Caveat Lector

Tables. Bloody tables. Manakin isn’t quite as table-infested as the JSP URI, but it’s still got plenty of bloody tables where they shouldn’t be.

A comment I left in the code today:

<!-- NO CAPES! -Edna Mode. NO TABLES! -DS -->

I also notice that the summary-view table allows blank metadata items (abstract, description). This is stupid. I believe I have fixed it. Once I’m sure, I’ll let you know.

Also, argh, VERBOSITY. Less noise on the pages, please! Turning the bitstream table into a list allows me to get rid of the table headers. This is a good thing.

Also, double-argh, thumbnails at the end of the file listing, when they’re the first thing anyone wants to consider! Fixed that one too.

And inflicting MIME types on users sucks. I gotta find a way around that one; I don’t care what METS allows.

Edited to add: I have a notion for that last. Get the Bitstream Format Registry to export itself to something XMLish, then call it via the MIME type in METS. Kludge, if I can even get it to work, but way better than inflicting MIME types on users.

Hm… there is also input-forms.xml, which might be pressed into service in a pinch…

(This is in answer to the blogging prompt I gave my class this week, in case anyone is wondering why it seems out of left field.)

My dad, like most dads, took me to the office every once in a while, with all due stern caution about Sitting Quietly and Being Good. I believe it was on one of those visits that I saw my first acoustic coupler. Handset modem. You know what I mean (or maybe you don’t). Stick the telephone handset in the vinyl sockets. Earsplitting screeches ensue.

I may be one of the last people on this earth to have learned to type on a manual typewriter.

That was in the eighth grade, in Mexico. I didn’t actually type on a computer until a few months later, when our martinet history teacher back in the States demanded a letter-perfect typewritten double-spaced final paper. My dad sighed and took me to the office, where he introduced me to a Commodore 64 and something that might or might not have been WordStar.

Honestly, I can’t say I liked the thing very much. It wanted me to type weird two-letter commands starting with colons. Instead of black ink on white paper, I had to learn to get used to green phosphors on black. And it’s hard to get anything done when you’ve been adjured time and time again Not To Break The Expensive Equipment.

Times do indeed change. I make my living working with the equipment. I’m not afraid of it any more (… usually; kernel panics are legitimately scary). And I’ve become dependent on it to a substantial degree.

Dependent? But we’re not supposed to be dependent on technology!

Please. Go find a cave and live in it. If you can’t live without books, you’re dependent on technology. Can we get over the mistaken notion that technology is novelty and move on? Thanks.

Most of what I read these days, and nearly everything profession-related that I read, I read from a screen. Honestly, if ebooks weren’t DRMed up the wazoo, I’d read my pleasure reading that way too. With two cross-country moves in three years, never mind the trail of broken bookcases I’ve left in my wake over the years, I’m coming to the conclusion that the boxes of paper are more ruddy trouble than they’re worth. (But DRM is worse, so this is me not taking the plunge. Yet.)

Quite a few of my friends live online. My old college buddies. My roleplaying buddies. Friends I haven’t met yet. Just a moment ago a friend I haven’t met yet IMed to cheer me up because I have had a remarkably pointless and frustrating day. You know what? It worked.

Want a cliché? Here’s a cliché. I met my husband online. It’s the honest truth.

I keep coming back to Andy Clark. Buffle the MacBook, Nova the PowerBook G4, the Silver Surfer, they’re part of my brain. Without them, I am not whole; I could learn to live without them, but I would have to learn. Retrain my thought processes. Remember how to remember. Reclaim my handwriting, even. It’s a scary prospect.

That eighth-grader? She could never have imagined.

I turned down a possible panel invite to a conference I really want to go to, because of short notice and my current unbelievable busyness. So it goes.

I know how to use iMovie to get video off a miniDV tape now. The learning process involved an entire wasted hour, as I didn’t know the signs that iMovie was actually picking up data, so didn’t realize that they were absent. Irony in action, yes? So it goes.

