Caveat Lector

The prophet Jeremiah was an interesting fellow. Bit of a Cassandra; he told inconvenient truths that no one cared to heed, doubtless in part because he was such a gloomy-gus. (Lord Dunsany in the Pegana cycle points out that the divine hardly ever hands down happy prophecies, so if prophets want to be anything other than gloomy-guses, they have to lie their prophetic arses off.) You have to admit, the poor guy did his best. Flashy presentations, props, the whole bit. Put up with all kinds of abuse, too, and kept right on telling truths, even when he bitterly resented the awkward positions truth kept dumping him into.

He is, of course, the source of the word “jeremiad,” which word Alma Swan used in a lovely interview by Richard Poynder (do click at the bottom of the post to read the whole thing, even if it is a PDF!) to characterize my on- and off-blog writings about the state of institutional repositories in the United States. My computer’s onboard dictionary offers “a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes” by way of definition, although my internal mental lexicon (somewhat uneasily) suggests a definition closer to “philippic.”

Okay. I’ll cop to that one, either way, and I’ll also admit to considerable fellow-feeling for poor old Jeremiah. I am also not-so-faintly amused because I’ve kept a good many serious woes off the blog. Had to. So it goes. (Even the Roach Motel preprint is very slightly bowdlerized. When I get the edits for it, I’ll make the final decision about whether to go with the full or the expurgated version.)

The truth is, I don’t like the frame of mind I’m in with respect to my work. I am fully aware of the degree to which I frighten, disturb, frustrate, annoy, and anger other people in my field. None of that is my aim. I express myself in the way that I do partly because the growing sense of helplessness I live with has built up a good solid head of steam fueling my personal frustration levels—I would like to contribute more than I feel I do or can given my present circumstances!—and partly because I am not in a position of power or influence, and I therefore have to yell myself hoarse just to be heard. (It doesn’t help that institutional repositories are a bit of a void; we don’t have one big soapbox, but fifty small ones. Most of the time I don’t know whether I’ve been heard. It’s entirely possible I’ve been yelling louder than I need to.)

I get the distinct sense sometimes that people wonder how on earth I get away with what I say. Allen Renear greeted me at ASIST with “Hi, Dorothea. Still causing trouble, are you?” Er, yes. Often. Intentionally or not, I live my life in the tradition of Shakespearian and Calderonian wise fools, who shout what no one else will whisper into the ears of kings too mad or self-obsessed to listen. I’ve stepped a bit outside the proper fool’s boundaries lately by becoming angry and lashing out, I admit; but that’s the frustration talking. When I’m in a better frame of mind, I remember the gentle, clear-sighted, humorous detachment that is the fool’s gift.

Another thing about the wise fool: he’s usually dead by the end of the play. Lear’s fool. Clarín in La vida es sueño. Old Jeremiah has good literary company in his dangerous profession.

Sorry, tangent. I get away with saying what I say the way I say it for a few reasons. One is that honesty redeems a good deal of my bad behavior. (I’m fairly sure I’m not the only open-access public figure for whom this is true; if you’re in this field, you know who I’m thinking about and I needn’t name names.) People recognize that I believe what I’m saying, and now and then they even appreciate that I don’t obfuscate. Another is that for the most part (and with one or two notable exceptions, such as the AAP), I don’t personalize conflict. However hacked off I may be, I’m not hacked off at you, I’m hacked off at abstract inefficiency or general blindness or dysfunctional systems. A third is that I don’t usually open my mouth, especially in a philippic, before I’ve chewed the matter over in my head. Like it or not, I generally make sense, manage to articulate observations and the patterns I can derive from them cogently. Even the people who dislike the way I say things have trouble dismissing what I actually say.

I have a particular strength in the area of systems analysis relating to data flow. (Not “information” flow, much less “knowledge management.” Data flow.) I have no earthly idea why I’m good at this; I was never trained for it and don’t analyze at all systematically. But I’m good. Workflows, interaction design, data design—given enough reliable input (and I’m inexhaustibly curious about people’s one-on-one interactions with data), I see where data go and what people do with them, and I see where systems fail. Just about everything important I’ve ever written or spoken about ebooks or design or scholarly communication or institutional repositories comes out of this weird gut intuition I’ve got about the inner workings of data flows. I can’t explain it; I’ve just gotten enough feedback on its insights over the years that I trust it. If I were religiously inclined, which I’m not, I might even draw a parallel with prophecy.

