Caveat Lector

Hereby be it known that Steve Lawson owes me a drink the next time we fetch up at the same conference. (Going to ASIST, Steve?) He knows why.

I think Necia was a little chagrined at the low turnout for my talk (15-20 people). I wasn’t, though. For one thing, I’d been to several other talks and seen what turnout was like—mine wasn’t anything unusual, and was in fact better than some. (This says something about conference programming that I would examine further if this weren’t a dead topic.)

For another, been there done that, can’t be fazed by it. At an OEBF meeting several years back my technical content-preparation program was put up against a DRM roundtable. The instant I learned that I knew beyond the slightest possible doubt what was coming. I ended up talking to three people, one of whom was Allen Renear. When this happens, I don’t change a thing. The people who do come deserve my best, and my best is what they get; I can’t imagine why I’d do otherwise.

For a third—look, open access is a fringe topic even in academic libraries. We librarians don’t have any right to grumble about faculty ignorance (though $DEITY knows I do it anyway). We’re just as bad. I don’t know how to change that. I do what I can think of.

So I talked my talk, and it was fun, and I saw some nodding heads and heard some laughter at the bus photos, and I think I may have inspired one librarian at one institution to restart a dormant repository program, so from where I’m sitting (in the airport at the moment, working in my text editor) it’s all good.

TXLA records sessions and sells them; I’m going to ask if I can self-archive mine after a suitable embargo period. It’s a little thing, but with any luck it will get them thinking.

I caught two talks before mine. The first, by Kathryn Deiss of ACRL, discussed innovation and barriers to same in academic libraries. It gave me a functional framework for coping with some occasionally-difficult things about MPOW’s functioning. Extremely worthwhile talk, very reality-based and grounded without being elementary, and I will definitely make a point of attending her sessions should we ever fetch up at the same conference again. Recommend you do the same.

The next talk concerned the trials and tribulations of archiving material off the web. Though I didn’t find anything wildly new in it, this is not a slur on the presenter Dr. Kathleen Murray, who was very lucid and informative; it just reflects that I’m in that business myself some of the time. And in fact, not learning a whole lot was itself informative for me—means I’m not missing anything too terribly obvious—so I’m glad I went.

After my talk I sat in the wireless area performing email triage (I didn’t have time to check my email in the morning before hitting the conference for Kathryn Deiss’s 8 am talk) and waiting for my heartbeat and blood pressure to subside. (I love presenting dearly and wouldn’t give it up, but it revs me up in ways that are probably bad for my health. So it goes.) Then I picked up a late lunch on the Riverwalk, grabbed my bag from bag check, and shared a cab to the airport with another librarian.

Despite the drama that blew up on CavLec and elsewhere over TXLA, I had a fantastic time there and would happily return. It certainly doesn’t hurt that San Antonio is a nifty city for tourists: easy to navigate, pleasant to hang out in, and enjoyable to look through.

The conference itself is gigantic (which is, I daresay, a large part of the reason disparities in speaker treatment happen), but from my worm’s-eye view it seemed very well and smoothly run. My one suggestion would be more obvious “tracking” of sessions into public, academic, K-12, and general library tracks in the schedule. This would have helped me plan my days better, and might even have attracted more people to my talk—there are academic librarians who don’t know the first thing about OA, even that it pertains to them.

And in the end, I didn’t strain, sprain, break, or otherwise injure anything despite the Friday the 13th talk date, so it appears London was a one-off, not a trend. (Believe me, that’s a relief!) My plane’s at the gate; if the weather cooperates, I’ll be home with the Goth-kitties tonight.

(I’m sorry. My only defense is that if I hadn’t used that title, somebody else woulda.)

Yeah, so I got to the San Antonio airport in plenty of time to check in and find my gate; American Airlines lives in the not-quite-so-pretty part of the airport. The plane to Dallas before us duly loaded and took off. We were told to go to the gate next door, where ours would be coming in. Then, because clear visual evidence indicated that our pilot couldn’t count gates, we boarded at the gate we’d been told to move away from.

We pushed away from the gate, and taxied a bit, and then we sat. And sat. And sat. Weather in Dallas, we were told. Not a big storm, moving quickly; we’d be on our way in 45 minutes or so.

