Caveat Lector

An unexpected characteristic (at least to me) of SPARC Digital Repositories was the representation of quite a few institutional repositories that were either brand-new or still in the planning stages. What does a recessionary future hold for these proto-IRs, and what about existing ones?

“This is a great time to be starting an IR!” enthused one SPARC-DR speaker. “You get to learn from those who have gone before you.” And avoid their mistakes, understood. Believe it or not, this marks progress. Whether any given attendee had read Roach Motel was a crapshoot—many had, some clearly hadn’t—but its lessons were the floor under the entire event. I only heard “build it and they will come” in scare quotes, accompanied by polite derision.

So new repositories, those that manage to get themselves going in a budget environment where new services are a tough sell, will start on firmer ideological footing than the generation before them. That’s good. At the very least the new entrants will have a clearer sense of what they want and how they can get it than we did when we were in their shoes. Wonderful.

What are existing repositories supposed to do, then?

I asked this question at SPARC-DR in response to the speaker mentioned above. The answer I got was pretty mealy-mouthed: “Go find allies.” Um. Yes. What exactly do you think I have been trying to do for the last three years? (I lost my temper entirely with the closing keynote speaker over similar bell-the-cat rhetoric.) If I have no allies worth mentioning after three years of effort, what is the likelihood they will materialize out of the woodwork now? And how is it that a burdensome legacy of failure will help me find allies, exactly? Especially allies with political clout and money? Especially since turning a failed repository around takes more resources than have already been thrown at it?

These are the questions institutional repositories will have no choice but to confront in 2009. As library budgets shrink, money for programs of dubious efficacy disappears. Remember also that the United States does not have the nationwide research-reporting mandates that several European countries and Australia do; academic libraries have been running repositories purely out of idealism and hope. I can’t speak for you, but in my neck of the woods, these are not commodities available in generous supply.

Given that my crystal ball cracked up in a big way last year, I’m a little hesitant to make the dire forecasts my gut is telling me are warranted… but only a little. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if last year’s prediction about a repository closure was correct, just premature.

What is clear to me at this juncture is that the repository world is split in two as regards the appropriate response to faculty apathy about deposit. One chunk of the world is gamely gearing up to take on mediated deposit of the peer-reviewed literature. The other chunk of the world is using the repository for lower-hanging fruit (ETDs, undergraduate research, collapsing it with the local digital library, whatever) and doing a fan-dance around its lack of commitment to green open access. All right, there’s a third chunk, too: those that are doing both.

However, it’s the second chunk that are the problem, from the point of view of the open-access movement. Bluntly, these institutions love green open access—until it costs them resources beyond the mere provisioning of a repository. Since they are now uncomfortably aware that green open access costs more than that, they are sidling away from it in as delicate and face-maintaining a way as possible. The question for open access is how to keep its agenda alive in libraries that are no longer able or willing to dedicate specific resources to the green road.

There are options. One is to push harder on the gold road: ask libraries to dedicate funds to gold OA memberships and author fees. This is a tall order, because the subtext here is asking libraries to cancel even more journals to pay for a brighter future, but I do think gains are achievable, if perhaps mostly symbolic ones at this point.

Another is to bypass outreach to libraries and work harder on faculty, in hopes of additional Harvards and Stanfords. My own thought is that like many federal agencies with their eyes on NIH, institutions are watching Harvard and Stanford to see how their policies shake down in practice before they dive in. It’s probably too soon to push this angle too hard in the States, unless targets are chosen very carefully indeed. (Hint: The more centralized an institution’s power structure, the better a candidate it is for this approach. Sprawling campuses governed in a decentralized fashion with lots of little squabbling power centers are bad, bad choices; herding cats won’t work, as the limited impact of the “patchwork mandate” tends to demonstrate.)

A third is to ’fess up about the real costs of green OA and provide libraries and struggling repositories with a realistic roadmap to achieving it. We have these data now; the problem is that libraries are backing away from the cost of the inevitable conclusions. If the open-access movement wants green OA through institutional repositories, it will have to stiffen the collective library backbone from the top down. I don’t see this happening, but if green OA through IRs is to survive, it will have to. Yes, there were a fair few library directors at SPARC-DR, but I guarantee you the problematic ones weren’t.

