Caveat Lector

It’s like I’m psychic or something. The RAND Corporation folks just came out with a report on IRs in the UK. It reads like they cribbed off Roach Motel (and no, that is not an accusation; I’m quite sure they didn’t). Check out some of the funny-if-it-weren’t-so-sad:

Overall, the interviews seemed to validate the hypothesis of the EMBRACE project board that digital repositories are currently underutilised, and that there are significant barriers to a strategic commitment.

Ya think?

However, the findings revealed a complicated picture of disciplinary differences, departmental and institutional differences, and heterogeneity between and within stakeholder groups.

You don’t say.

Even if most of the barriers identified in this report – e.g., the lack of awareness, a technology that is in its infancy, risks of reputation damage, or the administrative burden of depositing – can be overcome, one major challenge remains for digital repositories, namely the lack of incentives for the wider institutional community to provide content for these repositories.

Imagine that!

While undertaking this study, a clear theme emerged. There appears a misalignment between the objectives of the repository and the needs of different groups of stakeholders.

No, really?

And that’s just the executive summary, people. There’s way more happy-fun reality-checking (right into the boards, too, ouch—okay, apologies for the hockey joke) in the report proper. I’m not all the way through it, so I’m still unclear whether the report will recommend retrenching or outright bailing.

We need reports like this. I’m glad this one was written, and I dearly hope it is widely read. I’m just annoyed that it wasn’t written two or three years ago, when it might have done more good.

I’m still hearing about teensy-tiny institutions in the US starting IRs. Makes me want to get out my stompy boots, that does, and put the YakTrax on them for extra indelibility. You heard it here first: If you aren’t a doctoral institution, don’t bother with an IR. No, I don’t care what Harvard did; you aren’t Harvard, and you have many less-futile things to do with your precious library budget and staff.

Geesh. I really need not to read such things on a day I took off work.

From my colleague Ciara Healy at UW-Oshkosh, quoted with permission, comes this gem:

I like to say that I “put up” a thesis because it reminds me of canning/preserves which is a lovely visual for the digital repository—neat basement shelves full of all of those lovely Bell jars with briny ideas inside.

I love that. I love it so much I am pondering how to make marketing materials out of it.

I have not been kind to the prevailing discourses about institutional repositories over the last year or so. At my best, I’ve been a cogent if blunt critic. At my worst, I’ve been a thrower of petty tantrums.

I’m not arrogant enough to claim that I’m responsible, even partly, for the discourse changing. I will, however, gladly assert that the discourse is changing. Not everywhere, not wholly, and not all at once; but in many places, in the general direction of reality, and with some momentum behind it.

JISC’s series of repository workshops is a case in point. They’re not talking about outreach and marketing, which were (I’m sorry) never anything but red herrings, figleaves over IRs’ genial uselessness. They’re talking about rights clearance and preservation. Hallelujah, practicality and value! The ARROW project, too, is firmly embedded in the real world. Here’s our mandate, here’s our budget, here’s our plan, here we go.

The Mellon-funded report into institutional repositories (as I have previously noted) is another prime example. Palmer et al. didn’t talk to Big Thinkers; they talked to repository-rats, liaison librarians, academics, and developers. Refreshing.

The latest entry into the arena is Bankier, Foster, and Wiley, IRs: Strategies for the present and the future. And it’s good stuff; I can recommend it with a clear heart. (One small usability note for BePress: Dudes. FILENAMES. “fulltext.pdf” is awful. Also, URLs. “http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=jean_gabriel_bankier” is bad, bad, bad.)

It’s not perfect. I’m dubious about all this Task Force bureaucracy, because I have yet to see such a Task Force redeem an IR from uselessness, much less keep it out of the morass in the first place. The real goal, which I wholeheartedly endorse, is to create a cadre of important people on campus who have some skin in the IR game—but honestly, I don’t think a Task Force along the lines set out in this article can actually accomplish that. Who isn’t on sixteen task forces and committees? What’s going to raise the profile of this one in the estimation of its membership? And who’s going to put skin in the game without a reasonable expectation of reward?

