Caveat Lector

I’ve rented a car for this weekend. We’re going up to Appleton tomorrow for a maple-syrup festival thingie, but today is all about errands—which, I must admit, are much easier for the wheeled.

I picked up Dream’s heart pills first, and then I hopped over to Hilldale to pick up the Bibliomedusa, which I finally got framed. It looks unbelievably fabulous and I plan to post a picture of it, because how can I not post a picture of the language-geekiest library in-joke ever?

I stopped for a tasty lunch at Pasqual’s at Hilldale; I still prefer the Monroe Street one because it’s a bit rough-and-readier, but the Hilldale one is just fine. Next was a stop at the hardware store for a curtain-rod so that we can put up the chunk-of-Bayeux-Tapestry reproduction my mom got us; while I was at it, I got a hangy-post-thing for the back yard so we can put up bird and hummer feeders. I then tooled over to campus to leave the Bibliomedusa in my office and pick up the extra office chair I’ve been meaning to take home for ages. (Oh, hush. It’s mine, only I no longer need it because they bought me one.)

And now I’m home catching up on email before I hop out again for a bulk-buying run. I promised to pick David up at work, and we’ll catch a little take-out dinner before I come home for Dragonhunting.

It’s not spring yet, but “late winter” is fair. Like a snake shedding its skin, Madison is slowly losing its snow cover. Walking outside with no gloves and coat open is quite comfortable in the afternoons. I saw a huge group of geese the other day, going around in circles trying to decide which lake to head toward—this being a difficult decision because the lakes haven’t even started to open up yet. Walking to work yesterday morning, I saw two rabbits nosing around a cleared patch of yard looking for something vaguely edible.

I still seem to be okay at this driving thing. Can’t perpendicular-park worth a damn (though I’m good at parallel-parking, go figure), but the world seemed to conspire today to show me drivers way worse than I am—one guy managed to hop a curb, couple other people did parking jobs so bad that I would have backed out and started over, and one idiot completely ignored that his lane was ending until he had to beg to be let in.

So if you see the orange-copper Chevy Aveo tooling around Madison and environs this weekend, wave and say hi. But don’t honk. Please. Makes me nervous.

Oh boy. There’s gonna be a BIG party in Fenwick Library. And here I have to miss it.

Congratulations, Mario! Well-deserved.

Yesterday we put on our travellin’ shoes, climbed into the orange Aveo, and headed north and east to Appleton, the northernmost of the Fox Cities. Our goal was the Bubolz Nature Preserve and their Saturday maple-syrup tours. Snow crunching and shifting underfoot, we tromped through their sugar bush to see the sap dripping from the trees into decorated plastic buckets, thence to be dumped into an immense boiling pan over a wood fire for evaporation and caramelization. Eventually you take it out and filter it, and then it’s syrup.

Of course I bought a big jar to take home. How not?

The star of the show in absentia was a pileated woodpecker, who had gone and made abstract sculpture out of a dead-but-still-standing tree trunk. He’d taken a two-and-a-half-foot tall by half a foot wide by half a foot deep hollow out of that thing, and the pile of shavings on the ground before it was more than respectable.

After that we found our old favorite eatery, Sai Ram, discovering that it’s really every bit as good as we remember it. I’ve never had lighter pakoras, and the masala vegetables were absolutely divine. In the same little strip-mall is a genre-specific bookstore, used and new; I found another Melissa Scott novel and a James Tiptree Jr. anthology, while David dug up an anthology of antique (1930s) skiffy.

We drove downtown, found a place near Lawrence University to park the car, and wandered about College Avenue for a while. The Outagamie history museum is small, but has some fun tidbits in it, and the Houdini stuff is almost as good as their advertising suggests. After that and a peek-in-shop-windows stroll, we got back in the car and I drove home. I think people go insanely fast on Highway 26, but I’m a notable fuddy-duddy about highway driving.

