Caveat Lector

Okay. All you Keynote users out there. I’m one too. Can we come to a general agreement on something?

CUT IT OUT WITH THE GILL SANS ALREADY.

Look, I like Gill Sans. I like it a lot. It’s a snazzy, readable, generally handsome font. But it’s the default in a bunch of Keynote themes, and it is supremely overused.

I’ll quit using it if you do. No, actually, I’ve quit using it already. (Hi, Optima Bold!) There’s a wild, wonderful world of fonts out there—let’s use some of them!

I met today with the systemwide committee that’s working out where the repository I run goes in the future. Les Carr was there. He was awesome, and so was the meeting.

This is not, you understand, something I usually say about meetings. Meetings are not awesome. Meetings are for the most part necessary banality. But this? For me (I will not speak for the other attendees), this was a frickin’ awesome meeting. My mind just exploded all over the landscape. It’s a wonder I could drive home at all.

I don’t feel comfortable yet talking about the substance of this awesome meeting. There’s a lot of work and politics yet before the substance of the awesomeness can become reality.

I can, however, comfortably mention that probably the most valuable member of an extraordinarily valuable committee is the committee skeptic, the one who isn’t sure why the committee included them in the first place, the one whose hand goes up first with a question, the one whose questions are always tough and always on-point.

This librarian’s value to the committee is inestimable, and I am hunting for ways I can make that more widely known. Skeptics are often reviled, $DEITY knows. Me, I consider them means for discovering my weak and blind spots before I go making a fool of myself. I love me a good skeptic, and it’s my good fortune that this committee has one of the best.

Watch this space late in the year. I think we might just surprise you.

The mandatory NIH public-access policy goes live today. The sky does not seem to be falling (I just checked), but you wouldn’t know that from some of the reactions I’ve heard. Since this week has been declared OA Week, I thought I’d kick it off by retailing some of the things I’ve heard that worry me, with all appropriate serial numbers filed off.

I haven’t heard any worry over the fate of publishers. If I were a toll-access publisher, I would be worried by this. As I’m not, I’m not.

Without undue tooting of my own horn, let me say that my concerns about recalcitrant publishers have proven to occupy a lot of faculty brainspace. I don’t live in the medical-research realm, so I don’t know how much of this worry is futile handwringing and how much identifies a genuine problem. I only know that deans are worried particularly about protecting their junior faculty, who already find publishing an uphill climb. The sooner we all address this, the easier we will all find the compliance process.

I have heard a lot of worry over the versioning problem, from faculty spanning quite a few disciplines (with the understanding that “NIH grantee” implies a fairly narrow range to begin with). “What happens when copyediting catches real errors, or changes the thrust of an argument?” runs the basic version of this question. “The version in PMC will simply be wrong.”

This is not a silly or uninformed objection. I used to work for a publishing-services bureau; I know full well what “final” peer-reviewed manuscripts look like before and after copyediting. Let me tell you, a good copyeditor is worth his or her weight in diamonds, and it warms my text-artisanly heart that faculty realize this as well. Final manuscripts can be disasters; research faculty can be terrible writers and terrible writing teachers.

I saw a suggestion that copyediting happen before the journal-submission process. I’m sorry, but no, that won’t work. Part of the copyediting process involves bashing the manuscript (citations especially) into journal style, which obviously can’t be done until the journal has been chosen. Another part is marking it for typesetting, which is intimately connected with each journal’s particular typesetting practices. You can’t just pick copyediting up and dump it in front of manuscript submission; you’d only add a step, slowing the whole publication process down and increasing its cost.

At present, the only workaround for this (as I understand matters) is working with a publisher cooperative enough to replace PMC’s manuscript version with the published version. These publishers exist, but they are not exactly numerous. For PR purposes if for no other reason (and “accuracy” is a plenty good enough reason all by itself), I think it would be wise for PMC to work out a way for PIs and other authors to fix errors in their manuscripts. I have heard the versioning problem called “a flaw in the policy” and “suicidal” by people in very high places.

Another difficulty has to do with the principal investigator’s responsibility under the policy, given that the PI is likely not an author (much less the first or corresponding author) on every single article coming from a given NIH grant. This is a tough one to resolve, given that the buck has to stop somewhere, but I would suggest at the least that first/corresponding authors as well as PIs be able to approve manuscripts and offer corrections.