It doesn’t help that the discussion of the said Task Force is really a thinly-disguised pitch to consider hosted services instead of open-source. That’s a real decision with real consequences, don’t mistake me; but it’s the last decision, and far from the most important. The important decisions are “what do we want and how are we going to get it?” Where to put it comes afterwards.

But in the main, I like the article, because it makes no bones about actual work having to go into the IR. The “build it and they will come” notion is finally, finally crumbling to the dust it should never have risen from. It’s also free of the stupid, counterproductive exclusive focus on the peer-reviewed literature. It sets usage statistics forward as the necessity they are, not a decoration (are you listening, DSpace?). And it talks about staff and resources, processes and procedures, glory be. No more “let’s hang a rat off a cliff and see what happens.”

The discourse hasn’t advanced as far as I would like it to. I still want to see “… and if you aren’t willing to put this much effort into an IR, don’t have one, okay?” I am distressed for my ratly colleagues scrabbling at the edges of cliffs. That’s no way to live. Still, coming this far is improvement.

L’shana ha-ba-ah b’yerushalayim. Next year in Jerusalem.

So along with Greg Laden’s excellent flight of fancy, My Father the Anthropologist is a winner of the Open Access Day blog contest.

Now I’m supposed to run around snubbing everyone, right? Isn’t that how these things work?

Seriously, though, I hope librarianship gets a little bit of a boost in the open access community from this “famous to fifteen people” moment. Libraries are more than wallets, Dr. Willinsky, and librarians are strategic assets of great importance to open access, Dr. Jacobs. If yesterday’s what-I-do laundry list opened some eyes, that will be a big win for libraries and for open access.

I’m quite looking forward to my prize from PLoS, and it was great of them to sponsor the synchroblogging (which had over forty entries!). My big win from Open Access Day was something a little bit different, though: In my email this morning was a note from a member of our campus community, asking whom he should talk to about open access.

Win. Big win.

In 1980 or thereabouts—I was eight or nine—my father the anthropologist started yet another rant about serials cancellations at his university’s library while he drove the family somewhere in the family car. He thought the problem an artifact of library underfunding, I remember. I don’t recall that he ever did anything about it save rail bitterly on the subject to us, his captive, powerless, and resentful audience.

At the inaugural meeting of the Open eBook Forum in 2000, David Ornstein and Janina Sajka explained what they hoped electronic books would accomplish. Amid the faux-visionary fluff and the crass dollar signs, one hope they expressed made me vibrate: that for the first time, a visually-impaired person would be able to walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble and buy a book off the shelf just like anyone else.

Access to human knowledge and creativity. Access for the wrongly disenfranchised. Access. I loved markup, I loved text, I loved design, I loved standards work—but then and afterward, it was the access argument that kept me engaged with electronic books. My father the anthropologist, his own eyes not what they had been, understood and endorsed that argument at once.

I certainly know how reassuring accurate, authoritative medical information can be. When my father the anthropologist went to the hospital for bypass surgery, I looked for every scrap of reliable information I could find about what he’d have to go through, what his chances were, what would happen afterwards. Information is hope for helpless bystanders.

I know what information gaps mean to the efficacy of medical care, too. I started my quest to treat my repetitive stress injury when my hands and wrists hurt so badly I couldn’t sleep some nights, nor survive a day’s work without severe pain. The open web, obvious misinformation aside, contained little more than nonsensical and insulting condemnations of RSI sufferers as malingerers, as well as blatant advertising of invasive surgery on the websites of orthopedic surgeons.

My primary-care physician insisted on old-fashioned treatment modalities before she would refer me anywhere. I paid for and endured weeks of wrist braces that I knew would not relieve my pain because I had tried them, as well as a tennis-elbow strap that left me in such agony that I refused to put up with it longer than a day. I did achieve a referral at last, and physical therapy turned out to be the right treatment. As I healed, the new search skills I was acquiring in library school, along with the access that being a student entitled me to, helped me discover that the medical literature understood why my doctor’s initial recommendations had been wrong. Why did I waste time, money, and pain over my inability to produce reliable information to assist my medical provider in treating me appropriately?

