Caveat Lector

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?

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.

I want to be a lot of people when I grow up. Allen Renear. Norm Walsh. Bess Sadler. No fear of that happening, for the simple reason that I will never grow up. But the latest person I want to be when I grow up is Peter Suber, and this video and its accompanying slideshow (Peter, is that Creative Commonsed? There’s no indication in the file) are why.

As the post title says: watch and learn.

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!

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 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.

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 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?