This morning I was feeling decadent, so we drove over to Bluephies for a tasty brunch. David suggested a drive through the Arboretum, and by pure chance we arrived at the Visitor Center fifteen minutes before a scheduled nature walk, a big old redtail hawk wheeling and soaring overhead. So we did that, crunching and slipping over more snow, and damned if there weren’t some hints of spring: a carpet of green watercress on one of the open springs, turkey and deer tracks everywhere, tufts of coyote fur, cardinals furiously claiming territory, and last but not least, the humble skunk cabbage poking its odiferous shoots up in the marsh.

I like these weekends. They are immense fun, and they keep me comfortable behind the wheel of a car. I’d still be happier if Community Car would let me in, but oh well—something to look forward to when I’m forty.

I resonated strongly with this examination of library timidity faced with projects that might bring overwhelming success.

When I have proposed new repository programs and services at MPOW, I have more than once been told, “They’ll all come running. You’ll be swamped. No.”

My response, heretofore silent, is invariably, “Wow. What a great problem to have.” As opposed to my current problem, which is my service being ignored, devalued, and defunded.

What I have trouble with in all this is the constant lament I hear that libraries have so much terrible trouble justifying themselves and their funding in the Google Age. Well, hell’s bells, people, maybe if we brought down the house once or twice we’d have an easier time of it?

Last night my throat started getting sore, so sore I didn’t sleep especially well. I dragged my lazy carcass in to work anyway because there was an NIH presentation I had promised to get to.

Besides, I’m not all that sick. I’ve only sneezed a few times today, which is a good thing, because every time I do it’s like somebody took a razor blade to my tonsils. Ugh.

I heard a real howler today. Seems the scholarly-communication czar at a Certain Research Institution quoted Roach Motel in a presentation and then said (my paraphrase) “Isn’t it nice that we don’t have those problems?”

This is me. Rolling. On the. Floor. Laughing. My. Nether regions. Off.

I dropped by their institutional repository. I won’t repeat the numbers I found there because the institution could be identified by them. They do have what looks to be a flourishing ETD program, but aside from that—all I can say is that “denial” is more than a river in Egypt. If their mission is the standard open-access notion of capturing the institution’s peer-reviewed output, they’re no better off than any of the rest of us, take my word for it.

I can’t speak to their faculty-participation levels without looking behind the public façade, and I don’t know anything about what arrangements may or may not be in place for mediated deposit. That’s one of the odd things about this business: high numbers mean success on some level, but it’s not at all clear which, as it may mean either an engaged faculty or a really with-it library.

Low numbers are low numbers, though. Their numbers aren’t extraordinarily low, but they’re low compared to the institution’s peer-reviewed output, and as is typical of IRs, a glance down the collections list demonstrates that a hefty chunk of their content isn’t peer-reviewed.

There’s no shame in that. It’s the boat most of us are in. I wrote Roach Motel partly as a bit of an apologia for that boat. But I’m sorry, it’s plain old bloody stupid to deny it… unless the institution has some other mission for the IR that they’re not letting on about.

This is possible. It’s one of the directions MPOW is going in for our IR (with my active connivance, I may say); if it won’t work for the peer-reviewed-literature wonks’ purposes, let’s see what it is good for. If this is the case for that institution, however, their actual site doesn’t so much as whisper it.

Which makes me think Czar Scholcomm’s comments really are an amazing case of ostrich-headed denial. Lordy, when is the green open-access business going to grow up?

What’s an institutional repository for, anyway? That’s one of the charges set before a state-system-wide library working group I’m chairing. It’s a tough one, too. We made good headway on our other two charges (service definition and budget) at our last meeting. We didn’t get anywhere on this one.

Some IRs will claim that they’re there to collect and preserve the institution’s peer-reviewed research output. That’s the classic reason to have one at all. By that measure, I don’t know a single successful one. Not one. Not even Ohio State or Oregon. Certainly not either of the ones I’ve run.