More to the point, other people trust what comes out of my data-flow intuition-space. I can’t explain that one, either, but it’s true. When I write or speak something I’ve intuited, people believe. Way back in the day, the very first talk I ever had any success with, the one I gave for Microsoft Research—it was crude and unpolished, but it came out of that intuition-place, and by gosh they took it seriously. My London talk came from there. So did much of Roach Motel. So does my unvarnished frustration with DSpace—I see all these wonderful data flows that I can’t get into because DSpace is in the way! Also, of course, the interaction among DSpace, admins, developers, repository-rats—I see destructive patterns, they annoy me, then I annoy everybody else by pointing them out. So it goes. Intuition, or prophecy if you will, isn’t always—or indeed ever—comfortable.

So, yes, jeremiads. We’re at a weird place in the United States (and Alma Swan was kind enough to agree with me that the US is lagging Europe and Australia badly) with regard to the constellation of problems around several sorts of digital data created by the research enterprise. Academic libraries have been pushed as far as admitting that collecting and caring for these data might be a good idea, although there are pockets of vigorous resistance even to that mild suggestion. These same libraries are not, not at all, convinced that they have an active role in the process of data collection, much less data creation. What’s the difference? It’s the difference between opening an institutional repository and filling one, between throwing up an Open Journal Systems installation and being an actual press.

Meanwhile, research enterprises in the States are creating their own data systems (and by “system,” let me be clear, I mean humans as well as technology), mostly ad hoc. Some of them are very effective, to be trusted without an instant’s hesitation. Most are not; some oughtn’t be trusted to live out the week. At MPOW, I see examples of all of these. I also extrapolate that an immense amount of redundant effort is going into parallel development of solutions to common problems, which offends my efficiency-loving sensibilities—and not just mine; I adduce the NSF DataNet grant effort and some noises I hear coming out of the NIH about no longer grant-funding itty-bitty data-centers as evidence.

My chief concern, which is partly personal and partly much broader, is that by the time libraries decide that solving this problem—solving it actively, with money and staff as well as lip service—is within their mandate, it will be too late and we’ll have been shut out of the solution. What I have to lose if that happens is obvious. What the problem-space has to lose, well… I wish it were more obvious than it seems to be. To me it’s obvious, but I’m just pining after work I’d like to do, so why heed me?

An alternate way things might well play out is that by the time the research community decides it needs librarians, both libraries and librarians will have disclaimed the problem, disgusted by (among other things) the painful institutional-repository experience, and frightened by the vastness of the problem’s scope. That would be a shame… but I see it happening already.

The reason I’m up in arms is that my gut tells me we’re at the crucial crossroad, where everyone decides who has which piece of this pie. Infrastructure, finance, and staffing decisions made now will reverberate for decades. I’m not sanguine that the decisions being made will be the right ones, and if walking around with a wooden yoke on my shoulders would draw the right attention to the problem, I would do that. I can in fact be patient, very patient. I put myself through library school doing data entry! But my gut is screaming at me that there is no time to waste if matters are to work out well, and I believe my gut.

Jeremiah learned that one of the curses of prophecy is foreseeing one’s own failures. I’ve been right beside him on that one for much of the last year, and it’s a deeply unpleasant place to be (for no fault of Jeremiah’s).

That said… and to end this on a hopeful note… I think Roach Motel is accomplishing what I wanted it to, and that gives me real hope. I know it’s being read; not only is it already the second most popular download from the repository I run, I am already seeing things like Alma Swan’s interview, hearing from people who have read it—and some of them are people in positions of power and influence. What’s more, it’s making them think, and one or two are even acting on it. Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine—Simeon, not Jeremiah.

Finally, a small correction (Poynder’s error, not Swan’s): I am no longer at George Mason University. The most excellent Shane Beers is doing the honors there. I work for the University of Wisconsin.