Reading the NIH’s comment stream, I see that the too-much-work backlash has begun. In my cynical way, I tend to ignore this particular objection (trusting in Swan’s research on mandates to back me), but if we open-access advocates want to be smart about this, we will sort out how to help libraries offer third-party PMC submission services. (Disclaimer: MPOW does this. It was not my decision, though I support it wholeheartedly.) PMC could help us all by providing a deposit API (preferably based on SWORD) that those of us with institutional repositories could program against. Not only will that allow people like me to get in on the repositing action, it will help institutions monitor compliance and provide useful services (such as local PMCID/NIHMSID databases) to faculty. As mandates become more numerous, local services become even more important, as they allow faculty to become accustomed to one deposit interface, not a dozen. Please, PMC, set the example here!

Confusion about the policy is rampant, though MPOW is doing its level best to calm the waters. I do worry about institutions that are letting this slide—which is most of them! I suggest that the NIH target marketing efforts at libraries as well as researchers. MPOW and other institutions like it prove that we can help. The problem is that not all of us know we should. If the NIH isn’t working with SPARC to clue in the larger research-library community, it should be.

Happy Open Access Week!

The warm weekend we just had did for the ice on Monona Bay for good. This morning I was running a tad late, so I motored (figuratively) down to the foot of my street—and stopped dead, lateness forgotten, because there were half a dozen loons in a little group just off to my east, and two more cruising a bit further off.

I got such a charge from that that I got to work seven minutes early. (Well, yes, I did catch the lights, too.)

Happy spring, folks, from Loony Bay.

A lot of library-school students ask me wide-eyed how I learn what I know about computers and programming and miscellaneous stuff. When I tell them “Accidentally, sometimes because I had to, sometimes because I was just curious,” they look disappointed.

What? Do they think I can show them the Yellow Brick Road to library geekdom, like some kind of fat hippie Glinda? I can’t. There ain’t no such thing.

There are, however, six magic words. Be very careful with them; they are extraordinarily powerful.

You will be careful, right?

Okay, then. The six magic words are, “Hmmm. I wonder how that works?”

If you’re not sure how to get started with technology, use the six magic words on something you use, see used, or are interested in using. Blogs. Wikis. Databases. Regular expressions. OPACs. The Internet. A scanner. Your iPod. Whatever. “Hmmm. I wonder how that works.”

Magic. Seriously. Try it.

I was goaded into this. I swear it.

On, Addendum, on, Addendum,
Cut through that red tape!
Make that research free to all, boys,
OA sure is great! (U-rah-rah!)
On, Addendum, on, Addendum,
Fight for scholars’ fame!
Fight, campus, fight fight fight!
We’ll win this game!

Somebody want to do the second verse?

The ice, she is melting. This morning, raw and windy though it was, I saw the first skrat of spring sitting by a hole that probably had an ice-fisherman somewhere in its past.

This afternoon as I went on a small detour in order to vote in state and local elections (bye-bye Frankenveto, I hope), I stopped to watch a brown creeper sidling up a tree. Couldn’t go three steps without startling a robin.

Yes, okay, some of the big snowpiles still haven’t quite melted. It’s still spring.

In other news, since my JCDL preconference proposal got a big fat THANKS BUT NO THANKS stamped on it, I have a little more time to spare, and I’m going to spend some of it writing an article on authority control in institutional repositories for Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. Got to admit, I’m kinda jazzed about that. C&CQ is high-class stuff for this low-class repo-rat.

Plus, authority control isn’t nearly so vexed an issue as the stuff I’ve been writing about in Roach Motel. With any luck, this one won’t be like pulling teeth.

And I’m going to the summer data-curation institute being held by UIUC in June, which causes me to utter a hearty w00t!

So you’re a profession, or you want to be. How do you guard your borders?

One way, as a friend pointed out to me in IM, is to control something so dangerous or vital that government regulation comes into play. Doctors and lawyers have this one sewn up; malpractice in either can get you sued, and calling yourself an MD without the degree and the associated certification will get you thrown in jail. (Compare this to faking a Ph.D, which will get you roundly ridiculed, but won’t earn you hard time.) The higher end of finance is also regulated, for similar reasons. I can go around calling myself a financial planner all I want, but if I call myself a CPA, I’m in a world of hurt; them puppies is regulated. (For the record: I am not a CPA.)

Librarianship? Not so much with the regulated, and we wouldn’t like what happened if we were, as our profession’s ethics and praxis are often at cross-purposes with government. So forget about that.