Sometimes the above mission shades into a slightly different one: to range the institution’s faculty behind open access such that they self-archive their own work (and, it is implied, take over the scholarly publishing world, haha, mine is an evil laugh). This is the Les Carr view of IR success, in which mediated deposit is to be scoffed at because it’s a non-missionary solution. No winners there at this point, either. Not even Harvard, yet. Not even those institutions with mandates. Sure, faculty will do what they have to, but in their pointy heads they file the mandate under “one more intrusion of an out-of-control academic bureaucracy” and assign it the same dull resentment reserved for IRBs and grant progress reports. What’s more, they don’t hit the keys themselves. They delegate it to department secretaries, graduate students, librarians, and similar nonentities. Some commitment to open access that is.

The thing is, when you strip away the rhetoric, it’s quite clear that hardly any IR is set up to handle the workload either of the above missions generates. If you want all the peer-reviewed research without a mandate, you’re going to have to do mediated deposit, there’s no way around it. Number of IRs set up to do mediated deposit? A few. I do it, on a sadly small scale and without staff help. On a large scale? None. Not one. I heard Trisha Davis of Ohio State with my own two ears at NISO/PALINET, saying that she’s scared of the possibility of her small-scale mediated-deposit shop getting flooded.

As for the missionary workload involved in the second goal—look, that’s just funny, that is. Except in very small schools where the entire library (not just the repository rat) has a solid, unified commitment to open access, the kind of high-touch outreach needed to get faculty on board is not even remotely feasible. Worse still, IRs are really pathetic flags to rally anyone around, faculty or librarian. “Useless excrescences,” I called them in Roach Motel, and that’s harsh, but it’s not unfair.

And yet those are the standards against which libraries are judging repository rats. I wonder sometimes why I don’t have ulcers. I don’t wonder why my hair is graying.

Some IRs, self-aware enough to realize that both the above missions are pitifully out-of-reach (and believe you me, I resemble this remark quite strongly), redefine the IR as a service point. Come to us; we’ll take care of whatever you give us. This is the best of all possible worlds for a repository rat; at least good service is both definable and feasible. I certainly try to provide it. I’m certainly trying to move the working group in this direction (and the wording of our charges helps). The trouble here, once again, is that service isn’t a sufficient mission. Service in service of what, exactly? And round the wheel goes again, as university presses and librarians who have never been in the repository-rat trenches scoff at IRs for their meagre and non-peer-reviewed contents.

This is why I often think of IRs as preservation vehicles. Digital preservation I understand and can perform, at least as well as most and better than some. It’s also hard to argue with as a goal; it needs to be done, and who else is going to do it? It’s not as sexy as open access, but it’s unassailable. I’ll take unassailable. Everything else I do gets assailed all over the place.

A repo-rat’s life is not a simple one, not least because the tradeoffs I have just explained seem not to resonate with anyone who isn’t a repo-rat. I yell and scream and stamp my feet and make people upset at me and call myself and the service I run harsh names—because I don’t know how else to be heard, and conversations that don’t include my point of view invariably turn out to be empty and useless from where I’m sitting.

I made a feeble joke over at Walt’s blog to the effect that he must have been extra hard-up for material for this issue of Cites and Insights (PDF). CavLec eats a shocking proportion of the pagecount.

Without opining as to the veracity, insight, or other value of my blogging, it might be worthwhile to think for a moment about how a one-horse blog by an otherwise undistinguished repository-rat (think about that, think hard; in what way have I distinguished myself in my profession other than CavLec?) became one of the open web’s top voices on institutional repositories. I don’t think it’s as simple as “Walt and I are friends,” though I won’t deny that plays a role.

Point one, mine is just about the only voice like mine out here. Stevan Harnad does not count, as he is not running one of these things. Ditto Peter Suber. Ditto Jan Velterop, who comes at open access from a different angle entirely. There’s Les Carr, but that only happened recently. There was almost Leslie Johnston, but bless her, she got out of this field while the getting was good.