I’m all done with teaching except for final-project grading and final-grade calculation, so it’s as good a time as any to post a post-mortem in case I do this again (and I’ve already been asked if I’d be willing). I’ve been leery of posting much about teaching, because several of my soon-to-be-former-students do read the blog, but hell… if Michael Stephens does it, can it be that bad?

I liked teaching back in the day, even in the Department from Hell. I still like teaching. My hammy nature comes out to play, as does the highly opinionated part of me that holds Strong Views on what folks ought to know about and be prepared for. I walked home from classes feeling good, and that was a sustaining influence given the up-and-downness evident in my day job lately.

(Still hate grading, but no jam comes sans pill.)

In general, I think my syllabus covered useful stuff. Next time, though, I want to do some hands-on work, and I’m already looking for notions (Andrea Mercado’s kioskification of Firefox looks like a good one!). I can teach a basic SQL query from scratch in an hour or two. I should. Ditto regular expressions and the basics of HTML and CSS. It’s all about expanding one’s daily technology toolkit.

Of the three major assignments, two were solid hits and the third… needs work. The job talk and the position-description assignment went over really well (how often do students thank you for assigning them work? well, mine thanked me!) and I was chuffed at how useful the job talks actually were, for the rest of the class and even for me. The third I may separate out into two or three smaller assignments—it really isn’t safe to assign big, relatively unstructured projects, because students get more stressed than they should. It’s a shame, because big and unstructured projects are what the real world is all about, but there seems to be a limit to how far a class can go in acting like the real world.

So I think “write an implementation plan or project documentation” and “install, theme, and mod a new server-based technology” can and should be done separately from each other, likely as the dreaded group projects. Live and learn.

Our local course management system sucks rocks and I refuse to use it ever again for anything. Next time I’m putting in a Drupal install, and we’ll interact online that way. The blogs worked reasonably well, but they’d be better in a Drupal install (like Five Weeks’s) because of increased opportunity for interaction among students.

Using del.icio.us as a tickler file for current events was a winner. For one thing, it helped me tie what I was teaching to the real world. For another, it modeled the professional behavior of keeping one’s ears perked for relevant news. For a third—hey, readings for next time! (Though I’m happy with the readings I found for this semester, and will reuse a lot of them.) Drupal’s RSS module should let me put a few good blogs and technology-news sources (Ars Technica for the win!) within student reach.

I’m scheduling quizzes next time, instead of doing them ad-hoc. Should be a stress reducer for everyone, me not least—several weeks I ought to have written up a quiz, but life just kept on intervening in that annoying way it has. No major exams, though; in a class like mine that’s just goofy.

I can’t say enough about how great the students were. They took a chance on a brand-new class from a brand-new instructor. They put up with my genial weirdness (did I mention the day I played two Monty Python clips in class?) and my insane outside schedule. They let me know how I could make the class better instead of grumbling out of earshot. They expressed gratitude early and often, and sometimes in embarrassingly fulsome terms. They took chances with their final projects, several of them, trusting me enough not to let fear of a poor grade hold them back.

I will be proud to have them as colleagues, and the library world will benefit from their presence in it.

Boss, killing a rat is no problem. Stuff it into a sack. Beat the sack with an ax. Then shoot it. Then drown it. Burn the sack with the dead rat in it.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

That’s a pretty good description of what this repository-rat’s last week was like, from an extremely personally-expensive strategic error on my part (no, no further details, sorry), to getting my butt kicked by Manakin, to my (brand-new, purchased with personal funds) color printer dying (which led directly to the aforementioned expensive strategic error), to various blog-related kerfuffles, to an extraordinarily pointless and time-costly expedition to plug the repository to entirely the wrong audience, to complications in a project that should have been out of my life for good six months ago but somehow manages to have more lives than a rat and a cat put together, to a hurricane of bureaucratic tsuris surrounding what I do and what I’d like to do, to yet another in the long string of accusations from various parts of constituting Part Of The Problem, to spending much too much time getting video ripped and conference posters printed, and…

And then I heard that Roy Rosenzweig had died. My first thought, which does me absolutely no credit whatever but illuminates my frame of mind, was “Bloody hell. Why am I doing this, again? Apathy or mindless happytalk or hypocritical lip-service everywhere there isn’t outright hostility, and here we’ve lost one of the good ones. We can’t afford that, damn it.”