I’ve got another talk invitation in the batting cage. I’m guessing I won’t land it, because they’ll want happytalk and I was bluntly honest with them about not having any to offer. That’s okay, though; they’ll find somebody to give the troops a pep talk, the troops will go home happy, the conference will achieve its stated aims, I get out of having to cope with air travel, everybody’s cool. So it goes.

On the rare occasions I start something in the blogosphere, the ensuing discussion is invariably better than my original post. (The power of many in action.) So it’s been with “training-wheels culture.” I particularly recommend Laura B. Cohen’s careful unpicking of the matter. I could, if I chose, try to point out where both my statements and my record (which I think speaks pretty powerfully about my commitment to helping librarians with technology) have been distorted past reason… but you know what? Not worth the added stress. People are thinking seriously about an issue I raised. That’s good, even when I get savaged in the process, and my whinging about ill-treatment will only distract from the serious thinking and the problem-solving anyway. So it goes.

I’m still way too busy, very stressed, and not good company. Will try to keep that off the ether. So it goes.

So I built what I thought was the crude beginning of a workable Manakin theme and dumped it up on the test server. Whereupon it stubbornly failed to work.

Here we go again. I’ve been fighting with this thing for nearly a week. No quick answers, just “500 I can’t find dspace.cfg.” Which is horse manure. The tech lists are no help: “it’s some kind of a configuration problem, not sure what.” Yeah. Thanks. Guessed that.

Next step is to do this the slow way. There’s a known-good DSpace/Manakin combo on that server. I’m going to restore it, copy it to my local drive, compare it to what I’ve got, and if I have to, start replacing files bit by bit until it breaks again, whereupon I’ll at least have narrowed down the problem!

Would be easier if the compile-deploy cycle weren’t such an amazing pain in the posterior. Die, -D, die!

I’ll let y’all know what it was once I get this licked.

Alma Swan is going to get her calendar printed!

If you want one or more (buy one for all the repository-rats in your life!), they’re fifteen bucks each. Email Swan at aswan at keyperspectives dot co dot uk. I already have!

Wretched week. Absolutely wretched. I am writing it off as a bad job and starting fresh.

With a weekend full of grading and lecture development. Sigh.

But on the plus side…

I spent most of my day Friday helping out with a one-day campus symposium (the payoff for me being a chance to flog the repository both in print and in person, which I duly did).

In so doing, I ran into one of the new faculty members at SLIS—there are quite a few of them, as SLIS was down to a skeleton crew the year I graduated, and is now getting back to something approaching a full slate.

We talked about my specialty, and New Faculty Member’s specialty, and the upcoming ASIST conference, and the iniquity of conference food in general, and…

… And eventually out came the siren. “Have you ever thought of pursuing the doctorate?”

I was good. I didn’t say “Now why would I do a damfool thing like that?” In hindsight, I should have laughed and said “One damn dissertator is enough for any family.” What I did explain was that research and I don’t get along.

Sirens. Gotta stomp them little suckers flat. I will say, though, I’m finding that easier to do than I used to.

Boss, killing a rat is no problem. Stuff it into a sack. Beat the sack with an ax. Then shoot it. Then drown it. Burn the sack with the dead rat in it.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

That’s a pretty good description of what this repository-rat’s last week was like, from an extremely personally-expensive strategic error on my part (no, no further details, sorry), to getting my butt kicked by Manakin, to my (brand-new, purchased with personal funds) color printer dying (which led directly to the aforementioned expensive strategic error), to various blog-related kerfuffles, to an extraordinarily pointless and time-costly expedition to plug the repository to entirely the wrong audience, to complications in a project that should have been out of my life for good six months ago but somehow manages to have more lives than a rat and a cat put together, to a hurricane of bureaucratic tsuris surrounding what I do and what I’d like to do, to yet another in the long string of accusations from various parts of constituting Part Of The Problem, to spending much too much time getting video ripped and conference posters printed, and…

And then I heard that Roy Rosenzweig had died. My first thought, which does me absolutely no credit whatever but illuminates my frame of mind, was “Bloody hell. Why am I doing this, again? Apathy or mindless happytalk or hypocritical lip-service everywhere there isn’t outright hostility, and here we’ve lost one of the good ones. We can’t afford that, damn it.”