We’re not talking. We’re not organizing. (The OA publishers are, but we’re not.) Even those of us who are talking are talking hardly more than happytalk. I don’t know how much more clear I can possibly make it: green open access as she is practiced (rather than merely opined about) has a severe morale problem. When I asked NISO to make me proud of what I do, I wasn’t kidding.

A talk I had with a SLIS professor and a doctoral candidate the other week brought home even more strongly something I point out in Roach Motel: repository labor is invisible. Just ten minutes or less per article, chortle the archievangelists; the software is free and easy to set up and Just Runs, and that’s all there is to it!

Yeah. What am I here for, again? But at least it helps explain the dearth of ratly voices. Why would we think anyone would listen?

There’s obvious rhetorical use to making these claims about institutional repositories. They just happen to be claims that devalue me and all my analogues at other institutions. This doesn’t seem to bother the archievangelists and other Big Thinkers much; in fact, some of them are perfectly happy to do explicit devaluing themselves (see Roach Motel for a couple of examples), which has led to certain plaints of mine. Yet another explanation for the dearth of ratly voices. Why do I want to talk to people who despise me? Cui bono?

Certain types of labor in this field are even more invisible than deposit labor. Systems administration (”it just runs!”) and design labor, certainly. Rights-clearance labor, which is picky, demanding work notable for its total lack of clarity. Consider also that there are two or three types of it: clearing rights from faculty members for mediated deposit, clearing rights from publishers, and explaining the whole Creative Commons thing. I have yet to meet a faculty member who intuitively understands that the license is an agreement between faculty member and repository/institution, while Creative Commons is an agreement offered by the faculty member to the general public. “Why do I have to sign the license if I put a CC license on it?” I get that a lot.

Labor theorists should be having a field day with this. We, the open-access movement, demanded free labor from faculty, on the weak excuse that it wasn’t much free labor. They didn’t pony up. When they didn’t, we lashed together some rationalizations for why they should, ranging from “citation impact” to various variations on “productivity measurement.” They were unimpressed. At that point, our reactions diverged. Some of us, the Ohio States and Oregons of the world, decided we’d have to put in the work ourselves: mediated deposit. The rest of us figured that the labor could stay invisible if it became forced instead of voluntary labor: mandates. The whole bit about mandates being forced labor, and not a repo-rat in existence in a position to force labor out of faculty, never seemed to occur to anyone. (Except me. But I was trained by Greg Downey.)

The Harvard decision, looked at in this light, leaves a troubling question open: What’s going to happen when Harvard arts and sciences faculty realize they’ve imposed a labor requirement on themselves? I’m not at all sure they have realized that, and some of the “permission mandate” talk being thrown around muddies the waters further. For the record, the Harvard policy is not just a permission mandate; it requires that faculty get their articles to the Provost’s office. Somehow. We don’t know anything about the “how” yet… but to my mind, that may be the key factor in the policy’s success or failure. If faculty think they’re putting too much work into this—worse, if they’re right—I wouldn’t give the policy survival odds past two years.

Do I need to say that slapping up a DSpace install and requiring faculty to use it would be the death-knell for this policy? I hope not. I expect I do need to say it, though. Harvard faculty didn’t sign on to do five screens of metadata, an upload, and a click-through license per publication, folks. That’s work, that is. The simple fact is that DSpace has heretofore been extraordinarily disrespectful of its users’ time: browsers, searchers, depositors, community and collection maintainers, all the way up to system administrators. I plan to defend this assertion in a later posting, but for now, take my word for it, and understand that it becomes a serious backlash-inducer in a forced-labor context.

Verily I say unto you: Harvard’s Provost’s office, library, and IT division had better be hard at work on citation-retrieval automation, automation that involves as little faculty labor as possible. And verily I say unto anyone who wants a mandate like Harvard’s that they’d better do likewise. And verily I say unto everyone that we (as a field) are so far from being adequately automated as to scare me.