I didn’t know Roy well. I’d met him a couple of times. Some people immediately impinge on the consciousness as too damn smart and capable to quite be real. He was assuredly one of those. I did what I do with people like that: stay out of their way while they do their thing, watching with awe. I’d heard from the Mason grapevine that he was ill; all the more reason not to play the Porlockian.

One reason academic fiefdoms are dangerous is that they tend to coalesce around their founders, withering or stagnating once the founders’ fire is gone. I’m not worried about the Center for History and New Media, though, because the other thing I noticed about Roy was his talent for attracting… well, talent. It’s still there, and my guess is it’ll stay there.

That’s today’s thought, though. At the time, finding out about Roy’s death was just the ugly capstone to my monster brutalist edifice of a week. Honestly, I spent most of the weekend sulking. (And not doing my grading, which I still have a lot of to do.)

Today I came in, put on Fairfax Choral’s performance of the Duruflé Requiem for Roy, wrote off a lot of sunk costs (both time and money), dealt with equipment problems, dumped a bunch of stuff off my desktop and to-do list that didn’t need to be there, starred the email in which the sysadmin hauled me out of my Manakin morass, sneered at NeoOffice when it lost all the non-heading text out of Roach Motel (seriously, NeoOffice, wtf?), promptly rescued the article with Apple Pages, and still made it to the morning staff meeting on time.

Because you can’t kill a rat. Try.

I turned down a possible panel invite to a conference I really want to go to, because of short notice and my current unbelievable busyness. So it goes.

I know how to use iMovie to get video off a miniDV tape now. The learning process involved an entire wasted hour, as I didn’t know the signs that iMovie was actually picking up data, so didn’t realize that they were absent. Irony in action, yes? So it goes.

I’ve got another talk invitation in the batting cage. I’m guessing I won’t land it, because they’ll want happytalk and I was bluntly honest with them about not having any to offer. That’s okay, though; they’ll find somebody to give the troops a pep talk, the troops will go home happy, the conference will achieve its stated aims, I get out of having to cope with air travel, everybody’s cool. So it goes.

On the rare occasions I start something in the blogosphere, the ensuing discussion is invariably better than my original post. (The power of many in action.) So it’s been with “training-wheels culture.” I particularly recommend Laura B. Cohen’s careful unpicking of the matter. I could, if I chose, try to point out where both my statements and my record (which I think speaks pretty powerfully about my commitment to helping librarians with technology) have been distorted past reason… but you know what? Not worth the added stress. People are thinking seriously about an issue I raised. That’s good, even when I get savaged in the process, and my whinging about ill-treatment will only distract from the serious thinking and the problem-solving anyway. So it goes.

I’m still way too busy, very stressed, and not good company. Will try to keep that off the ether. So it goes.

Both of the immediate supervisors I’ve had in libraries know about my blog. Neither of them has ever made the slightest move to call official work attention to it, and neither have I. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m gun-shy about this; if you check the early days of CavLec, it isn’t hard to find out why. I don’t generally recommend that everyone follow my example, but in this case, I do think everyone ought to at least think about it.

Sure, it’s possible to write a blog of sufficient quality to merit inclusion on a tenure report or annual evaluation. Especially in libraryland, though, that means putting a hefty muzzle on things. Don’t you dare write anything personal that someone else might get angry or squicked at. Don’t go too far outside the norm (and lest we forget, the blog-norm is gendered, racially weighted, heteronormative, ableist, fat-hating, class-bound, and a few other ugly things picked up from the society it derives from). And don’t have opinions on matters libraryish that differ too much from your boss’s. Asking for trouble, that.

And when you get in trouble, no one will defend you. You shoulda known better, mate. It’s the Internet, after all. Everybody knows that bosses are control freaks who’ll lower the boom at the first sign of trouble.

Go there if you want to. I sure wouldn’t.

