When my brain shuts off at work (which happens with distressing frequency), I do authority control on the repository, since that’s work not requiring a great deal of mental power. Right now I’m just deduping: taking name entries that are obviously for the same person (and yes, I insist on the “obviously” for the time being) and making sure they have a single representation. For example, I discovered that “Nowak, R.” “Nowak, R.D.” “Nowak, Robert” and “Nowak, Robert D.” were the same person; all items previously under those names now only sport “Nowak, Robert D.”
(DSpace folks: don’t try to do this through the DSpace UI. It will take FOREVER if you have folks with lots of publications, as I do. Go into your database. The magic query is update metadatavalue set text_value = '[good name]‘ where text_value = ‘[bad name]‘;. Then run an index-all at the end of the day.)
I’ve nuked some 300-odd duplicate names, and I’m only somewhere in the O’s. When the deduping is done—and it’s probably going to take me a few more weeks; my brain does occasionally function—I’ll get on to regularizing names and trying to do some real authority control. Resolving initialisms, whee!
When I tell people I’m doing this, they look at me funny. Why in the world, their expressions say, would you spend all that effort on this? For a repository?
Think about that. Doesn’t that speak volumes about academic-library attitudes toward institutional repositories and the contents thereof? Ignore the rhetoric for a moment. Ignore all the shiny marketing campaigns and the “future of librarianship” jazz and the wistful rumblings about e-research and open data. When the rubber meets the road, libraries don’t think IRs are important enough to waste even a smidgen of authority-control effort on. Considering the howling in tech-services circles about how sacrosanct high-effort cataloguing practices are (or aren’t), that’s quite a statement.
It says, loudly and clearly, “We are not proud of these things.”
I can’t argue. I’m not proud of either of the IRs I’ve run. I have no leisure to be proud, even had I reason to be. I’m too busy being afraid, afraid that I’m not doing my job properly and that’s the reason so little of the vast wealth of knowledge MPOW and MfPOW produce has passed through my hands. It’s possible to read Roach Motel as a personal apologia, and I don’t doubt some people have, but most of the time I’m not trying to shove the responsibility off on somebody else. I’m trying to figure out what my responsibility actually is and how I can best fulfill it.
Unending fear grinds me down. It’s demoralizing. It’s distressing. It pleads to become apathy and cynicism, and I won’t say that it never gets its wish. Add to that the intense frustration of rarely (if ever) feeling useful—and feeling useful is for me a basic work drive—and you have one repository-rat who’s ready to crawl into a hole and pull it in after her some days. Most days, even.
As I pointed out in Roach Motel, the people I putatively serve don’t have much good to say of me, those who have bothered to comment. To most others I am completely invisible, and when visible, ignorable. None of this boosts pride.
There’s another mailing list now, REPOMAN-L, for repository-rats. It’s been fairly quiet so far. In contrast, SPARC’s new author-rights mailing list is already humming. I think the difference comes down to pride. No one wants to claim repository-rat status. Author’s rights, however, are a sexy thing to be working on. Small wonder repository rats have no community of practice. You have to have a base level of pride in your work before you’ll join a community of practice, much less start one.
Next week NISO is starting up a series of meetings of “thought leaders” about IRs. I’m honestly a little dubious about the idea; didn’t “thought leaders” get us into this mess to begin with? I don’t see a single name on the list that I recognize as an actual repository-rat. And no, I’m not angling for an invite—I’m just a repository-rat rabble-rouser, not a “thought leader,” and I’m not genteel or patient enough for the elaborate dances of high-level think-tanks. But they couldn’t invite my good twin Sarah Shreeves, or Leslie Johnston, or Trisha L. Davis? I don’t understand that.
Still. Charitable reading, benefit of the doubt, and all that good stuff. I know at least one of the listed attendees reads Caveat Lector, and the number may be as high as three. So, for those readers, here is one repository-rat’s challenge to the NISO thought leaders: Make me proud of what I do. Convince me it will survive, against my many and manifest doubts. Make my institution and my profession proud of what I do.
If you can do that, I have a feeling the rest will fall into place.
