Caveat Lector

Mouser’s scratches are healing, and she’s growing fur back over them; in a week, she’ll look downright respectable. She is still utterly cuddlebuggy. I had to tell her that she can be my necklace while I’m awake, but when I’m trying to sleep, someplace else would be better.

So I woke up this morning on my side, with Mouser perched purring on my shoulder. Kittens. What can you do?

Because I am a wily housemonkey, I put my fleece bathrobe in the laundry and then let Mouser sleep on it for a couple of days. I wore it out into Goth territory this morning. Dream was the first to amble up, whereupon: “*sniff* *sniff* *sniiiiifffff* *sniffsniffsniffsniffsniffsniffsniffsniff* *HISSSSSSS*” I tried to pet him to reassure him, but I only earned another hiss, and he stalked off in highest dudgeon.

Didi duly sniffed as well. No hissing. She wouldn’t sack out on the robe, even though fleece bathrobes are her favorite thing ever, but she did sack out by my knees. And if there’s a treat involved, she’ll put up with anything.

Dream came back and sniffed some more, without the hissing this time. I think we’ll manage. Eventually.

I told them so. I told them so. Last winter. I told them.

I talked to a roomful of publishers last December. These were not junior editors or wet-behind-the-ears interns. These were the wheelers and dealers, the top brass, the VIPs. (Scared me clean out of my wits at the time. I was expecting peasants like myself, and seeing court nobility, I came closer to panic and stage fright than I ever have at a talk. Just lucky I had a hell of a lot of pain to act as distraction.)

A lot of my audience represented folks whose publishers are nominally (key word, that) part of the PRISM initiative. Maybe, as has been suggested, they didn’t know their employers were pulling this stunt. Me, I’m dubious; it’s the little guys who are protesting and backpedaling right now. But if they were at my talk, there is no excuse for saying they didn’t know PRISM would blow up in their face.

Because I told them.

I told them about the American Anthropological Association, which was in the middle of a messy crack-up over open access. The funny thing is, open access turned out to be almost a side issue. The real problem was that top brass, smugly sure everyone in the organization thought as they did, pulled a big stunt without asking anybody, and when they were called on it, they stonewalled. Result? Chaos, disaffection shading into open revolt, and (ironically) a strengthening of the very movement top brass wanted stopped. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, I said; lay your cards on the table and discuss, don’t be arrogant, because AAA has weakened itself with this and you’d be shocked at how easy it is for you to do the same.

Huh. Ain’t that starting to sound familiar.

When the Dezenhall thing broke, I told ’em again. Get away from this, I said, far away. I didn’t say “it will win you no friends and make you plenty of enemies” because honestly, I thought that was obvious.

Guess not.

Look, here’s one last free clue, big-pig publishers. We in the open-access movement are, by and large, pit bulls. We are mean. We are scrappers. We are stubborn as mules; we have to be to stick it in this business. We bite as well as bark. Most dangerously of all, we are idealists, and despite a couple of embarrassing exceptions, we keep our noses clean. (I mean, consider. With my public bluntness and low diction, I’m damn near as embarrassing as open access gets. I’m not hangable, though, and the rest of the movement is a pack of Versailles courtiers compared to me.)

And most of us, unlike you, have very little to lose. Sure, I could be fired. That’s okay. I’m still a librarian. I’ll find something to do, never fear.

You are not in a good place to be messing with us, okay? We won’t always win, but we always fight—and we don’t have to win every time to erode your position and bolster ours. When you make it this easy for us—not to mention fracturing your own base, you idiots, how could you think that would not happen?—you lose. Big.

I’d rather fight an honorable opponent. Truly. Next time? Think.

A little while ago I made a post with the following rather provocative paragraph:

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.

I followed up shortly thereafter with this graceless rant:

The elephant in the closet is that institutional repositories are in trouble. They haven’t done what everybody thought they were going to do, which was attract lots of shiny happy faculty managing all their shiny happy peer-reviewed content such that we could finally tell big-pig publishers to take their ridiculous journal pricing and shove it somewhere painful.

It didn’t work, okay? And it shows no signs of tipping into a workable state. That’s a damn scary thing to say, if you’re a repository-rat.

I hope I may be forgiven for suspecting that this post from Charles W. Bailey was written at least in part to respond to my momentary despondency. I do appreciate the gesture, and nothing I am about to say should be taken otherwise.

I hold to my thesis. Institutional repositories as a class are in serious trouble. They are not producing the outcomes they promised—or, indeed, much of any outcome in many cases. They are sucking up library staff time and development muscle, and libraries haven’t enough of either commodity to waste on a non-productive service.