But just to look at the other side of the glass for a moment, imagine you’re a library manager and you find out one of your reports does this really killer blog. Shouldn’t you bring it under the library fold? Good publicity, 2.0ishness, and all that?

No. No, you really shouldn’t. No matter how professional that blog is, it is a function of the librarian and not the library. (After all, you don’t get to keep the blog should your report leave your library, do you?) Treat it as you would any other publication by one of your reports. Reading it is totally kosher. Talking to your report about it at the water cooler is fine. If you regularly make note of your librarians’ professional activities, it’s probably all right to point out one or two posts that got quoted a lot in a meeting or a librarian-activity report (but I’d ask first, honestly I would). It’s fine to ask that person to talk about blogging tools, or to work on a duly-constituted library blog.

But your report’s blog is not your library’s blog. That simple. Makes life easier for your report, and gives you deniability in case your report pulls something stupid.

And for heaven’s sake use judgment. (I know, I know, asking a lot here.) A pseudonymous LiveJournal intentionally left uncrawled by searchbots isn’t the same as a wholly-owned domain running WordPress with a swanky template. If it looks personal, it probably is. Treat it as such.

Really, all this ought to be common sense, but I ran into a friend’s situation yesterday where it wasn’t, so I decided to spell it out. Without, thankfully, spelling it out in lolcat.

Some days I wonder why in hell I do what I do. Such days usually feature supercilious faculty, dubious librarians, or (worst of all) both at once. These days, when I have one of those days, I walk back to my office grumbling and hammer away at another para or two of the Roach Motel article.

(Said article currently consists of four single-spaced pages of notes and half- to fully-composed paragraphs. Oh, and a lengthening del.icio.us tagset.)

Then there are days like today, when I meet a librarian who immediately has half a dozen ideas for materials I ought to capture, volunteers (VOL. UN. TEERS.) to create a listing of faculty in her discipline who already have preprints on their websites, and suggests marketing materials she would find useful.

I must say, I’m much happier working on marketing materials that have actual use in their future than I am writing a critical re-evaluation of the institutional repository.

So I promised colleagues a while back that I’d do up some marketing materials for the repository. And there’s nothing like a nice flyer, right?

I have no budget. Repository-rats never do. Hey, we work on open access, what do we need money for? So I can’t do spiffy four-color stuff; I run on a strictly grayscale basis. I mention this not to whinge, but to point out that it’s a pretty serious design constraint in a full-color world.

I also don’t have Photoshop (see above about “no budget”), so I’m working with the GIMP.

The story I wanted to tell in this particular flyer is “Librarians have always cared for your books and your journals… now we take care of your digital works too!” (I dearly hope that’s both/and enough to be inoffensive. I’m never sure about these things.)

So I got the bottom half done fairly quickly. Screenshot, list of Things To Put In The IR with nice arrows pointing to the screenshot. (The GIMP doesn’t do auto-shapes such as arrows. Google kindly informed me that the way to do arrows is to use a wingdings font at a suitably-enlarged size. Worked a treat.) Logo, URL, and contact info at the bottom. No sweat. (Well, some sweat, because ever so not graphic designer. But it wasn’t bad.)

And then there was the top half…

My first thought was a photomontage of books and libraries and stuff. I zipped over to Flickr, searched materials marked with the Creative Commons Attribution license on the tags “books” and “library” and whomped one together with the results. It looked stupid and square and amateurish. I got rid of it, though I kept its individual components.

Going back to my search turned up these awesome old-book cutouts. I snagged one and got to work.

My first thought was to outline the book, cut the outline away from its background, and use the background as a border for photos. The way to do this is not by tracing with the mouse; I figured that one out in two seconds flat. Google to the rescue again—the way to do it is to blow up the picture a bit and use the Bezier path tool. This lets you select points all around the outline of your thing, turn that outline into a selection, and clear everything inside it. Once I grokked the concept, I had my outline pretty quickly.

So I slapped the outline back on the flyer and popped a few photos in behind it. And I printed it out. And it didn’t look too bad… people know what an open book looks like in outline, don’t they?… it’ll work, kinda… okay, okay, it looked like a squashed butterfly with ragged wings. No good. Try again, genius.

