He brings up something that I’ve heard from other people as well: annoyance at my insistence on the phrase “repository-rat” to refer to librarians who manage institutional repositories. Some of that is me, and some of it is deliberate and calculated rhetorical strategy. It seems worth picking apart.

The “me” part, I confess, is of a piece with my steadfast refusal to take myself and what I do too seriously. Back in the day, I called myself a conversion peasant. Now I’m a repository-rat. I’m stubborn about this, and I don’t anticipate changing it… but I also recognize that it leaks into how I refer to other repository managers, as well as the specialty as a whole, and I see how that can feel like disdain.

It isn’t. It takes quite a bit of dedication to stick with IRs, and an impressive array of skills to manage one well. (I’m not saying I do, mind. Not for me to say. But I’m steeped in this field, I know whom I respect, and I know what they are capable of.) Moreover, these dedicated, skilled people have to persevere in the face of widespread ignorance, apathy, and even opprobrium directed at them, never mind lousy software and badly-stacked odds.

Which leads me to the rhetorical-strategy bit. I feel like a rat in the wainscoting, ignored and despised and isolated. Why shouldn’t I? Why should I be any prouder of what I do than my employer (which has partially defunded my service), my profession (which barely acknowledges I exist and makes no effort to support me), or the open-access movement (which openly insults me when it doesn’t ignore me)? Why should I pretend to support and respect I don’t actually have?

And why is it uniquely my responsibility to redress these issues? If the institution I work for, the profession I have joined, or the open-access movement I am part of would like me to stop referring to myself as a rodent, howsabout they toss me a bone so I can move up the animal taxonomy a bit?

Like the immortal archy, I see things from the under side. There’s use in that, I maintain, just as there’s use in colleagues such as Shane asserting themselves to raise the profile of our work and the esteem in which it is held. I’m on their side, I truly am—I just approach the work from a different angle.

insects are not always
going to be bullied
by humanity
some day they will revolt
i am already organizing
a revolutionary society to be
known as the worms turnverein

—Don Marquis

I am hard at work on a little movie for MPOW, to be shown at an arts-and-humanities symposium in (yikes yikes yikes!) two weeks (yikes!). This turns out to be surprisingly simple and even enjoyable, given Keynote, Garage Band, a video camera, a digital audio recorder, lots of neat pictures from MPOW’s collections, and a hell of a lot of time and elbow grease. I have yet to see whether Keynote’s QuickTime export works as advertised, but if it does, I will be a very happy camper.

Come to think of it… I should probably check that on Monday. You think?

And I can say in all honesty that at least one such thing wouldn’t have happened at all if I hadn’t possessed a quasi-professional public soapbox firewalled off from my job strictly enough that third parties can’t easily get me in trouble for it. Because, the third parties in question? Have a history of getting people they find bothersome in trouble at work. In my case, they’re coming to the table instead, presumably having evaluated the available opportunity to dunk me in the soup and decided it either wasn’t possible or wasn’t worth the effort.

(Not that I trust them further than I could conveniently throw them, mind you. I’m optimistic, not stupid. Due self-protection measures are being taken.)

Over the last couple years I’ve learned that I can do professional writing, though it takes a hell of a lot out of me and I don’t think I will ever find it easy. Speaking is worlds easier, and whole universes more fun. (Combine Walt Crawford, to whom good writing comes as naturally as breathing, and me and you’d have one frighteningly effective public-figure librarian.)

I’ve also learned, though, that much professional publishing is limited-impact, especially when the goal is to motivate action (as my implicit professional-writing goal usually is). The thing I wrote for Library Journal wasn’t wholly bad, but it sank like a stone, to judge by the lack of reaction. My essay for Information Tomorrow—I was satisfied with it. It was solid if uninspired writing (and “solid but uninspired” is about the best I can do, folks). And when I wrote it, it broke some ground. When it was finally published, though… not so much with the groundbreaking. Kind of unfair.

If I’d waited for Roach Motel to be formally published, I suspect the same thing would have happened. I am not the only person saying some of what’s in Roach Motel (though I do, perhaps over-enthusiastically, think some of its observations and analysis are original). If I’d waited, why would anyone bother to read me? Or believe that I’d come up with this stuff off my own bat rather than reading it elsewhere?

As it is—I’ve laid my claim, with Roach Motel and with the NISO/PALINET talk, and people are listening, and wheels are slowly starting to turn.

There’s a taxonomy in all this, somewhere. (I am such a flippin’ librarian sometimes.) The blog is for open dissent and matters that won’t wait for my agonizingly slow formal-composition process. Speaking is for education and out-on-a-limb assertions. Professional writing is for persuasion, and open access to professional writing is for establishing primacy and expanding reach.

Perhaps it’s a sign of a hopelessly contrary nature that I need that open-dissent safe-space. Can’t imagine doing without it. Moreover, I’m just contrary enough to think that the blog’s helped my chosen profession as much as or more than anything else I’ve written for it. I’m satisfied with that.

When Creative Commons gets CC0 in gear finally, I’ll pop a badge and a license up, something I decided against years ago because CC0 didn’t exist.

Until then, take my word for it. I won’t sue. Honest.

Here’s my new policy. I’m publishing any of those I get. Sans links. With names. Call it my little gesture toward turning over the rock and watching the little grubs squirm.

Hi,

We just posted an article “[article name deleted] “( [article URL deleted] ). I thought I’d bring it to your attention just in case you think your readers would find it interesting.

Either way, thanks for your time! Happy New Year!

Amy S Quinn

Email address was from GMail; headers gave no immediate reason to doubt that provenance.

Bite me, Ms. Quinn.