Fundamentally, the value proposition on which IRs were sold to libraries was in error. Voluntary self-archiving in institutional repositories simply does not happen in the absence of deposit mandates. From a library perspective, this changes the picture from the original “build it, step back, and they will come” to “make a tremendous ongoing investment in marketing and library-mediated deposit services that may never pay off if other libraries at other institutions don’t do likewise.” It’s only sensible that many libraries back away from the latter commitment.

If we in the open-access movement don’t confront our error head-on and make plans for routing around it, I predict with unhappy confidence that many if not most IRs will wither and die, and few more will open. As I said, that’s not necessarily a deathblow for open access, not at all. I do think it would be a sincere pity.

We are not confronting our error. Except for Stevan Harnad and Arthur Sale, we are by and large not so much as acknowledging our error—instead, we are papering it over with happytalk case studies and the kind of thinly-disguised worry that earned my ire previously. As for Harnad and Sale, it’s well-known that I believe the call for institutional and even patchwork mandates to be a lovely but thoroughly impractical notion. I’m a lowly repository-rat. Who’s going to bell the faculty cat for me?

While I’m pleased at the adoption of the CIC Author Addendum by sundry faculty senates (including that of the flagship institution of the university system I work for), I don’t think it means too terribly much in practice. Most faculty won’t use it. Practically none will connect it with the concept of self-archiving via the institutional repository, not least since the Addendum itself doesn’t even fill in that particular blank. To the best of my knowledge, no provisions have been made at any of the universities adopting the addendum to track addendum uptake among faculty and publisher response thereto, which in practice means I have no way to find out which faculty have successfully employed the addendum so that I can retrieve and archive their articles. “But they can self-archive!” Sure they can. They won’t without a mandate. The addendum doesn’t change that.

So we’re in a bind of our own creation. If we keep dancing around the issue instead of stepping up to solve it, we’re hardly well-placed to hope anyone else solves it for us. We also risk widespread demoralization among librarians running these underutilized services. Pluralistic ignorance is corrosive; a librarian who assumes that everyone else’s IR is running great guns and it’s only hers having trouble is a librarian who will shortly look for another job. I’m not there yet, myself. I don’t mind saying I’m not too far away from it, however; data curation and other pieces of cyberinfrastructure are looking mighty tempting.

I take specific exception to this sentence from Bailey’s post: “I cannot say this enough: successful institutional repositories are not primarily determined by technical factors, rather they are determined by attitudinal factors.”

Who is to say? Perhaps if we had built repository systems that weren’t unusable lumbering dinosaurs, that were designed around daily faculty reality rather than the idealized vision of self-archiving, we might have earned some uptake on grounds of immediate practicality rather than hopes of changed attitudes. But we didn’t, so we’re stuck.

An example: mediated deposit. Repository systems blithely assume that the person pushing the buttons to make a deposit is the same person with authority to grant the repository’s license—that is, a person with intellectual-property rights over the content. This is wishful thinking. In most repositories, most deposits are done by a third party, be it a librarian, departmental staff, or a faculty member’s graduate-student assistants. None of the repository software packages or services I know of acknowledges this reality by separating the act of depositing content from the act of licensing it for preservation and display. I don’t even want to talk about how much time I have wasted building chicken-wire-and-duct-tape paper licensing workflows around this problem. Nor do I care to talk about how many faculty I’ve seen walk away from paper licenses they’d likely click through onscreen without a care in the world.

(In DSpace, it’s possible to skate around the issue with the batch-import tool, which allows any person registered with the system to be tagged as content depositor. Of course, the batch-import tool never verifies that the said person signed or even saw a content license, or did anything at all to authorize the deposit on his or her behalf!)

How much more uptake would we have if we could offer a service enabling departmental IT staff to batch-deposit papers which (once individual faculty have responded to the email requesting licensure) appear magically as prettily-formatted HTML citations on faculty and departmental web pages? It’s technically feasible. We haven’t done it because we’ve fixated far too strongly on the “self” in “self-archiving.”

How much more uptake would we have if we maintained a system that welcomes and cares for unfinished work as well as curating and displaying the finished products of that work? I can say with some authority that I’d have a great many more preprints and postprints if faculty could find their preprints and postprints in the first place!

In short: perhaps the attitudes that need adjusting are ours, not faculty’s.

All of this is elaborated upon at much greater length and with footnotes in “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel,” which currently amounts to twenty-one pages at one-and-a-half spacing and is still going strong. Still, I don’t care to wait for that to be published. These discussions need to happen now.

So, yeah, DSpace RSS feeds. They don’t work like RSS feeds anywhere else in the universe.

The blog feeds I follow send me whatever’s been posted since the last time I polled them, when I poll them. No fixed number, just whatever’s there that I haven’t seen. This is the behavior I expect; I don’t want to miss posts just because it’s been a while since I polled, and one particular blog has gone on a posting spree for whatever reason.