Labor. Follow the labor, and you see the cracks in the green-open-access system. Follow the silence, the lack of voice, and you see how those cracks have been allowed to happen—and grow.

I’ve gotten a couple of private questions about the University of Iowa’s ill-fated electronic thesis and dissertation program. What happened, in a nutshell, is that Iowa laid down an open-access ETD mandate, the creative-writing students balked because they sell their stuff and don’t want it OA, and the whole thing got very huffy very fast.

I don’t have any friends at Iowa and so I don’t know what happened behind closed doors, let me just say that much up-front. I seriously doubt, however, that the library had as big a role in this as is being portrayed. I’m sorry, I just cannot credit that Iowa librarians (librarians!?) would have done that little homework on that major a policy shift. I went to a whole ETD conference and did a whacking lot of searching in the literature (plus consulting with one of the top names in ETDs) before anybody trusted me to help with MfPOW’s ETD policy!

I can credit without an iota of difficulty that the Graduate School walked into ETDs completely unprepared and then blamed it on the library, because I’ve seen more than one graduate administration that didn’t give a flying flip about its students, and plenty of clueless, blame-shifting faculty who pick any handy target when they’re caught out.

I could admittedly be wrong about this. I don’t think I am. And if I’m not, I think the library should be apoplectic at the way the Graduate School shoved it into the line of fire. “I want a new building in the next capital budget or I blow your lame-o coverup to the skies” apoplectic.

Anyway. ETD policies. It’s stupid and irresponsible not to offer an embargo period. One to two years is the norm last I checked, and I believe it sufficient; a few places offer indefinite embargo, but I honestly don’t think it necessary to pander to egos quite that far. (If you haven’t sold it, contracted to publish it, or patented it in two years, it ain’t gonna happen.)

Of course the institution doesn’t take over the student’s copyright. (I hear weird, vague, and unconfirmed reports that the University of Michigan actually does this. If it does, it shouldn’t.) A non-exclusive license to hold, preserve, and make available is all that’s necessary.

Iowa screwed up big-time. Do not do likewise. That’s pretty much all I can find to say.

I hate it when I have to preface a post with “I’m not making this up.” It invariably means the WTF is flying thick and fast. But I’m not making this up.

There’s going to be a debate on institutional repositories, you see. Between a scholarly-communication czar and a library-school professor. Each of whom comes from a school that does not even HAVE an institutional repository, much less, y’know, a repo-rat or anything.

Am I the only person in existence who thinks this faintly ludicrous? I mean, sure, debate scholarly communication or open access, that’s fine, you don’t have to be a repo-rat to do that, you might not even want to be.

But as much as I respect both Smith (whose blog is good stuff) and Tibbo, I’m sorry, they have no business debating IRs without a repo-rat at the table. This is the same Big-Thinker-no-experience nonsense that got all of us into the IR mess in the first place. (And no, Dr. Tibbo, “helping to plan” doesn’t count, because I have yet to see an IR plan that didn’t crumble soon after contact with reality. IR plans never include repo-rats. They’re written before the repo-rat is hired.)

C’mon, everybody. It’s time to demand repo-rat representation in IR discourse. We can’t leave this to all the Big Thinkers, not to mention the research types who for some unfathomable reason now think that IRs are a sexy research topic. They do not help us. Time we helped ourselves.

Edited to add: Just for fun, I decided to see what kind of self-archiving cred Smith and Tibbo might have. Neither E-LIS nor DLIST turned up anything for Smith. Tibbo has two papers in one and three in the other. When I searched LISTA, I found 18 results for Tibbo, and five for Smith (but I don’t think all of them are actually his). Draw your own conclusions.

By the way, I think folks in the area should emphatically go to this—if only to ask why there aren’t any repo-rats at the table!