We repository managers have a lot of work to do in the coming year, if we’re to make a dent in the distrust we are rightfully regarded with. We’ll just have to see how well that goes.

I find myself pondering the quandary OCLC and libraries are enmeshed in. If you haven’t heard—and it seems a great many librarians haven’t—OCLC is trying to unveil a new agreement regarding WorldCat records uploaded by libraries. For my money, the best analysis is coming from Jonathan Rochkind. As best I can tell, his assessment of the copyright situation is right on the mark, his guesses about motives and means ring true to me, and his suggested solutions are workable.

The angle from which I approach this is, as usual, my Greg Downey–influenced labor consciousness. (I tell people at SLIS that Greg Downey will change the way they think about the profession. They don’t believe me. They should.) Where is the labor coming from, where do the results of that labor go and why, and of course cui bono?

What keeps sticking in my craw is that libraries never said “Let’s get together and form a consortium!” They said “Let’s get together and share cataloguing records.” A consortium used to be necessary to do that, which was the genesis of OCLC. In my estimation, that necessity is waning; ubiquitous networking can do the job just as well or better. OCLC’s “we gotta eat” attitude is not flying because they are overestimating their contribution to the whole and (crucially) misidentifying the goal of the contributed labor.

(Any resemblance to the scholarly journal industry is left as an exercise for the reader. Likewise any similarity between the OCLC landgrab and the Thomson-Reuters lawsuit against Zotero. Okay, I’ll offer a hint on that last one: both rely on licensing arrangements only because they haven’t a copyright leg to stand on and they know it.)

Labor figures into this from another angle, as well. It’s no secret that OCLC has been assembling a considerable portfolio of talent—not coincidentally, pleasantly and affably outspoken talent—in its research division. There’s a potential problem with outspoken talent, though; it tends to be opinionated, not to mention idealistic. When its employer violates its ideals, outspoken talent has been known to start in horror and leave.

I have a feeling this OCLC landgrab isn’t sitting real well with some of OCLC’s talent. It’s no more than a feeling; I have no ears on the inside. I don’t know how much that talent is expressing itself internally, either. Possibly not much; American work culture is such that outspoken talent with a lick of sense points its expression outward rather than inward. Still, those folks are outspoken. How long will they remain silent? And if they do, will their silence be the ultimate silence of departure?

And a third labor angle: Many classes of librarian labor can be safely ignored by mammoths like OCLC and ILS vendors. Reference librarians grumble a bit, but they don’t revolt, and they won’t badmouth you in public. Ditto cataloguers, who skulk about on AUTOCAT and otherwise say nothing much. There’s one class of librarian you don’t want to hack off, though, and that is…

… the hackers. As a class, they’re like me: public-facing, articulate, loud, obnoxious, and unashamed of any of it. They also control vital parts of library infrastructure, and influence decisions both toward and away from OCLC properties, meaning that they can call a boycott and make it stick. They also bathe in the waters of open source, open data, and sharing, making them far more like the initial labor pool of cataloguers that became OCLC than either OCLC or existing cataloguers are now.

They are OCLC’s competition. Not Open Library, not LibraryThing, not even LibLime and ‡biblios (though ‡biblios looks like a contender to me). Library hackers. Give them a room, a week, the Library of Congress record store plus whatever their institutions hand them, and lots of pizza and caffeine, and they’ll have built a new and better WorldCat. And don’t kid yourselves, OCLC, they want to.

OCLC’s landgrab takes a big library-hacker toy away—a toy they were in the process of turning into real tools and services. This is bad for libraries and librarians, unquestionably, but I’m completely convinced that OCLC cares far more about OCLC than about that. What I’m trying to get across here is that hacking off the hackers is bad for OCLC, too. Whatever else hackers are, they’re free labor from OCLC’s point of view. If OCLC gives them toys, they’ll urge their management to support OCLC, and they’ll build tools on OCLC properties (which, lest we forget, go far beyond their catalogue-record store) such that their libraries will break if OCLC isn’t supported.

That’s a much better position for OCLC than the landgrab leaves them in, I think.

The usual way to characterize the decision to run an institutional repository on open-source software versus outsourcing it is to think of it as in-house IT expertise versus lack of same. If you’re a big library with an IT shop, you run open source. If you’re not, you call up the vendors.