My next idea was to outline the top pages and the edges of a couple pages underneath—again, the Bezier tool lets you do this—and layer photos as though it were a book of photos. After a while, it became clear this wasn’t going to turn out well, so I abandoned it.

And then, finally, I did the right thing. Outline the open pages, recto and verso, clear the interior of the outline, pop the photos underneath, and leave the rest of the book image alone. This? Looked awesome after a bit of photo tweakage. Even in grayscale it looks good.

I had my husband critique it, and I’m going to fix a couple of layout and font issues tomorrow. But in the main, I am well content.

A graphic designer would have figured this out in much less time than I took. But I added a few tools to my amateur’s arsenal, so I consider it time reasonably well spent.

(with apologies to I.B. Singer)

So the biblioblogosphere’s gotten out its monocles (sans ponies, alas) and its ascots and is responding with all seriousness and decorum to M-ch–l G-rm-n’s latest sallies on Brittanica. Ahem. If you care to learn more, a Technorati search will provide most necessary reading.

Me? I’m still stuck on the funny. C’mon, people, this is comedy platinum here! Laugh! I think I’ve still got one or two “One of the Blog People” buttons left. Who’s with me on a mass snailmail of same to Mr. Now One Of Us?

It does appear that G-rm-n was his usual insultingly privileged self. He’s pulled overt privilege trips before, and damn it, I am past annoyed and getting downright angry that my tribe is not calling him on them louder and more often. My personal thanks to those who have. Mr. G-rm-n can have my “alternative medicine” Armaid when he pries it out of my working-very-well-thank-you hands, the same hands that standard Western medical practice ignored for years and even damaged further.

For the most part, though, I’m kicking back and letting myself enjoy the joke. Much more fun than getting offended yet again at G-rm-n’s unshakable beliefs and offputting personal style. (I say “personal” rather than “writing,” incidentally, because I have met him, and he went out of his way to put me down. I’m not sure what it says about the personality of our profession that many of us revere this man when that same repellent condescension crisscrosses every bit of his written output I’ve ever seen. I’m damn sure it says some ugly things about elitism and privilege.)

I think Jane is on to something. “I’m better than the common man” is exactly what’s going on here. I do not, however, think that we need to be looking out for “trivia,” because the content of blogs is not the real meat of the attack. If it were, maybe we’d get cited and formally refuted once in a while, instead of merely sneeringly alluded to!

No, what’s going on here is captured neatly in this blog comment:

I think the main problem the presenter was trying to illustrate was the use of casual prose and an expression of personal feelings in a professional-themed post, which would never occur in a column because they have to meet Editorial Standards.

Aha. It’s not the content. It’s the register. The G-rm-ns of this world aren’t afraid of what we might say; they’re confident enough in their superiority and their privilege to think they can outargue us or just plain shut us down within the profession—no one who’s anyone reads blogs anyway, right?

What they’re scared of—and I wish I understood why, but I don’t; it can’t just be a control issue, it’s too visceral for that—is that conversations can be had, lessons learned, and decisions made without a choking cloud of turgid prose and rigid process descending over everything.

It’s almost an identity issue. If we don’t write the way librarians have heretofore written, are we still librarians? If we don’t do things the way libraries have heretofore done things, are we still working in libraries? Librarians are librarians. They behave a certain way and have certain narrow interests. They’re not knitters or gamers or parents or genre partisans (much less ficcers) or football fans or political activists (well, okay, maybe that last). So when they’re presenting themselves as librarians, librarianship should be the whole of the self-presentation. All that other stuff? Is other than, and therefore less than, librarianship. It should not be presented alongside it for fear of lowering the lofty communicative register that makes librarianship what it is.

That’s my read on all this. That’s my best guess about why G-rm-n hates bloggers but still contributed to a blog. He’ll never be a “blogger” as long as he still writes like a (G-rm-n–style) librarian. And he’ll slam me (metaphorically speaking) every chance he gets, because even when I’m writing for publication, I don’t write like a G-rm-n–style librarian. G-rm-n–style librarians don’t put “Roach Motel” in their article titles.