Another way is gatekeeping the entry to the profession, by some combination of education and oathtaking. The clergy do this. We try to do it in librarianship; that’s what the MLS is for. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, the MLS isn’t the only way to find work in a library, even quite responsible and high-level work in a library—even running a library. So the MLS is made of fail, and it’s made of more fail every day, as the curriculum steadily focuses on work bits (such as basic reference) that have already been deprofessionalized, without adding bits that haven’t (such as digital data management).

Likewise, a curriculum so rigorous that only a few survive it would be an effective gatekeeper. In librarianship? When pigs fly.

My aforementioned friend also pointed out that one thing that happens to disciplines that face change is that they split, with the newbies forging a new path while the oldbies sit back and (often enough) moulder. Well, isn’t it interesting that we have L-schools and I-schools, and isn’t it interesting that the I-schools are generally tougher, and isn’t it interesting that I (sticking out like a sore thumb in this profession as I do) kinda wish I’d gone to one. I’ll be blunt: based on what I see going on, if the L-schools and the I-schools don’t reintegrate, only one will survive, and it won’t be the L-schools. What price ALA accreditation then?

Yet another way to guard the borders is by requiring continuing reaccreditation of professionals, such that nobody who isn’t serious about the profession is willing to put up with the hassle. Teaching and nursing do this. Tenured academic librarianship sort of does. The rest of librarianship? Nah. There’s a reason the MLS is called the union card. Once you have it, you’re in for good.

The flip side of accreditation and re-accreditation is the ability to kick somebody out for malfeasance or plain old idiocy. Lawyers can be disbarred; doctors and nurses and teachers can have their licenses yanked, or let them expire (since they’re time-limited if you don’t reaccredit yourself). We don’t do this in librarianship. Let me tell you, it is a problem. Some of our colleagues don’t do us even a tiny bit of good in the eyes of the world. We have cords and cords and cords of deadwood. We can’t do one damned thing about it.

So what’s guarding the borders of our profession? Not a whole lot, and that’s why these librarian/parapro discussions keep coming up like a bad burrito, and why we can expect them to continue doing so. If ALA wants to fix the problem, it can pick one or more of the above border-guarding tactics and get serious about it.

But that’ll be a cold day in hell. Remember, ALA doesn’t serve librarians. It exploits librarians for the sake of libraries.

There’s been a more-interesting-than-usual round of posts about librarianship as a profession, and how that works with the existence of paraprofessionals. See Rachel, Rachel again, and Meredith for background.

Me, I’ve got my Greg Downey glasses on again. You knew I would, right? So what is a profession from a labor perspective, anyway? I can tell you this much: the usual dictionary definition, involving specialized training, a professional association, and a code of ethics is the kind of thing a real labor theorist (which I’m not, of course) would laugh at and immediately start deconstructing.

The point of being a profession is monopoly labor protectionism, driving up the price of the Elect. End of story. All the training, all the oaths, all the conferences, all that other stuff amounts to pissing in a circle to mark territory, hoard resources (i.e. jobs and social status), and keep the unwashed out. Where an individual doing a particular kind of work can more or less swan about naming her own price, labor perceives no need for the trappings of a profession; this is why computer programmers don’t at this point have one. That day, however, may be coming, given that global wage arbitrage is hitting the US programming industry hard.

Some professions guard their borders better than others. The medical profession is damned good at it, and so is the legal profession, though both are finding themselves pressured these days. The free market, you see, does not like professions; they make the peons all uppity and stuff, getting in the way of capital flow from rich capitalist to other rich capitalist. The free market dismantles professions whenever it can find a way to do so, usually in the name of efficiency and cost-saving.

Academia as a profession is hurting bad, and is starting to realize it. They did it to themselves, of course, wildly overproducing Ph.Ds and turning over teaching (which is a much more visible part of the profession than research, despite the actual emphasis inside the academy) to brutalized adjunct labor. Remains to be seen whether they can recover.

Notice something about the preceding paragraphs? I didn’t say a thing about specialized skills, who’s got ’em and who ain’t. From a labor perspective, that doesn’t matter, it’s a big red herring. Can you guard your borders and command an over-market price? Congratulations. You’re a profession.