I used to subscribe to that view. After some things I heard at SPARC-DR, I have changed my thinking. Truthfully, your choices may be constrained in either direction; if you have money but no IT staff, you’re hiring a vendor, whereas if you have IT expertise (even at my borderline-competent level) but no budget, you have no choice but to free-ride on open source.

Let’s imagine that you have a real choice, though. You have in-house IT. You also have a budget. You have to make a choice. In that case, the question is where you want to use your people. Where is their time best spent?

My current thinking is that if you have that choice, the only defensible reason to use open-source right now is if you are seriously planning to write novel code on top of the platform you choose. If that’s what you believe in throwing your staff time at, use open-source; if you go with a vendor, obviously, there won’t be anything for those people to do.

I’m willing to give a little bit on this stance in the case of EPrints, which I believe stands up very well on its own against vendor offerings, and will continue to do so. I would also encourage repositories that use vendors to demand that those vendors support SWORD, because (so saith my crystal ball) SWORD support will open up a lot of opportunity to adopt useful SWORD-based tools under development, such as the BibApp.

Bluntly, I don’t think there’s any excuse to adopt DSpace or Fedora unless you’re planning some serious hacking—unless the value you add actually depends on that hacking. The overhead in staff time (which, let us recall, also costs money) is too high for too little return on investment otherwise.

This equation would change if there were livelier code exchanges in the open-source software communities. If an open-source solution plus solid, innovative, well-maintained, decently-supported plugins or modifications would do the job, that would be a strong competitor to a vendor solution. We don’t live in that world, not for DSpace and not for Fedora. As a minimal example, I have a metric ton of useful little DSpace/Manakin hacks—and no place to share them, or look over other people’s. You can in fact find my Manakin hacks, if you know just how to tweak Manakin URLs to look for them, and if you read a little bit of XSLT. But come on, who’s going to do that? And who (but a CavLec reader) will even know to try?

There is no plugin/mod infrastructure, technical or social, for open-source repository software the way there is for, say, WordPress or Drupal. Honestly, for code-based innovation, you have three choices: do it in-house, use EPrints, or lean on a vendor. The open-source repository communities (EPrints included, unfortunately) are pretty much useless for sharing working code.

One of the things SPARC-DR taught me is that I have been spending much too much time beating on DSpace, and my time has better uses. I’m not entirely happy with that insight, because I’m sort of fond of beating the living daylights out of DSpace, but I can’t ignore the facts.

The simple fact is that every minute I spend on DSpace, I’m not spending on content recruitment, advocacy, metadata, copyright clearance, service development and provision, and all the other aspects of repository management. Honestly, those things are where a conscientious repository manager should be spending her time.

So get her away from the software, and keep her away.

The question of design and branding raises its head here, to be sure. In my experience, the vendors in this space do as good or better a job of design and branding as those of us (myself included) who do it ourselves.

This advice is probably worth what you’re paying. Nonetheless, here it is: unless you’re adding significant value by hacking, don’t run open source; outsource.

I’ve just been asked to mentor new librarians in the area of Writing for Publication.

I think I’ll go lie down. Case of the vapors. No, seriously, people, I’m not even a little bit sure about this one.

Aside from almost seven years of logorrhea here, I am not a prolific writer. One or two articles/essays a year is my limit, and it’s my limit because writing professionally involves so much self-flagellation that if I tried to do any more than that, I wouldn’t have any skin left on my bones. For whatever reason, I can cut myself slack about a lackluster presentation, but producing even lackluster writing for publication takes it right the hell outta me.

I’ve been asked whether I had any interest in writing a book. Hollow laugh. No. I did express interest in a tech book once, but tech books are relatively straightforward writing for me. A real book, especially of the polemic/extended-essay variety that is what I have been asked about, would kill me dead dead dead. Dead.

What’s worse from a mentorship perspective is that I have no experience whatever shopping my own writing around. My apologies for a moment’s boastfulness, but the truth is that all my professional writing opportunities have come to me, not the other way around. Maybe that’s closer to the norm than one would imagine—the bar in librarianship is famously not high—but even if it is the norm, someone looking for mentoring probably isn’t in that position. I’m just not sure I can help.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to. I just don’t think this is my proper topic, you know?