Now, it should be noted that the friction between work demeanor and non-work demeanor has been a CavLec theme since CavLec’s earliest days, with work-versus-blogging a common subtheme. I may well be reading my own issues into this kerfuffle; I was glad to see Jane’s and the Mad Strategerist’s contributions because they happened completely independently of me while still capturing pieces of my sense of the issue. Adjust your internal bias sensors accordingly.

And now I am done being all buttoned-down and serious, and shall therefore go off into a huge gale of laughter again, on my way back to my usual court-fool stance. Mr. Blog People his own self, blogging! How bloody hilarious is that?

ETA: And what should come up in my aggregator mere seconds after publication of this post? Some days I wonder why I bother. Except, the funny, the funny!

If my life ever stops being weirdly (but amusingly) ironic, I’ll look down to see if I’ve died and somehow just not noticed it yet.

Not two days after I whinge about not having any OA whuffie, I get a pitch to do an article for an IR-themed journal issue. Before you even ask, the journal in question is not an Elsevier organ, the green-OA terms look just barely acceptable, and one of the issue editors is someone I respect a good deal.

But I cringed, because (I suddenly realized) it isn’t all writing I dislike, just academic-research writing. Probably a grad-school hangover, and a stupid one at that, but there it is. Introduction, lit review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, bibliography, shoot me now please.

It’s the lit review that really gets me. In college and grad school (not so much library school, though) I had the uneasy feeling that my professors knew every article that had ever been written about my topic, and would descend upon me in rivers of red ink if I missed even one. (I didn’t even start a dissertation, either. Go figure.) The literature wasn’t a support or a source of useful background—it was an evil devouring hydra with more necks than a chicken-house.

So I didn’t answer the request right away. Ugh, need the whuffie, but double ugh, academic writing.

Cuddled in bed for a nap with a Goth-kitty, however, I started thinking about all the things I’d like to say about the journal theme, and they started fitting themselves together in my head around anecdotes from my real-life work experience, and… damn it, there’s the article, there it is right there, it’s just not strictly research-academic-type writing.

Bleh, so I don’t need the whuffie so bad I can’t risk losing it. I pitched them the article idea, because the worst they can do is say no and get somebody else, you know? And I can still write the article and send it somewhere, though I admit to more screaming horrors at the notion of writing articles purely on spec. (Like I don’t have anything else to do with my off-work time?)

I’ve got a great title for it, though, thanks to my former coworkers at Mason. “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.” My low peasant sense of humor has me grinning like a loon at the thought of that title coming up in a search of a research-article database.

So we’ll see. Maybe I kick another grad-school monkey off my back by giving this particular article-monkey a ride. If the pitch flies, I’m gonna try to negotiate the OA terms, though, at least as they’re expressed on SHERPA. Publishing is too damn slow, that’s all there is to it.

I got some plaintive emails asking me just what the heck “whuffie” was. Wikipedia is the best source for a quick answer. (All you librarians who just cringed: aside from the OA e-text of Doctorow’s book, which indeed answers the question but not necessarily quickly, find me a better source. Resolved: for a certain slice of pop culture roughly bounded by geekdom, Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia there is. Discuss.)

I’m not sure the real point of my last post on the subject got through. This is probably due to my not explaining it clearly, so let me have another go.

Academic libraryland has a flavor called “tenure-track” in which the acquisition of whuffie by means of publications, conference presentations, and the like is not optional if you like your job and want to keep it. The exact rigor of the tenure process varies; it can be absolutely as rigorous as the process for teaching and research faculty (Ruritania is like this), or it can be watered-down, a bit or a lot.

Academic libraryland has another flavor that I call “wannabe tenure-track,” where whuffie-acquisition is not strictly required but upper management leans on librarians to acquire whuffie anyway. (My former POW is of this flavor. Just warning folks who are considering becoming the next me. Don’t let it scare you, though; I got through all the renewal/promotion process except the actual ruling, and I survived. Moreover, I’m pretty sure I would have survived the ruling.)

