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!

Michael W. Carroll’s whitepaper on the NIH policy is a useful document for all repository-rats, not just those who have NIH grantees to worry about. Lovely tidbits in there on various aspects of copyright vis-a-vis scholarly communication. Recommended.

DSpace finally, finally, finally has an up-to-date list of vendors. I can’t speak to how good any of them are (though I’d trust some of the named individuals implicitly based on what I’ve seen of them on the DSpace lists), but just having the list is a vast improvement over the previous situation. Good job, DSpace Foundation!

I’ve mentioned before the excellence of scholarly-publishing executive Mike Rossner, and he’s gone and done it again. Right or wrong, it takes a special sort of courage to break ranks and call out your own kind in an extremely fraught conflict. Rossner’s letter is useful as an anti-FUD device.

For those of us hoping for motion on an initiative similar to Harvard’s, this month’s SPARC Open Access Newsletter is a must-read. Amid the straightforward history and lucid analysis are tantalizing tidbits about how it was done. “Enlist Peter Suber” sounds like good strategy to this rat!

I will be going to this JA-SIG conference in April. (It looks as though I will be doing a Manakin tutorial, although things are not set in stone yet.) If you are too, I’m interested in sharing a room. The conference hotel rate looks startlingly reasonable.

If you’re going and you’re from Madison or coming through, I’d also love to discuss carpool arrangements. There’s bus service, but it’s at awkward hours.

Chances are I’m self-funding this thing (ran out my fiscal-year funding on ASIST), so I really appreciate chances to hold down costs.

The University of Southampton’s Les Carr has started a blog!

This is awesome. We so very desperately need more repository managers blogging. (No, I’m not the only one; I know at least two others besides Les, but their blogs aren’t heavy on IR-related content.)

I met Les at Open Repositories ’07, which is why I’m going to take a chance that he’ll be amused by this post’s title. News via Open Access News, as usual.

When everything about me is remarkably random, why just eight? Nevertheless.

1. Despite considerable unfondness for the Harry Potter books, I just agreed to play Hermione Granger in a (rather deconstructionist, or I wouldn’t have done it) HP RPG. I am still wondering whether to have my head examined.
2. I appear to have gone up a second dress size. This is annoying, because I don’t really want to go clothes-shopping. It was, however, probably inevitable.
3. I’m still waiting to hear about the potential paycheck-enhancing activity I applied for. Latest news is that I may hear sometime this week.
4. I am liking the CSA thing so far. Anything I don’t manage to use up generally makes good soup stock.
5. I’m in a bit of a book doldrums at the moment. Nothing seems interesting enough to yank me away from the laptop. The fantasy-authors research guide may be partly at fault here, in which case I’ll get over it.
6. I’m considering a Netflix or Greencine subscription; there isn’t a good video store in anything like walking distance from our apartment, and with the demise of University Square 4, it’s even hard to see movies on the big screen.
7. I don’t like mushrooms. I can tolerate most uses of portabellas if I have to, but those slimy button things? Ugh. And black olives are a bit strong for me, though I cook with olive oil regularly.
8. Aside from a year or so during which I cut my hair short, I haven’t really changed the ways I wear my hair since high school. Sometimes I wonder about this, but really? What I’ve got is cheap (because my husband can trim it), functional, and good enough—what’s the point of slathering lipstick on this particular pig?

You’re tagged if you wanna be. Ipsa dixi.

Went to Loreena McKennitt concert last night. Was fun! Also ate about a bucket’s worth of veggie sushi. (Wasabi Autumn rolls. GET THEM, for they are most excellent. With a side of the ever-reliable veggie tempura rolls. Thus ends the commercial, with apologies to Walt.)

Couple-three linkies, just to tide folks over until I have my brain back:

• The latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter. If you are an academic librarian and a CavLec reader and you do not take ten or fifteen minutes to read the opening article, which is a brilliant and quite hopeful look at the “State of OA”—well, bah, there’s nothing I can tell you, is there? Because you clearly haven’t been listening to a word I say. Seriously. Read it. It is that good.
• A by-the-numbers but still worthwhile article on women in techie librarianship. May I please say how amazingly grateful I am that the author, Eva Miller, didn’t do the usual thing that’s done with women-in-careers articles, namely, include all kinds of irrelevant family detail? That’s a cheap sexist trick, intended to provide wink-nudge reinforcement to the whole kirche-kuche-kinder thing, and it just gladdens my wizened little heart not to see it.
• A tart, cogent, and useful reminder that there’s no easy way out of privilege. I memoried that one, because I need to read that or something like it every so often.

Quoth the marvelous Karen Markey: “Giving users a Boolean-based system to search digitized texts is comparable to giving Captain Kirk a Mercury-era space capsule to travel the galaxy.”

Karen wins the Intarwebs. That is awesome.

It’s a great article, too, with which I am wholly in sympathy. Check it out. (Apropos of nothing, it seems as though nearly everybody writing intelligently about library catalogues is named Karen. I can think of four without even scratching my head. How did that happen? If the OPAC is the unit of suck, then perhaps the Karen is now the unit of sense?)

If you are a repository-rat, you are required to read Sale’s now-published explication of the Patchwork Mandate. Sensible stuff, although I would like to see it reformulated by someone who understands what power and influence librarians do and (more importantly) don’t have in the university setting.