I’ve had a third-party request to talk a little bit here about the BibApp, so I’ll do that.

The BibApp was a major reason I got so excited about coming to work in Madison. At the time I first heard about it, there just wasn’t anything like it, and while it shares DNA with projects such as Cornell’s VIVO and BePress’s Selected Works, it still does useful things that nothing else does.

The public face of BibApp is a set of researcher profiles (see live examples from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), anchored in but not limited to their publication record. Researchers or their proxies can add photographs, statements of interest, and so on. BibApp is browseable and searchable, and results can be limited by facet. Publication results have OpenURLs attached to them, so interested readers can be directed to their local link resolver.

The behind-the-scenes face of BibApp is a publication-list manager and repository-populator. BibApp vacuums up citation lists in popular bibliography formats such as RIS and RefWorks XML. (Not, alas, EndNote, because doing anything with their homegrown formats has been proven hazardous. Word to the wise: Zotero exports RIS. If I were to start a BibApp project, that’s the tool I’d use.) BibApp checks for duplicate citations, prompting to have potential duplicates resolved or removed.

It does its level best to assign authorship automatically to individuals it knows about, no matter how a name is represented in the citation. Over time, as BibApp learns more about name variants, coauthorship patterns, publication-venue patterns, and subject patterns, it becomes more accomplished at assigning authorship. BibApp performs similar authority control on publisher and journal names, and it will shortly be possible to federate this information in order to pre-populate new BibApp installations with the knowledge other adopters have built.

Once BibApp recognizes a journal or publisher in a just-imported citation, it checks with SHERPA/RoMEO for policies relating to green open access. If it recognizes that the publisher’s typeset PDF is archivable, it bundles up a package for import to a repository via the SWORD protocol, which currently works over DSpace, EPrints, and Fedora. No muss, no fuss, no bothering faculty for keystrokes!

A pilot with a fairly small engineering department at UW-Madison turned up about 1400 archivable articles. The major time investment in all this is putting together those citation lists, but in at least some cases, faculty themselves use citation-management software and can lend a hand. If not, student labor is quite adequate to compile lists. Eventually, BibApp will be able to update citation lists automatically via author-search RSS feeds from indexing and e-journal databases; that feature used to exist, had to be taken out, but will be put back!

And that’s the BibApp. The first stable release should be out in the first quarter of next year.

BibApp’s initial developer was my colleague and former SLIS classmate Eric Larson, of the Wendt Engineering Library. I also credit Wendt Library director Deborah Helman for giving Eric time and space to write code, and for tirelessly championing the software on the Madison campus. Eric shares development duties with Tim Donohue of Illinois, and Sarah Shreeves of Illinois has been instrumental in its outreach and sustainability strategies. Jointly and separately, we are pursuing several avenues for funding and additional developers, and I’m quite optimistic about its future.

That said, we are definitely looking for additional BibApp developers and early adopters, so please get in touch with us if you’re interested!

(with apologies to TS Eliot)

Not all repository-rats are as difficult or irascible as I am. We are, I will venture to say, a tough crowd to speak to, though. What I know about us, based on observation, is that we tend to be on the one hand ruthlessly practical, on the other remarkably attuned to our environment. I myself am more the former than the latter, but in all honesty, it’s the latter group of rats who tend to be more successful.

We are also a group of people that has had a lot of ideas that turned out to be wrongheaded shoved at us, and a lot of smack talked about and to us. Moreover, those of us who have been in this business awhile are a bruised, beaten crew, and we are cynical in direct proportion to our scars. That makes us a tough crowd.

Herewith, some suggestions for avoiding the biggest pratfalls in talking to us.

Know what we do and respect its difficulty. Breaking this dictum seems to be particularly common among career academics, and it may be part and parcel of academia’s general disdain for librarians. Nonetheless, the successful rat-whisperer knows something about the lifecycle, care and feeding, and behavior patterns of the common repository-rat.

We know when you lack clue. We do not appreciate it. We are, however, a fairly approachable species. If you don’t know what we do and why it’s hard, ask before you speak, please. Or, you know, read something like Palmer et al.

