Principle is just as bad as the Chandos book), and it causes real librarians, librarians like me who have staked our careers on OA and are working our butts off for it, real problems. We deserve to be taken seriously, damn it. If we deserve nothing else, we deserve that.

So I got ranty today on the SPARC/ARL list. And as is the way of these things, I expect I’ll regret it in the morning. But I also expect some other librarian will have an easier time of it sometime in the future because of my rant, and I guess that helps a little.

My last day at MPOW is tomorrow (and all hail the civilized employer! not all of them are), and so I’m trying to do the right thing by the poor mail admins and get off all the listservs I’m on.

This led me to ask myself just what I was going to do with the subscriptions, because I certainly can’t afford to jettison all of them. I thought about adding them to my personal account and shuddered. The idea of creating a new account on my webhost wasn’t much better, frankly; listserv mail just doesn’t really belong with the rest of my email. I don’t need to keep it for the long term, as when I need to search listservs, I search web archives thereof. I don’t need POP access to it, either—it just builds up into a huge maintenance and storage-space hassle.

If I wait until I have a work email address again, that only means a bunch more subscribe/unsubscribe tsuris. Ugh. But every once in a while, there’s that one mail that’s worth keeping…

So I got myself a GMail account. First name dot last name at gmail dot com. GMail can handle the load, everyone will still know who I am, I don’t miss any mail, and I don’t ever ever ever have to mess with the subscriptions again.

Because how much more of a pain in the rear could that be?! I’m on four DSpace lists at Sourceforge, but Sourceforge’s Mailman installation is so screwed up that I had to unsub/resub individually from each one. And then there’s dspace-general, which isn’t hosted at Sourceforge. SPARC-IR cost me twenty minutes of head-scratching, before I noticed the unsub/resub links at the bottom of their archive pages. (”Feed,” “index,” and “digest”? Huh? And why doesn’t SPARC-IR put the addys at the bottom of posts the way that SPARC-OAForum does?) ALA-SCHOLCOMM doesn’t actually tell me anything I don’t hear from six other places, so I took several minutes to figure out how to ditch it. JISC-REPOSITORIES is on crack some listserv system I’m not familiar with, so figuring out how to get an account and switch my subscription cost me another fifteen minutes.

No wonder social software is taking over the world. Listservs are a hassle. Only takes me two seconds to subscribe (or unsubscribe, for that matter) to an RSS feed.

Points to GMail for how easy it is to create filters, though. Thunderbird could learn something about that.