I didn’t know Roy well. I’d met him a couple of times. Some people immediately impinge on the consciousness as too damn smart and capable to quite be real. He was assuredly one of those. I did what I do with people like that: stay out of their way while they do their thing, watching with awe. I’d heard from the Mason grapevine that he was ill; all the more reason not to play the Porlockian.

One reason academic fiefdoms are dangerous is that they tend to coalesce around their founders, withering or stagnating once the founders’ fire is gone. I’m not worried about the Center for History and New Media, though, because the other thing I noticed about Roy was his talent for attracting… well, talent. It’s still there, and my guess is it’ll stay there.

That’s today’s thought, though. At the time, finding out about Roy’s death was just the ugly capstone to my monster brutalist edifice of a week. Honestly, I spent most of the weekend sulking. (And not doing my grading, which I still have a lot of to do.)

Today I came in, put on Fairfax Choral’s performance of the Duruflé Requiem for Roy, wrote off a lot of sunk costs (both time and money), dealt with equipment problems, dumped a bunch of stuff off my desktop and to-do list that didn’t need to be there, starred the email in which the sysadmin hauled me out of my Manakin morass, sneered at NeoOffice when it lost all the non-heading text out of Roach Motel (seriously, NeoOffice, wtf?), promptly rescued the article with Apple Pages, and still made it to the morning staff meeting on time.

Because you can’t kill a rat. Try.

So the Manakin problem that had me tearing my hair out last week was a constellation of Tomcat configuration issues. Tomcat, as I believe I have mentioned before, gives me ulcers. The problems are solved, however, and I hope not to run into them again. If you want to know what they were, ask the local sysadmin, who groks Tomcat so I don’t have to.

Anyway, so Manakin was up, but it wasn’t paying the least attention to my new theme. I scratched my head. I fiddled. I checked out the DSpace wiki. I IMed Tim, who didn’t know what to tell me.

And then I figured it out. The xmlui.xconf file has to be replaced in the working DSpace directory, not in dspace-source. I did that, and hey presto! I have one deathly ugly Manakin theme up and running.

Holy hell, is it ever ugly. Where did my navbar go, for starters? And my logo?

But at least now I can beat on it until it works!

And in other good news, I was wrong! Yep, sometimes that’s good news. The conference organizers weren’t in the market for happytalk, so I am back on the menu. More news when I have it.

Andrew Dillon makes me happy yet again with his thoughts on LIS research:

It is no coincidence that our most frequent theorizing is in the broad area of ‘information seeking’, where there exist dozens of models of human behaviour and cognition in the context of use, many reasonably plausible, but few robust tests are ever conducted that discriminate between them. It is almost as if the field is content to approach theorizing only as far as it ties weakly to systems design, but not to any more ambitious effort at explaining fundamentals. Can we now agree to place a moratorium on further general models of information seeking?

Yes. Please? And can we dump information-seeking models out of ALA library-school accreditation so that we can then dump stupid pointless information-seeking courses from MLS curricula? Sometimes the problems with library schools aren’t library schools’ fault!

Read the whole article; what Dillon has to say about LIS faculty’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the pathetic preparation for a research career vouchsafed many LIS Ph.D students, is worthwhile—and from my observations, right on. (And another reason to resist the sirens. I don’t even want to put up with graduate school for the sake of a good education. Why the seven hells should I do it for a lousy one?)

I’ve been asked to guest-speak on open access and IRs at SLIS’s digital-libraries course in November. This may have been a mild tactical error on the professor’s part, because my thought on LIS and IRs dovetails very neatly with this examination of an OA LIS journal:

Library school professors, particularly, need to show more leadership in the open-access movement. If you are not a part of an open-access journal, join a current project or start a project of your own. If you are an author, submit your work to an open-access journal. Be sure to make your work openly accessible. Don’t be obscure!

That exact apathy is at work with LIS professors and librarians with regard to self-archiving, as the thin pickings at E-LIS and DList demonstrate. I don’t mind (politely) pointing that out to library-school students. Salience can be a powerful motivator, and we repository-rats can’t afford to be too terribly picky about our tactics.