Understand our environment. There is a lot about open access in general and IRs in particular that’s just plain weird. I am constantly gobsmacked, caught utterly by surprise, by things that go on in this arena. That said, a lot of what goes on can be reasoned about from available evidence, and a number of us engage in this reasoning regularly. Peter Suber, of course, is an honorary repository-rat in this regard. I have to assume it’s the philosophy background that lets him reason so well and explain his reasoning so clearly.

When you run into an environmental phenomenon you don’t understand, such as (for example) the behavior of scholarly societies with regard to open access, you need to look for evidence (it’s there), look for analysis of that evidence (there has often been some), and do some thinking. If you don’t, you sound poorly-informed or just plain stupid.

To my mind, the key thing you must build a sense of regarding IRs and repository-rats is the power relations surrounding them. Innumerable are the speakers and writers who behave as though repository-rats were Hogwarts professors, able to wave wands and create content, awareness, administrative backing, funding, software, developer time, staff, buy-in from librarians and faculty, and copyright clearance from nothing. We’re not and we can’t, because we do not have that kind of power, not individually and not collectively either.

Do not speak to us as though we were faculty; many of us are not. Do not speak to us as though we were deans or library directors; we’re not. We are, by and large, caught in a terrible responsibility-without-authority bind. I cannot overemphasize how important it is to understand that when you speak to us. The instant you make me say “great, but who bells the cat?” you have lost.

What does work is to point out parts of our environment that we don’t entirely understand. Discipline-based insight, events outside academia that may help or hinder us, and anything happening in smoke-filled back rooms that we aren’t in are prime topics for us. Coherent visions of the river in which we are but small eddies may also serve (John Wilbanks did this beautifully yesterday), but…

Glittering generalities do not fly with us. Glittering generalities are what got us into the mess many of us are in. I am reminded of the scene in Kipling’s Stalky & Co in which some rich slob with no skin whatever in the military game slobbers on to a bunch of kids who are about to go out to India (and lose their lives as like as not) about patriotism and valour and service. “‘This man,’ said McTurk with conviction, ‘is the Gadarene swine.’”

You don’t want us to think that about you. I know you don’t. So be grounded, be realistic, be practical, be where we are.

And please, please, please don’t ever quote Lynch 2003. Trust me on this: the IR discourse has moved a long, long way on from “essential infrastructure.” We rats are so done patting ourselves on the back about how essential we are; we know differently. If any glittering generality has come back to stab us in the back, it’s that one. We loathe it. Avoid it.

We know what we’re supposed to do. We need grounded insight on how best to do it. We know we need content. We know we need increased awareness at our institutions. We know we need to speak to faculty in language they respond to. We know we need sustainable funding and staffing. We know we need allies and partners. Do not speak to us as though we do not already know these things. It is trite and patronizing. Do not speak to us as though we do not try, every day of our working lives, to make these things happen—particularly if you have never tried it yourself. It is condescending and rude.

If you have insight or experience on what we can do to get ourselves these things, though, we’re all ears. If you can actually help us get these things, we will bless you forever. I’m still waiting to hear Stuart Shieber talk, for instance. He’s as close to somebody who waved a magic wand as I can think of. I have no earthly clue how he did what he did, nor how his environment hindered or facilitated it, and I’d dearly like to know.

This is a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger post, unfortunately about a real speech to a roomful of real repository-rats at a real conference, a speech that failed to meet its mark in a truly trainwrecky fashion. I post it in hopes of avoiding further such trainwrecks. In order to keep the focus on the larger phenomena that fed into that speech rather than the speech itself, I decline to name conference (sure, right now that’s obvious, but in a few months it won’t be) or speaker.

(My live notes from the John Wilbanks keynote.)

John Wilbanks

i.a.n.a.r.e. “I am not a repository expert.” “I almost said that I am not a repository rat.”

gets his information from Mellon and JISC reports, and links seen on blogs “especially Caveat Lector.”

“why is there a disconnect between planning to share and actual sharing?”

Disruptive processes can’t be planned in advance; planned innovation is slow.

Digital publishing is just “a bigger earhorn” because we’re still thinking that the way to communicate is through writing papers. We’ve made that better, faster, and cheaper, but the process is basically the same; boil it down to 8.5×11 pages.

Process change comes more slowly than product change.