Three hours (and several “want a bus back to the terminal?” calls) later…

Three hours later, air-traffic control let us go, despite lightning coming in on our left. The flight was a bumpetty-bumpetty-whee! of a roller-coaster until we got above the storm. On landing in Dallas, we heard that the San Antonio airport shut down five minutes after we took off.

Not a big storm my sore knee. It was a hell of a big storm. Tornadoes. DFW shut up like a clam for several hours. Not an open gate to be had, we were told.

Three more hours later… yes, you heard that right, about seven and a half hours on that damnable plane… they finally managed to let us into the airport, where there was only one harassed gate agent available to get us rebooked. (I heard people calling the airline on their cell phones. All in all, sounded pretty pointless to me. Phone agents? Clueless.)

The flight crew swung through, fired up another terminal, and… got themselves booked into their hotel. In full view of the line. Not only do we not do customer service any more, we airlines, we rub it in our customers’ faces that we don’t. I don’t actually begrudge the flight crew their hotel rooms, as we had been a fractious crowd, but I truly don’t think it would have killed them to move down a gate or two and fire up a terminal there, just for the look of the thing.

Mr. Scott Vernon, the harassed gate agent, was the only decent part of the whole thing. My flight to Madison had been cancelled, and I’m guessing the ones who’d made it to DFW had all been rebooked already, jamming the next day’s American flights. Still, Mr. Vernon beat the living crap out of his keyboard until he had an answer. “Northwest, 6 am, going through Minneapolis, getting into Madison at 11:30. Okay?”

“Works for me,” I said. Pause, as my brain caught up to the situation. “Unless it starts snowing or something.” In spite of everything, he did manage a small but sincere smirk.

He handed me two green-and-tan pieces of paper. “You’ll need to get there at about 5 am. E terminal.”

“No problem; I’m not going anywhere,” I said. What was the point? Clock said well past 1 in the morning, and we already had word hotels were jammed. “Thank you, sir.”

I meandered my way onto the Skylink and off again in E terminal, called my husband at long last to explain the situation (I would have called earlier, but D terminal doesn’t seem to have pay phones), and here I am at ten past two, recharging Buffle at the security gate and hooked up to T-Mobile wireless. (I didn’t spend eighty bucks on a hotel room, so I figured ten bucks for awake-keeping material wasn’t a huge splurge.)

If by some weird freak of chance you’re awake at this ungodly hour? I’m on IM. Say hi.

I’m home again. Northwest duly took off at six, dropping me in Minneapolis at eight with plenty of time to forage for breakfast, which I did because I wasn’t sure I’d make it to my next flight without eating!

Back in Madison a bit after eleven with three-quarters of an hour of hassle over my checked bag (what, you believe the TSA’s horse manure about bags always travelling with travellers?) to deal with.

Then I went home and fell into bed. Seven hours later, I think I’m almost human again.

Expect minimal blogging for the next two and a half weeks. I have half a book and a book review to finish in that time span, and it’s just not going to get done if I don’t throw myself into book gaol and toss away the key. (Note to self: Don’t move in the middle of a book project and an upcoming presentation. Superlatively bad idea.)

Home IM will be set to “away” a lot; if you need to bug me, bug me. I expect I’ll be even worse about answering email than usual. My Twitter feed may become an amusement for those who enjoy watching that sort of thing.

Have fun without me, y’all. Just not too much, ’k?

I have finished entries up through C.J. Cherryh, which isn’t horrible for one night’s work (spent last night on the book review, which is—rather to my surprise—finished).

The entries get sketchier later on, though, so things will slow down soon.

And in the meantime, I seem to have damaged what seems to be one of my right foot’s peroneal tendons. It hurts. I’m going to be very upset if I have to stop walking to and from work. If I believed in Santa Claus, I’d have asked him for new and better feet years ago.

Through de Lint tonight, with a bit of a detour into H. Rider Haggard and Robert E. Howard because L. Sprague de Camp wrote a couple of biographies of the latter that I wanted to pop into his entry, and, well, I got sidetracked. The Howard entry looks much better now, though!

Foot hurt pretty bad this morning, so I wrapped it and took the bus to work. It was behaving itself by the end of the day, but it lied to me about that yesterday, so I didn’t risk the walk home either. May try again tomorrow morning.

