Meet Menelaus Fox
This is another in my series of personae related to institutional-repository development. Previous personae include Cassandra Athens and Dr. Helen Troia. Menelaus is a fabrication based on experiences I have had and people I have talked to.
Menelaus Fox is a collection-development librarian at Achaea University; Basketology is one of the several departments whose library collection he is responsible for. Every semester, Menelaus canvasses those departments’ faculty asking what books he should acquire and what journals he should consider subscribing to. Response is at best mixed; many faculty never answer at all, though Menelaus values the easy, collaborative relationships he has developed with a few, such as Dr. Helen Troia of Basketology. Menelaus spends a lot of time skimming publisher catalogues, book reviews, local faculty CVs, and other sources of information to make the Basketology collection the most useful it can be; he also reviews books in his area that come in via publisher approval plans, to make the final acquisition decision.
Menelaus also handles specialized and in-depth reference questions for the departments he serves; he has even been listed as coauthor on one or two Basketology publications by grateful faculty. When Basketology comes up for reaccreditation, Menelaus will write the report section on the library’s Basketology holdings and Basketology-related services.
Achaea University librarians are on the tenure track, and Menelaus is not yet tenured, so he somewhat reluctantly spends some of his time researching and writing articles for publication, as well as serving on two library-association committees, one for the state library association and one for ALA. Add to that all the usual library group work—search committees, Librarians’ Assembly, outreach committees, monitoring the Faculty Senate on behalf of the library, et cetera—and the occasional reference-desk shift or instruction session, and there just aren’t enough hours in Menelaus’s day.
Menelaus’s time crunch became all the more acute when a collection-development colleague retired and her budget line was removed from the collection development department to allow for the hiring of something called a “Repository Librarian.” Menelaus has nothing against the man they hired, Ulysses Acqua, but the loss of a position hurt his department badly; several of his colleagues are even more hurt and resentful than he. He won’t say so, but the shift in hiring priorities worries him. Is what he does still valued by the library and by Achaea University? Or has everyone gone off the digital deep end?
It’s not that Menelaus is technophobic. He adapts; he has to. When ordering went electronic, when book reviews went online, when he had to learn to evaluate online databases for quality, he adapted alongside his colleagues. He even likes instant-messaging, as it saves him a lot of pointless phone-tag. But librarianship began with the book, and it’ll live and die by the book—all this digital stuff won’t last past the next natural disaster, and then we’ll all value the printed word as it deserves.
Menelaus isn’t quite sure what to make of Ulysses and the service he runs. He isn’t even sure what Ulysses does all day; they didn’t have digital repositories when Menelaus was learning his profession. He understands all too well that journal prices have gone completely beyond insane (when Elseviley bought the American Journal of Basketology its price doubled almost instantly, and hasn’t stopped rising since), but he doesn’t see how a website is going to make a difference.
He’s looked at the site. It’s ugly; the mid-1990s want their web design back! It doesn’t look anything like the library’s regular website, either—what, does Ulysses have some kind of problem with the library? There isn’t much in it: some technical reports, a podcast or two, one or two retiring faculty putting their entire CV’s worth of publications in. A few hundred items, no more. Menelaus isn’t impressed, and that’s before one mentions the unbelievably pathetic cataloguing. He heard somebody in Tech Services sneer about that the other day, but he didn’t mention anything to Ulysses, because Ulysses is a decent enough fellow, earnest and very much invested in what he does. Whatever that is.
At Ulysses’s polite urging, Menelaus tried bringing up “open access” at a Basketology faculty meeting. It went over like a lead balloon, and Menelaus hasn’t made another attempt. Ulysses asked him about putting his own publications in the repository too, but Menelaus courteously put him off. It’s not like Menelaus doesn’t have plenty of other things to do, and he sure isn’t hearing any urgency from library management or faculty outside the library on this score.
He’s just going to wait and see.