So why is it hard to get this content? Why don’t faculty see the light?

- stable systems are resistant to change on multiple levels. No one thing will make people wake up; there are interlocking barriers to change. One such barrier is copyright, which locks up the container of the facts, not the facts… but it really locks up that container!

So we’ve moved to leasing materials, not owning them; and licensing makes it harder to unlock those facts from their containers. No indexing allowed; no adding hyperlinks.

Rights clearance is a pain! It is a block preventing process disruption. We haven’t provided enough incentive, enough “universal solvents,” to remove these blocks. Now we’re even seeing copyright applied to databases, often through confusion rather than malice (e.g. ChemSpider). What do the ideas behind CC mean, as they propagate into the scholarly realm? The rights problems are going to get MORE, not LESS complex; forcing IRs to focus exclusively on the peer-reviewed research ignores the library’s role as repository for lots of stuff. This complexifies rights issues.

- Faculty prefer carrots to sticks. So what do incentives need to do for them?

The minimum incentive needs to get faculty to go through the metadata/upload process, or to let somebody else do it.

Cartoon: “Behind one door is tenure; behind the other is flipping burgers.” If it doesn’t help them get tenure or another grant, it competes with activities that WILL help them toward tenure and grants. This is another way the system resists change! We wouldn’t NEED mandates if this weren’t so.

Let’s assume we fix the copyright and rights-clearance and incentives problems. This will create a flood of work!

Not easy to install IR software! Very powerful systems, but they need PEOPLE to run them. Can’t just go to register.com. Too frequently these people are not part of the conversation. Can be hard! (CavLec: miniature disasters post. An hour to change one link!) This, too, is another change-resister.

This is the complexity of the system we’re up against. Multiple levels of barriers, with multiple fail-safes.

reports from the front lines: building a commons is really, really hard! Takes passionate people with a clear point of view who are not willing to compromise on that view.

Everything at Science Commons is based on “running code:” legal and software code. >1000 journals now under CC license, which is pretty good! Scholar’s addendum engine, done in a single line of HTML code that can be dropped into a page. But they can’t keep data on who uses it (privacy), so it’s hard to follow up to assess.

Goal: using this to negotiate with publishers. But unless there’s a funder or institution behind this (NIH or Harvard), faculty won’t use it, because the power is on the side of the publisher (remember tenure!). “When institutions copy Harvard, we hope this will help.” (But people aren’t copying Harvard! -me)

Databases: copyright status isn’t clear, how/when to integrate isn’t clear, storage is a technical challenge. Ties lawyers in KNOTS! Default stances different in US and UK (no protection in US, some in UK). This makes Science Commons’s charge harder — but the only way to combine datasets is to eliminate the rights barriers. Solutions: CC0, and a set of “Science Commons norms” (citation, plagiarism control, etc). Dangerous to use law for that; better to use norms (yes! -me).

However, this conflicts with the protection instinct faculty have, and corporate funders even more. However, the protection instinct is frequently (? I would say “sometimes”) an instinct to protect freedom.

OA solves the legal problem, but the other problem is the “container problem” — the paper as a container for facts, the standalone database as a container for facts, are bad ways to go. Solution: Semantic Web. How do we make Google work better for science? Google finds things based on inbound links, but Google doesn’t search databases and doesn’t notice “links” to them. Goal: e pluribus unum (discovery tools that work usefully across different datastores). Get money to bribe database owners to do the right thing to make this possible.

Can put queries in URLs and then remix them by changing URLs. “Corpus of queries as links” and let people hack them. Not planning to share, but actually sharing, and throwing the result open, and it creates a commons! <$500K to make this possible! Have to do horrible screenscrapes and stuff just to create proof-of-concept to show people what’s possible when you open up.

NOTHING replaces hacking and releasing! Using trademark to protect the quality of their work, not copyright.

“Don’t plan to hack, hack! That’s the only way around the incentive problems.”

2 futures for repositories.

Note that repositories are points on a map — with no edges! No links between them! No networks! But networks create better incentives than points. Doesn’t mean “get complicated,” just the opposite: simple systems win the network game! (”OAI-PMH helps, but not enough,” with which I completely agree.) AOL and Prodigy were points, and they did cool stuff, but only “their people” could do anything to improve the system. The WWW was bloody ugly in comparison, but it was OPEN, and so huge numbers of people improved it. Three layers of openness (Benkler): physical layer, code layer, content layer. Fourth layer: knowledge layer, which means we have to deal with IP problems — so we have to engage the copyright problems.