I miss my spot-the-loon game!

I made it up to my sample entry (Neil Gaiman), which puts me at a little better than three-fifths done. I’ll make it.

We’ve found a third Goth-kitty, a little tawny-eyed charmer who roams the neighborhood and loves to be petted. It’ll happily hop inside if we let it, much to the consternation of the regular Goth-kitties, which suggests it’s not actually a feral… but I do wish I knew whose it was. It’s too nice a Goth not to have a good home.

(with a nod to the famous “refgrunts…”)

So I’m working on getting a translation of Eugene Onegin into the repository. I start doing up the metadata, and I think to myself, “Hm. Self, I bet there are a lot of translations of Eugene Onegin in the library catalogue. Rather than reinventing aboutness wheels, why not stand on the shoulders of my cataloguer colleagues?”

So I do a title search, and indeed, the library has quite a few translations. I click on a few, and I immediately notice that no two entries have the same subject headings. Several, in fact, have none at all.

Somebody explain to me how this is a good and useful thing? It violates collocation-by-subject. It means that someone perusing one of the subjects may not realize that Eugene Onegin is in fact highly relevant, because not as many hits will come up as theoretically should. It implies false dichotomies among the different translations (why should one be about “Novels in verse” while another is about Russian society?). It doesn’t, in a word, help users—among which august body I currently count myself.

This isn’t a cataloguer problem. It’s a tools-and-processes problem. Cataloguing tools should have heuristics for recognizing a new translation of Eugene Onegin and pulling up the other records for such translations. Subject assignment at that point should be point-and-click, accept what’s already in the catalogue (with, of course, an option to add new subjects if truly necessary—which I can’t imagine it is terribly often!).

I despair sometimes; I truly do. If cataloguing tools can’t even manage that, how on earth are they going to manage the immensely richer web of relationships implied by the FRBR model?

Wally just posted word that my former job has been formally opened.

If you’re a repository-rat or want to be one, I can recommend Wally and GMU without hesitation. I had a wonderful experience there, and my departure had nothing whatever to do with my job. (Some people can thrive in DC and environs. Some people can’t. I’m unfortunately in the latter group.)

You will have a lot of freedom to take this job wherever you think it should go. That’s a valuable commodity. You will also have an excellent supervisor and sterling coworkers, which are pearls beyond price.

Seriously, folks, this is a good one, and I really want to see it land in good hands. Consider it! I’m only an email or IM away if you have questions about it.

I did a lot of IR marketing this week, despite my perfect awareness that IR marketing doesn’t work. For a tactic that doesn’t work, I did manage to come away with some contacts, and it appears that the IR made its way into some heads, and that’s all good.

But if marketing doesn’t work, what does?

Here’s the problem I’ve got: there’s a ton of material that’s IR-ready floating around, but I can’t get at it. My nose is mashed up to the window of other people’s hard drives, web servers, workflow silos, and collaboration tools. I want the stuff that comes out of those arenas. I just have no way to grab it.

Here’s the problem everybody else has got: they need the curation, preservation, and “put this important content somewhere safe (but otherwise out of my hair)” tools that an IR theoretically provides, but they don’t need the hassle of extra deposit steps. They need an “Archive It!” button. They just have no way to build one… if they even know about the IR to begin with.

I need middleware, and I need it badly.

I don’t think DSpace or EPrints developers should be directly considering building the kinds of tools that Peter Murray-Rust is talking about. We’re the wrong people for the job (we can’t even do versioning!), and the job is being done elsewhere by others anyway, because faculty want and need these tools, and IT is finally listening. (I have direct evidence of that from my own job, but I need to keep fairly quiet about it because work is ongoing. You’ll just have to trust me.)

What DSpace and EPrints developers should be considering is how to hook IRs up to the firehose of research products those other tools are producing. By my one-horse back-of-the-napkin calculations, that means an ingest API (no, not a command-line batch import tool, an API!) that is configurable enough to authorize certain tools for unmediated deposit and then prepopulate metadata fields with what those tools “know” about their content and the people who use them.

It’s a tall order, but I dearly hope it’s not impossible, because I want to get my IR’s ingest pipe connected to that firehose.