It’s possible to sport the trappings of a profession without quite being one. My favorite examples are financial planners and realtors. There are credentials; they’re thoroughly bogus. There are codes of ethics, often roundly ignored with perfect impunity. There are conferences. Boy, are there ever. What there isn’t is a successful effort to kick out the amateurs. I could call myself a financial planner tomorrow, and not a thing would happen to me. I could turn myself into a Realtor™ in a matter of weeks. If I did, though, the so-called “profession” would do nothing to protect the value of my labor. Heard of some Realtors™ going hungry now that the housing bubble is popping? Of course you have. Real estate salesmen haven’t protected the borders of their so-called “profession.” It therefore isn’t one.

So how does librarianship stack up? Well, that’s interesting. I’ve been sitting in on another Greg Downey course this semester, one on library history. If you go back to the mid-1800s when this “profession” jazz was just getting started, you find out that the “professionals” were a bunch of overeducated white boys who basically wanted some extra social status (so that they would compare favorably with their brothers in law, medicine, and the clergy) and an opportunity to get together and drink them some fine, fine martinis now and then. Think I’m making this up? Go find out for yourself what the first few proto-ALA meetings accomplished; you’re a librarian. Besides, it’s pretty funny stuff.

Notably, these overeducated white boys weren’t sitting at ref desks or writing up inventory lists (this being pre-card-catalog). Oh, no. That work was too menial for such as they. They were either running libraries (from back offices that had little or no contact with the librarygoing public) or writing treatises on how libraries ought to be run. Sometimes quite important treatises (hello, Mr. Cutter), but still. The boundaries of the “profession” were quite narrow, and they didn’t include most of the people doing work in libraries, especially if those people were women.

But they defended their value in the labor market, and they kept the pool of that labor suitably small, largely by denying women access to it. They were a profession, by gum, whatever else you say about ’em. (Me, I say that Dui was a loon. Crazy as a bedbug, that man.)

The Carnegie library movement shook up that nice monopoly. There weren’t enough overeducated white boys willing to move out to the sticks, is what it amounts to. All this female riffraff started encroaching. So running libraries couldn’t be the boundary of the profession any more. What became the new boundary? Library school.

Fast-forwarding to today… as a profession, librarianship is a muddled mess. The simple fact is that defining “librarian” as “MLS-holder” doesn’t stand up to five seconds’ scrutiny. One part of the problem resembles that caused by the Carnegie movement: there are libraries aplenty run by non-MLS-holders. Most of them are K-12 libraries; some are rural public libraries. Since we have heretofore been unwilling to define “library” as “space managed by an MLS-holding librarian,” that part of the barbed-wire fence around our profession has been trampled into the dirt. Good thing, bad thing, who knows? But it’s a fact, that’s all.

Another part of the problem resembles academia’s issues: we’re importing lower-priced labor to do some of what had been defined as our job. This is called “deprofessionalization.” Got a non-MLS ref-desk assistant or copy cataloguer? Yeah, then congratulations, you’ve eaten away some of the boundary around librarianship. In academic libraries, deprofessionalization takes on a slightly different form: the import of Ph.Ds sans MLS. From a good-of-libraries perspective, this makes perfect sense. From the perspective of librarianship-as-profession, it further erodes our boundaries and should be stopped. Make ’em get MLSes. It’s not like they’ll find it hard (and more on that in a bit).

Now consider why Gorman and Yee make such a big deal of MARC and AACR2 as “the core of the profession.” Secret knowledge is assuredly an effective way to guard a profession’s boundaries, and the more involuted the knowledge, the better. The problem with that tactic is that the knowledge has to remain in some way relevant and useful, and like it or not, the MARC/AACR2 empire is crumbling. Gorman and Yee can squall all they want; it won’t keep cataloguers professionals, because the value of their bizarrely byzantine descriptive practices is rapidly approaching zero. They’re defending the ramparts of a castle nobody wants.

Not that Gorman is wholly free of deprofessionalization’s taint, either. There’s his coauthor, that pesky Walt Crawford to consider. We ought to give him an honorary LIS doctorate in purest self-defense. I’m just sayin’.

Speaking of Walt, who’s a systems analyst by training and trade, a third aspect of the problem is the profession’s unwillingness to redraw its boundaries to include computers and the people who work with them. Why does this unwillingness exist? In a nutshell, because many current practitioners can’t do squat with computers and are scared of being pushed out of the profession should the computer folks take over.