A librarian in one of these academic libraries, as well as a librarian who wants to protect her ability to get a job in such a library, has little choice but to set herself a yearly whuffie quota. New librarians particularly may find (she said ruefully, having been there and done that) that they accept work they wouldn’t otherwise have done just because there’s whuffie at the end of it. I know folks hate the phrase “paying dues,” but this is the clearest example of it I can think of.

Other librarians may want to amass whuffie in order to make themselves competitive in the larger library job market, supplement their incomes, feed their egos, whatever. Although these librarians may also accept whuffie-ful work that they aren’t otherwise interested in, they’re slightly different from the paying-dues group in that the motivations are basically internal rather than external.

None of these librarians is me. I’m not in a situation with any kind of tenure, I’m happy with my job, my income is adequate to my needs, and I have to starve my ego or it’ll stomp Neo-Tokyo.

But I don’t plan to stop speaking, writing (much though I have to flog myself to do it), and finding ways to contribute. One reason is that every now and again, I get to do something cool, like go to London and San Antonio. Both those trips were blessings; I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t pretend that subsidized travel (within my travel limits, which are somewhat straiter than most people’s) isn’t an attraction.

That aside, though, speaking and writing can be tools to advance other goals I have, goals that live wholly outside the “fun” and “personal advancement” segments of my brain. If you’re a long-time reader, you can probably recite the litany as well as I can by now: open access, academic libraries as publishers, more and better digital text, digital preservation, a better (or at least more honest) labor market for librarians, female enfranchisement in technology and systems librarianship, and so on. I care about all these, and when speaking and writing will further them, I’ll get in gear to speak and write. That’s what I meant by “achievement:” using such talents as I have to further real-world goals, with whuffie a side-effect at best.

Unfortunately—and this is a personal hangup, not anybody else’s problem—if I’m not careful, I fall back into old habits of mind, competitive and compulsively perfectionistic habits that don’t do me or anyone else any good. So I do push back pretty hard when people start talking whuffie at me. I don’t want to turn into a compulsive whuffie-chaser, now that I have the luxury of not having to chase whuffie at all (and it is indeed a luxury).

Here is where the whole thing gets difficult—and from email I get and blog posts I see, I’m not the only person with this dilemma. Sometimes you need more whuffie than you’ve got in order to reach your real-world, non-personal-advancement goals. I, for instance, have zero formal whuffie in open-access circles. None. No, really, none, not a biscuit. Maybe the book review and book chapter I’ve got coming out this year will change that a bit, but there are no guarantees in this world.

This means I don’t get speaking invitations that I could do good with. For every one I have gotten (and that’s all of, um, two), I’ve gotten a nibble for one that’s eventually fallen through. Truth. And of course there are all the invitations I don’t get because nobody knows who I am because for all the fire in my belly and my mad public-speaking skillz, I don’t have the formal whuffie in my sub-field.

So otherwise-uninteresting whuffie opportunities directly relevant to OA would get more attention from me than my anti-whuffie intransigence would suggest. I can’t think of a better way to play it. Wish I could.

I’m lucky in a way, though, because OA doesn’t have any formal organization that I have to stay on the right side of. When I see opportunities, I can jump. When I don’t, I can make opportunities without having to get anyone’s imprimatur. And the sub-field is small enough that worthwhile opportunities exist for individual action.

It’s gotta suck when the main venue for your sub-field is ALA. I mean, maximum “the airlock’s blown!”-level suckage. Not only do you have to do a lot of pointless crap to earn enough ALA whuffie to actually accomplish something halfway useful, you constantly have to wonder whether the red-tape and waste irretrievably associated with ALA is really sufficiently mitigated by the additional resources ALA makes available.

(Or whatever the attraction is. I think we all know where I am on that question—nothing excuses ALA’s resource-hogging ways in my book.)

And if you put in all the effort to grab enough ALA whuffie to finally matter, but your experience suggests that ALA isn’t worth further effort—what do you do?

Believe it or not, I’ve always respected that particular struggle by individual ALA participants, even though I’ve rarely had a good word for ALA itself. I’m still all for fomenting revolution, but I understand why not everybody climbs on board with me.