If we do this right, we create gears instead of locks. This is the opportunity! “Open copyright, balanced incentives, and distributed workloads.”

We have to do this by solving an information problem faculty actually have. That’s the road in. (HALLELUJAH. -me) What questions can only a network of IRs solve? So that people who use IRs outcompete people who don’t.

“How does the IR keep me from flipping burgers at McD’s?”

Individual brain capacity is not scaling, but COLLECTIVE brain capacity is, so how do we make our stuff work on a collective level?

Conclusion: don’t wait. Lots of things need to happen before all this becomes real! If we wait until all the problems are solved, the commons won’t have what it needs to explode. But people aren’t watching IR space, which is the best time to create an open, disruptive system! Use existing ontologies. Work around problems rather than tackling them head-on.

Create new ways to measure things. Tenure vs. McD’s is a matter of citations; that’s the only thing we know how to measure! But what about data? Downloads? TrackBack?

We need a thousand flowers blooming, not the slow process of consensus.

Invest in your repository staff! Hard to do when facing real financial crises like the serials crisis, but “there’s nothing so expensive as cheap people.” (I am ready to cry. That’s exactly what libraries are NOT DOING.)

I approach JISC reports with a combination of trepidation and schadenfreude. They’re always smart and grounded, but they do make me despair so.

The latest (PDF), on repository metadata interoperability, is a classic of the genre. Smart, grounded, and despair-making. Despite its focus, there’s a lot more to this report than OAI-PMH and authority control; it asks trenchant questions about what IRs are for and whether they’re doing (or even can do) what they’re supposed to.

I keep reminding myself that the bad truths need to make themselves heard before change can happen. I reminded myself of that all the way through writing Roach Motel, and I remind myself again every time I read a JISC report.

If you’re less inclined to despair than I am, check the report out.

I have been slowly loading up my Bloglines with educational-technology blogs, for curiosity’s sake and for various other nefarious reasons. (I’ve been tapped to help run a workshoppy thing on repositories for MPOW’s grassroots ed-tech group next spring. It will help to know what these folks think and talk about!)

Imagine my surprise to find a post on sharing that nails the bureaucracy problems with institutional repositories right through the head.

We are the poster’s They. We should worry about this, in my humble opinion. Quite a lot we should worry about it.

I’ve heard many a repository-rat bellyache about how little faculty want to do to share their work in IRs. We need to stop bellyaching and start accepting that if we want pretty metadata, we’ll have to do that bit ourselves. Make it easy, make it fun, make it magic—and isn’t pretty metadata magical?—and watch our content-recruitment problems melt away.

Also worth reading is Andy Powell’s evisceration of repository success conditions and measurement. Repository rats, the question of metrics is to our address. Do you even have success conditions laid out for you? No, I don’t either. Does that make you comfortable? It doesn’t me. Idealism and look-the-other-way won’t keep IRs viable forever; eventually we’re going to have to prove our usefulness just like everybody else.

Me, I’m not looking forward to that day, not one bit. I’ve stated my case, don’t mistake me; a lot of my case amounts to “given the system it’s embedded in, the IR under its previous assumptions can’t be successful, so can we revisit those assumptions please?” But without so much as a definition of success, how far can I reasonably expect to get with that argument?

I’ve said it before. What do you want and how will you get it? Those are your success conditions, and it’s shameful that IR planning hasn’t been honest enough to answer those questions and stand behind its answers.

So this is my little cheer for Andy, for looking the hard questions in the eye without flinching.

Policy development tends to confuse me rather; I’ve learned how to do it, but it’s definitely been an acquired skill. People who can do that work easily and lucidly amaze me.

If your institution is looking at digital preservation feeling lost and unsure, I can’t recommend this report from JISC highly enough. It lays out what needs to appear in an institutional digital preservation policy, how to pitch it as part of the institutional mandate, and what examples are worth following. It’s just techie enough without being incomprehensibly geeky.

It’s excellent. Take a look. Seriously.