I cannot begin to express how stupid, shortsighted, and counterproductive this is. Fall on your swords already, computer-phobics; it is absolutely necessary to do so if we are to preserve any kind of profession for the future. Mene mene tekel upharsin. We are Babylon, if we don’t expand our borders, Babylon divided between the non-MLS Medes and the programming Persians.

And then there’s library school. Oh, boy. Where to even begin? Well, first, it’s worth pointing out that LIS has serious trouble defining itself as a research specialization, and that tends to bleed over into library schools, notably in the substantial number of library-school faculty who have never set foot in a library except as patron. At UW’s SLIS, Greg Downey is half journalist, Kristin Eschenfelder got into LIS through a side door, their bioinformaticist is, well, a bioinformaticist—and I could go on, at some length.

Again, from a disciplinary-vigor standpoint, this isn’t all bad. Everybody knows I think Greg Downey is the bee’s knees. From a defining-the-profession (or -the-discipline) standpoint, it’s pernicious.

Second, library schools are just aware enough of the problem of libraries being run by non-librarians that they don’t actually dare set the intellectual bar (either of admission or of program content) very high. I knew some people in library school who were, I’m sorry, dumb as a box of rocks. They couldn’t have managed my other master’s program, any substantive master’s program, in a million years. They concentrated in a certain specialty which I won’t name (but we all know what it is, don’t we, librarians?). I don’t have an answer to this catch-22; either possibility hurts librarianship as a profession. If we kick the idiots out, we inevitably create even more libraries run by non-librarians. If we don’t, we’re stuck with our watered-down curriculum and box-of-rocks classmates.

Third, there’s the ALA, which is only making matters worse. Let’s review: library school now forms the boundary of the profession of librarianship—a porous and problematic boundary, to be sure, but a boundary nonetheless. It falls to the ALA’s accreditation process to defend that boundary, to make sure that the MLS bloody well means something.

It so happens that I have had a close-on view of a library-school reaccreditation process; I shall be intentionally vague about the where and when and how. I was, quite frankly, appalled. The accreditors were dumb as a box of rocks. They were stunningly rude, ill-behaved to the point of legally actionable harassment, toward a number of people at the library school (which, I may say, put a lot of effort into preparing for the reaccreditation process, and did its best to treat the accreditors like royalty). These accreditors spent incredible amounts of time and spilled ink on trivialities while ignoring quite substantive questions, in large part because they were incompetent to judge the substantive stuff. They made no attempt whatever to probe beyond surface appearances. The whole process was as transparent and auditable as a brick wall. I tell you what, if these slobs were medical-school examiners, we’d be in the middle of the next Black Plague.

You ALA members? Ask where your damn dues are going. Right now, they’re paying for these epic morons to continue devaluing your profession and its educational institutions. Never mind all the other ways ALA screws the profession over, as a profession.

So there we are. Are we, in fact, a profession? On balance, in academic libraries we are, in public libraries we mostly are, and in school libraries we’re not. But that could change and is changing. We may not have much time left to get our act together.

For myself, I’m not worried. I’m one of those folks who, based on developments in the research enterprise, is likely to be able to barter my labor individually for a decent price no matter what happens to librarianship as a profession. I’ll still call myself a librarian, no fear there. The question is whether people nod respectfully when I do—or laugh.

Edited to add: Walt corrects me on his training, and his sense of what he is and does. Mea culpa, Walt, and I apologize for the error.

“It’s too cold out to really be spring yet,” my husband just informed me mournfully.

Me, I’m not so sure. We saw moulting goldfinches at our feeder last weekend. There’s a flock of grackles in the neighborhood that makes disrespectful-teenager noises at me when I go to work in the morning. The cardinals are everywhere. There are veritable holes in the ice of Monona Bay. Yesterday walking home I took my gloves off because I didn’t need or want them.

Spring is slow, here. You take the signs you can get.

The Mouser-cat graduated from kittenhood this morning, polishing off the last kitten chow we’re going to buy her. From now on, she eats what the Goths do. She doesn’t appear to mind; I gave her a little of their food to eke out the last of the kitten chow, and she inhaled it.

There is still a lot of hissy-spitty in the house. It’s never quite clear who starts what, but it often ends in cats being unceremoniously ejected from the housemonkey bedroom at five in the morning.

Still, Mousers do have their uses, even for staid offended Goths. This morning, some hours after the cat-ejection, there was a set of unearthly piercing squeals outside the door. No one was being murdered; Mouser was just making known that her breakfast was an hour late and she would like it now, please.

Minus the please.