Caveat Lector

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!

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.

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.

Things that deserve to be linked, but that I haven’t got time to comment extensively on:

• The University of California’s suggested faculty response to the scholarly communications crisis. I cannot begin to express how much I love this. Marvelous, wonderful, and I wish I could stand to live in California, because let me tell you that’s where the action is. If I have time I’ll blog and comment on some choice quotes.
• There’s no housing bubble in the DC area. Yeah. Right. (I am so very continuing to rent.)
• The CURES Act. It is a good thing. Write your congresscritter.
• Dan Chudnov on barriers in libraries. The money quote: “If anything, we might guess from the fall of the wall in Germany that barriers will fall… The choice we librarians need to make about the fall of our own barriers — and, I’ll predict, 2006 is the year to make our choice — is whether we wield the hammers ourselves, or whether we read about it online.” Hell. Yes. And I have some thoughts on this in a DSpace context, which I’ll have to keep saving up for later.
• Hold on to your hat… somebody’s gettin’ eaten alive for even thinking of running a repository on Windows. (I happen to agree that this is an inane idea, but I kept my hands off the keyboard because I didn’t care to be quite this, er, emphatic.)
• Locals: c’mon to the Fairfax Choral Society auction. A couple copies of David’s book are on the auction-block.

The Center for History and New Media at Mason is a group of smart, energetic humanities-computing professionals with an excellent track record, big ideas and bigger plans. Among those plans is Firefox Scholar, which I’m happily watching develop.

I encourage all my techie-librarian readers to subscribe to Dan Cohen’s new weblog. Dan is CHNM’s Director of Research Projects, and CHNM’s research projects have a lot in common with what digital librarians are considering and doing.

(Bias note: Everybody knows I work at Mason, right? And I’m hoping that CHNM will pass one or two of their earlier projects to me for archival. That said, I think CHNM is tremendously cool, and will still think so even if I don’t get my hands on their bytes.)

Too good not to note:

• Ross Singer YAWPs about how it’s time to quit indulging ILS vendors. Thank you for rocking, sir. Yes.
• If I had but money enough, and time… I would so be here. Maybe in 2007. Heck, they oughta have a gal or two, just to, you know, integrate the place.
• I didn’t know you could do that with a shell script. Cool. Because working with launchd.plist is frustrating.

And I am pointedly not linking to the latest mauvais mot from ALA’s current president, because I’ve quite given up on thinking that anything short of a full book-cart to the head will make an impression on that man.

Don’t listen to me; I talk the talk, but I’m not a real usability expert.

These guys got a real usability expert to go over their library interfaces, OPAC included. What they found out is fascinating, and I want to see the results when they’re done.

One thing I especially liked was the expert’s obvious imperative to reduce the clicky-clicky. IRs in general and DSpace in particular is really horrible about the clicky-clicky; it’s impossible to find anything in fewer than four or five clicks, even—especially!—if you know it’s there. Coming in from an external search interface is even worse, because you get presented the same set of metadata twice, once from the search aggregator and once from the repository.

Clue: Patrons don’t want the metadata. They want the item. Get them to the item as quickly as may be.

Now, there are implementation issues here that I won’t go into… but suffice it to say the problem can to some extent be ameliorated, and if I end up running a DSpace install, I’m certainly going to try.

Well, well, look who’s joined the Blog People.

I’m tempted to thank Michael Gorman now; he’s given us a good one.

And less than a day after I opine stupidly about GIS making bibliographic map access better, there’s this.

Yeah. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.