DSpace RSS feeds give me the last five items. (I can change “five” to something else, so it’s really “the last n items,” but stick with me here.) It doesn’t matter if five, fifty, or five hundred items have been deposited since I last polled—I get the last five, no more.

This is not the behavior I want. I want to keep an eye on what’s going into the repository! That’s what the RSS feed is for, in my small beady repository-rat brain.

For once, I don’t think this is the DSpace developers’ fault; they’re relying on somebody else’s RSS library. Be nice if that library would fix itself, though. (And I could be wrong; I don’t know whether DSpace or the external library decides what goes into a feed at polling time.)

Edited to add: It’s my fault, as usual. RSS feeds are limited by number; all I can do about it is raise the number. Thanks to John Mark Ockerbloom, Aristotle Pagaltzis, and Jim Downing for setting me straight. (Though I still think the behavior is broken! Sometimes what one needs is a protocol, not a file format.)

As the seasons pass, I keep running into things I hadn’t quite remembered about this place that make me grin. I went to the grocery store today, mostly for some fresh mozzarella to have with tomatoes, and instead of the usual muzak over the store speakers, we were treated to—live radio coverage of the Packers game. Welcome to Wisconsin!

I taught my first class Thursday, giving myself an outline but trusting myself to follow interesting tangents where they led me. It was okay, though not my best effort ever. First day is the hardest, after all; actual classes are much more cut-and-dried. I’ve got my lecture slides for this Thursday done, and final-project plans are trickling in from students.

I will say that if Johannes Trithemius hadn’t actually existed, I would have had to invent him…

Partly for reasons external and unavoidable, partly because of the brain-fog I’d been struggling with (that seems to have departed now that the B12 has kicked in, I am grateful to say), I’m a little overcommitted until ASIST. The poster I need to finish for that august gathering is in a disgraceful state, and Tim and I will be talking about our preconference this Friday, so I have some work to do there as well. I have a book review that’s slightly past due that’s discouraging me because the book I’m reviewing is so vilely bad I don’t even want to finish it. The fantasy-guide editors came back with a polite demand that is going to take me several straight hours to accomplish, and said hours must take place before the end of this month. Roach Motel still needs work. I’ll have a wodge of grading to do after October 1, which is when the first chunk of my class is doing their mini-job-talks, and of course since I’ve never taught this class before, all my lectures have to be worked up from scratch.

So, yeah, sorta busy. Blogging likely to suffer. I wimped out and picked Google Reader to track student links and blogs; I’d meant to put in another Gregarius install, but the less time I have to spend messing with servers, the better. (Plus, Gregarius’s development pace has slowed to something rather slower than a snail. No stable version for well over a year. Disappointing. I may decide to migrate off it. I wish the desktop RSS clients would bag a clue and let me keep data on the web, so that I can check from multiple locations.)

Mouser is filling out and looking much healthier; her scratches are furring up nicely. She hasn’t shown any sign at all of resenting becoming an indoor cat—I suspect the solid week of rain she’d endured before we took her in conditioned her thinking in that regard. We’ve let her out of the bedroom to start the acculturation process, which so far is going in fits and starts. Dream is extraordinarily affronted, and we’ve had to separate him from Mouser a few times on grounds of violence. Didi, on the other hand, is quite willing to be friends, but Mouser isn’t having any, nuh-uh, no way, hisssssssss, so Didi is patiently giving her a wide berth.

“Mouser’s a kid,” David IMed me yesterday, after the emergency vet visit. “Kids get sick. It’s wot they do.”

Pretty much, yeah.

We both noticed late Sunday that she was winking her right eye a bit, but we didn’t think it was anything serious until we woke up Monday to find it swollen shut and oozing. So David ran her down to the vet, whose diagnosis was the non-specific “infection.” (From Googling about a bit, it looks like rhinotracheitis to me, but I’m not a vet and neither is Google.)

So for a week or so it’s antibiotic glop in a syringe down Mouser’s throat twice a day, and eyedrops thrice if she’ll stand it. Yesterday’s vet visit wore her out; all she wanted to do when I got home was crawl onto my shoulder and sack out, though I managed to catch her interest with some YouTube kitty-vids. (Which, I’m sure, is a use they never imagined!) Today, David reports, she’s back to her rambunctious self and is most aggravated at being shut in the bedroom again.

She’ll just have to live with it for a while… but at least it looks like she’ll mend.

Last week or thereabouts I got my first copy of the Journal of Web Librarianship, for which I write book reviews. I turned to the review section. I found the review. Yep. That’s my writing. Uh-huh. There it is. I didn’t even bother to blog it.

Today I dropped by the SLIS library after work to meet with a student, and as is my wont, I perused the current-periodicals shelf while I was waiting. Oh, look, there’s NetConnect! Wonder if they have the Fall ’06 issue with my Design Speaks article… why yes, yes they do.