The biblioblogosphere is usually pretty good about reading and pondering Pew stuff, but apparently Pew isn’t satisfied by its penetration therein, because they’re courting bibliobloggers in email behind the scenes. A few of the bloggers who have commented on the report thus far have noted that they were approached; most that I’ve seen have not. That doesn’t mean that anybody’s hiding anything; we can’t know which of them responded to Pew’s email and which just read the report and spontaneously found it interesting enough to comment on.

The email I got was fairly classy, as these things go; definitely not the kind of idiot PR spam that gets my back up. It addressed me specifically. It indicated more or less how my name came up and why I was chosen. No quid pro quo, not even wink-wink-nudge-nudge style. No arrogance. Really nicely done.

And it still bugs the crap out of me. I’m sorry, it just does.

One of the nice things about using blogs as a professional filter is the confidence I had that I was following people’s genuine interests, influenced by no more than their own curiosity and intelligence and the environment they exist in and interact with. These weren’t, in a word, people who were being told what to think, much less paid to think it. They weren’t being filtered, in turn, by any particular establishment, no matter how well-meaning, much less a vendor or other organization with enough dogs in the hunt to create actual bias. That’s useful, that is.

And now I don’t know how far I can trust the filter any more, and that’s a loss to me.

A number of bibliobloggers I respect have written policies about reviews and whatnot. I’ve resisted that here, because hell, I’m just a one-horse blogger with an antique (in web terms) theme, too ornery to mess with and too inconsequential to court. Best I can tell, in fact, I’ve lost readership in the last year or so; it’s been kind of a weird year, personally and professionally, and I can well believe old CavLec hasn’t been up to scratch lately.

But in the interests of transparency, I may have to change my mind. Here’s the deal. I value my bloggy independence, as I have from the very beginnings of CavLec, and I’m ornery as a kicked mule. If you push me to read and talk about something you have a direct interest in, not because you think it’s useful to me, and not because you intend to put my input to some sort of practical use (as with, say, a standards draft), but because you want to create buzz? To hell with you. I won’t just not read or review it, I’ll be more than a little tempted to call you out in public, as I’ve just done with Pew. That goes double if you try to hide your interest from me (which Pew was smart enough not to do).

Don’t mess in my biblioblogosphere, hypesters. I resent it. And bibliobloggers: it will help me, for one, if you disclose this stuff. Nobody has to be as ornery as I am about it, but as a blog reader, I would like to be able to take these faux-grassroots stunts into account as I read.

Somebody needs to revise the Worldcat relevancy algorithm. STAT.

(And no, I didn’t intentionally go do a Worldcat ego search. I just needed some results so I could see how they’d designed their results and item-metadata pages, so I typed the first name that came to mind.)

I’ll be out of town Sunday through Tuesday at the NISO/PALINET thing. Slides are done, but I haven’t scripted them, so guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow? (That and next week’s class lecture.)

If that’s not enough, I’m up for fifteen minutes at a local teaching/learning tech thing on the 13th. I can cannibalize existing presentations to put that together, but I still have to do that (and we just won’t talk about the two hours I spent on a meeting yesterday over this, because I am rapidly forming a personal rule that anything on which I have to spend more meeting time than actual doing the thing time is not worthwhile).

And Roach Motel is due shortly, and while I think it’s quite done enough to give to an editor without cringing—I took a pass through and fixed a lot of structural problems that were causing unnecessary repetition, and have I mentioned that I’m really not a very fluid and polished writer?—I haven’t formatted it the way they want and I need to do that.

And I’m so overdue on a book review that let’s not even talk about how overdue I am on the book review. I’m taking the book with me to read on the plane.

And I’ve basically promised to make a stab at integrating some PREMIS into Manakin, because that is the officially-blessed way of solving my friendly file-format descriptions problem. Wish me luck with that.

If that’s not enough, toss in some fairly massive upheaval in both personal and professional lives, none of which I feel justified in blogging publicly. Suffice to say that while both situations are unsettled, both are improving and I am cautiously optimistic about both—but none of it does anything useful for my stress levels, right?

There may be blogging. There may not be blogging. I’m busy.

There is likely to be more Manakin blogging; the redesign proceedeth apace and I have some tidbits to share. I merely remark briefly that I do better relying on my own hacktastic CSS skills than using other people’s beautiful elegant solutions. I tried the Holy Grail. I spent days trying to get it to do what I needed, and that was just in Firefox—I looked at it for the first time in IE yesterday, and it was horrendously, unbelievably, irretrievably broken. I gave up shortly thereafter, and within 45 minutes had something that is working fine in Firefox, and probably won’t need more than a few box-model tweaks in IE.

In passing: I read this report (PDF) on the fate of social-science post-docs, and was struck by the sentence “Funders, policy makers, disciplinary associations, universities, and graduate faculty need to recognize that the PhD in the 21st century is preparation for employment.”

I… I… I got nothin’. I can’t think of a blessed thing to say to this. Except a loud and boisterous “BEWARE!” to anyone thinking of entrusting their lives to a doctorate in a social-science discipline. (Including LIS.)

I am the Annoyed Librarian. Come the heck on, people, didn’t you all suspect already? There ain’t nobody in this here biblioblogosphere more annoyed than I am.

Library school? All over it. The stupid job-shortage lies? Oh yeah. Technology uberhype? Annoys me past reason. Pointless ALA shenanigans? I’ve expended more verbiage on that than anybody, and I don’t even belong to ALA.

You knew. ’Fess up. You all knew all along (because hey, writing styles like mine aren’t a dime a dozen, you know?) and you’ve just been humoring me.

Jenica, Michelle, Rochelle, Laura, just give it up. Poseurs. You can’t out-annoyed me. I practically invented annoyance!

I may at some point come up with coherent commentary. I’m not counting on it, though. I’m still stuck at “Bwuh?”