The key question to my mind goes something like this: “Okay, I went to ten decision-makers. Three think it’s a good idea, but aren’t going to bet their relationship with their department’s faculty on it. Five are wantonly clueless and don’t want to avail themselves of a clue-by-four. One is actively hostile to open access. One is on the point of retirement and doesn’t care as long as she doesn’t have to actually do anything. What do I do now?”

Add to this that influence hierarchies in academia are weird, as weird as—well, as they are everywhere else. It’s not clear at all to me that going to department brass is the automatic right move; for one thing, department brass rotates frequently and may have only a tangential relationship to actual departmental power. Sale’s good about identifying some other possibilities (such as high-output faculty), but it’s not as simple as that, either (what if high-output faculty are actively resented in their department for the height of their output?). And how much influence, leaving aside actual reporting hierarchies, do faculty in a single department or a single institution really have on each other, anyway? Isn’t the discipline a greater one?

But that leads us to intransigent disciplinary leaders, and… sigh. It’s never quite as easy as it looks. That said, I hooked a department chair myself last week, and I’ve every intention of putting the ol’ patchwork-mandate screws on.

I don’t get sick. Go figure. I’m fat and out of shape and everything the health thugs love to hate, but I don’t get sick. David has gone through two nasty colds in the last month, but me? Not so much as a sniffle.

I get occasional headaches, and now and then a case of the one-day blahs. That’s really about it.

A good friend of mine was just diagnosed with uterine cancer. It’s bitterly unfair. She is a generous and loving person with a husband and child who depend on her, and a wide circle of friends who love and value her for her unselfish benevolence. She takes good care of herself, always has.

This is not supposed to happen to women like her. It’s supposed to be women like me. Damn, if I could take it from her, I would. But here I sit, disgustingly healthy save for a still-healing knee, and there’s nothing I can do.

If that weren’t enough to reinforce a sense of helplessness before the world’s ugly caprices, a number of my coworkers were immediately present today when this happened. I was due to meet with a couple of them a bit later on in the afternoon; I was quite prepared to postpone, but they overcame shock and dropped by anyway.

I stuck to my knitting. What else could I do? Asking for details is ghoulish, and I didn’t want details anyway. They were outwardly completely collected (which is a feat I’m not sure I could emulate); asking after their mental state might only have brought back what they were trying to get away from. So I stuck to my knitting. I hope it helped.

The proper response to all this is supposed to be gratitude. There but for the grace. Count blessings. Well, I’m not grateful, damn it. I’m upset, because I don’t like these things happening around me, and I’m scared, because how long can my lucky streak last, and what horror is going to break it?

I read anything and everything I could get my grubby little paws on when I was a kid. I’m sure this surprises no one. Some things I couldn’t get through (and still can’t); I made a valiant try at James Fenimore Cooper because my grandfather recommended him, but yuck.

Lattimore’s translation of the Odyssey, though? I think I was all of eight. I found my mother’s high-school copy in the basement, recognized the name (because I read Bulfinch and Hamilton at seven thanks to a gifted elementary-school teacher), and just dove in. I remember giggling when Odysseus pitched up buck-nekkid in front of Princess Nausicaa, and being as sanguinary as youngsters generally are, I loved when the first arrogant suitor got it in the neck from the master’s immense bow. (Thought Telemakhos was a royal bore, but hey, I was eight.)

I read not a few of the standard children’s offerings. The Little House books. Some of the Grosset and Dunlap career series—Cherry Ames and Vicki Barr and that lot. Anne of Green Gables, for whom I still have a fondness. Tolkien and Lewis, of course, and Lloyd Alexander, and when I got into my teens I’m afraid I was rather indiscriminate about fantasy, though I never sank so low as to much enjoy Terry Brooks or RA Salvatore or all the other Tolkien-poseurs. (Did read Brooks. Did read Weis and Hickman at summer camp. Never read Salvatore.)

But my hands-down all-time favorite children’s book, the one I still pick up and read with pleasure, the one I took the trouble to have autographed by its author because I love it so much, is The Phantom Tollbooth.

For unstinting verbal ingenuity, for its morose but indefatigable protagonist, for sharp satire hidden in gentle allegory, for excellently rhythmic dialogue, for fall-down-funny moments, for love of beauty in all its forms, for the promise that mistakes and faults can be redeemed and transcended—for all these things I love that book.

If by some freak of chance you haven’t read it, do so. I promise you won’t regret it, no matter how old (or, for that matter, young) you are.

No, I am not safe. No, I am not even safer.

No, nobody should be able to disappear people.

No, torture is not acceptable. No, it is not civilized. No, completely aside from being flagrantly and beyond any conceivable justification wrong, it is not even useful.

No, I don’t recognize the country I was born in. No, I’m not entirely sure what happened. No, I don’t understand how a nation that had genuine claims to pride and freedom has become craven, cruel, and mercenary.

No, I don’t believe that I am exempt from being disappeared or tortured, now that the wall between government and unbridled barbarism has been breached. No, I don’t believe I will be the first to go—but that only frightens me more, thinking about those I know who are liable to vanish into the abyss before I do, thinking about those I don’t know who have already vanished.

No, I do not believe I can restore this country’s commitment to decency. No, that doesn’t exempt me from trying. No, of course a blog post isn’t enough.

No. Just no.