The Information Tomorrow anthology that includes my libraries-as-publishers essay has a splash page at last. Plus an ISBN and a price (yikes, really that much?!) and all that good stuff.
I don’t know what the other contributors wrote about (hey, Info Today, how about a TOC?), but I certainly do see names I’m interested in reading. I look forward to receiving a copy.
In other writing news, “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel” is slowly starting to look more like an article (you know, with an actual argument and flow of ideas and such) and less like a disjointed collection of random thoughts. I can tell this because now when I have one of those “oh, that’s something else I really need to write about” moments, I know right away where to put the paragraph stub for it.
It’s a hard article to write, I tell you what. Confronting some home truths about the frustrating, dysfunctional on-the-ground reality of running IRs means confronting some home truths about myself and the career choices I’ve made. I am definitely suffering through uncomfortable “oh, great, I’ve found myself another bloody windmill” moments. I’m still convinced, mind you, that open access is not a windmill—it’s viable, it’s necessary, and it will happen under various guises. Institutional repositories… well, the doubts I’ve had all along about ’em are only intensifying as I write.
It’s not all doom and gloom. I see ways forward, several of them. But the first step is cutting through the (peculiarly Statesian, for whatever reason) denial. If nothing else, “Roach Motel” ought to start some unhappy but necessary conversations among academic-library administrators, software developers, OA proponents, et cetera. And then maybe we can remember what progress looks like.