Flip flip flip… ooooooohhhh, look at that! I’ve been published! That kinda rocks!

What was the difference? Artisanry.

It’s not me. I write the way I write. “Serviceable” is the most I’ll allow myself. It’s just one of those things where I could tear my hair out trying to be better at it, but I’d gain a few percentage points at most. I write the way I write.

Haworth’s typesetting is ’orrid. The font they’ve chosen is unreadable on the too-small leading. The line lengths are too long, and the page is too gray. They indent paragraphs after headings, which is a particular pet peeve of mine. The print quality… well, “serviceable” is the most I’ll allow. Haworth is doing this journal on the cheap, and it shows.

Library Journal found a nice illustration for me, set my article in neat columns, did my pullouts in snazzy color, and created a page-spread that looked just downright pretty. Jay Datema reworked a lot of my article, partly to add opportunities to break up the gray with headings (after which the text does not indent, as $DEITY intended). I liked looking at my own work, and I generally don’t.

This is perhaps something to think about for the folks who occasionally write to me asking if I’m interested in writing a book. If you can’t give my book some damn text-artisanry, no, I’m not—and I’m just enough of a typesetting snob that I’ll write design approval into my contract. I’m looking at you, Information Today. What you’ve done to the books I’ve seen of yours is unprofessional, and you should be ashamed.

Artisanry matters. We need more of it. And if open access is threatening your business model, maybe artisanry is something to invest in. I’m looking at you, Haworth. Because I could typeset your journal better than you apparently can. In Microsoft Word.

One of the things my students don’t know yet, because it completely slipped my mind to tell them last week, is that I will in fact be doing their final project with them.

I asked them to investigate and then either implement or plan for a technology that is unfamiliar to them. And timing worked out such that I now have a Manakin-enabled DSpace test server to mess with.

The Manakin theme tutorial is pretty good so far, though it’s mildly frustrating that the xmlui.xconf file (like the dspace.cfg file) is the Special File that has to be changed in the running directory, rather than in source. If you’re working with a fresh copy of the code in Eclipse as I am, that makes the tutorial look wrong, because there’s a config directory inside Manakin with the xmlui.xconf file in it.

Ugh, complicated goofiness. But I believe I have created space for a new theme, and so on I go.

Oh, and I made a new category for Manakin grumblings and squees. I expect to emit many of both.

So this is the design I’m supposed to imitate in the new Manakin-based repository design. Except for the Arial (ugh), it’s not bad, passing over lightly that the CSS code looks like what I might have written when I was new to the spec—that is, disorganized and messy.

But I have a design problem. Well, several. One is that I don’t have a reverse-video repository logo. That could be gotten around; I can just make one. But if I do, I may cause brand confusion between the repository and the larger organization, and I can’t think of anything calculated to cause me more grief. If I don’t, then I have the problem of trying to fit a multi-colored logo into that nice red border. Yucko.

Okay, so we get rid of the red border at the top and make it white, demarcating it with the thin red line. The nav sidebar can stay more or less as it is, white-on-red. That will also let me move the breadcrumbs into the header, which is a feature of the default Manakin design that I quite approve.

Now there’s the two-logo problem. Two logos? Yes, two logos: one for the repository, and one (optional) for the community or collection. How do you put two logos on a page such that they don’t clash? And why is the real page title living in the body of the page and not the header?

Okay, so let’s be clever about this. If there’s a logo, we put it in the logo spot in the header. If not, we use the default repository logo. Either way, proper title goes in the header. Yes! I like this. (Others may not, if they are concerned about the repository “branding” itself. Me, I’m pragmatic. The repository “brand” isn’t worth diddly-squat. Letting campus communities brand their own collections is worth a lot.)

Now to figure out how to make it happen… title shouldn’t be hard, but I’m not sure about that logo…

Anyone using Manakin: Do not—DO NOT—send it live without a thorough read of the messages.xml file in the i18n folder in the config folder. Just in a quick read, I’ve found misspellings, incorrect apostrophe use, and similar things that send a librarian’s spine shivering as though nails had run down a nearby chalkboard.

I’m fixing them on my end, and when I’ve time, I’ll shoot a corrected version at the developers. In the meantime? Don’t embarrass yourself or your institution. Read the file and fix it!

Edited to add: Also, verbosity and redundancy. Argh. Librarian thing. Sometimes we need to be beaten with copies of Strunk and White. Avoid needless words, dammit, especially on the web! (Expostulations are never needless.) I just changed “If that is the case” to “If so.”

Edited to add (again): Even better. “The following represent ways in which you can log in. Choose the appropriate method by following the link.” changed to “Log in via:”.

We should totally hold a contest. Whoever can reduce the wordcount in DSpace’s message file most while retaining appropriate clarity wins.