I can only be glad I wasn’t suffering from anything life-threatening, like artery blockage.

I was slotted into an online course in “Virtual Collection Development,” taught with patient lucidity by Jane Pearlmutter, my first semester in library school. Among the readings was “The Librarians’ Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the ‘Big Deal’” by the University of Wisconsin’s own Ken Frazier. There it was again, this problem of serials cancellations, framed in terms so transparently sensible that I could only exult.

Later in the semester came a unit on open access. It would be nice to say that lightning struck and I knew that was what I wanted to do with my professional life, but it didn’t and I didn’t. Of course I was intrigued; I knew several for-profit journal publishers from the worm’s-eye view of an erstwhile lowly data-conversion peasant. I wove the complaints I remembered from my father the anthropologist, my own experience in scholarly publishing, and what I learned in class into a rich, detailed mental tapestry, and I felt real hope that open access was an answer I could take back to him that he would understand and appreciate. Discovering that I would shortly join the profession backing open access only confirmed that library school was the right choice for me, even should I not work in the open-access niche myself.

When I landed my first library position just after graduating, I called my father the anthropologist. His first question was “How much will you be paid?” I declined answering. His second question was “What’s your title?”

“Digital Repository Services Librarian,” I said, with pride and no little amusement.

On the other end of the line, a lengthy silence.

My father the anthropologist used to buy lab equipment out of his own pocket, rather than struggle with byzantine university purchasing procedures and skeptical departmental scrutiny. Rightly or wrongly, he was convinced no one would understand or support him and his work, but he refused to knuckle under. He would do what it took, spend what he had to, to further the research he fervently believed in.

I have bought quite a bit out of my own pocket too, rather than charge it to the libraries that have employed me. I have bought color inkjet printers, various sorts of expensive paper for brochures and bookmarks and whatnot, and poster printing. I have bought software that I use for work-related purposes. Once I bought an expensive print run of a color brochure because an opportunity came up to distribute a lot at once so suddenly that I didn’t have time to print and fold them myself as I usually did. I bought a cross-country trip to an important repository conference when I was de facto between jobs. I bought a laptop on which I do repository-related work when the occasion warrants. I have bought buttons with images of Mars on them, because when you’re handed a golden acronym you might as well make the most of it. Like as not the libraries I have worked in would have paid for some or all of this—I never asked.

I have read, written, rewritten, commented, and debugged code in Java, Python, and XSLT. I have tweaked JSPs, murdered unnecessary HTML tables, and rewritten CSS designs from the ground up, swearing sulfurously at various versions of Internet Explorer. I have edited metadata in XML by hand. I have translated Endnote records into Dublin Core. I have screenscraped ugly HTML and cudgeled it into legible metadata. I have screenscraped yet more ugly HTML for transformation into preservation-worthy markup. I have built convoluted SQL queries slowly and carefully from the inside out, run them on production databases with fear and trepidation, and once or twice cleaned up after them when I’ve gotten them wrong. I have typed cargo-cult incantations at command lines to keep server software running and upgraded, and raked Google for answers when some incantations didn’t work as promised.

I have stared at lengthy CVs with a sigh, and then waded resolutely in to clear rights on as many of the publications as I could. I have searched SHERPA/RoMEO and Bowker’s Books in Print. I have hunted down agreements from publisher websites. I have asked faculty for their copyright-transfer-agreement files, and tried not to let my smile grow too pained when they told me they don’t keep such things. I have explained the difference between preprints, postprints, and publisher PDFs to politely incredulous auditors. I have read scads of legalese, and interpreted it as best I could. I have read and pondered the words of librarians and lawyers who understand the legal fine points much better than I. I have made some risky calls, likely some wrong ones. I haven’t been called on the carpet for them… yet.

I have held one-on-one meetings and demo sessions with faculty and librarians. I have designed and produced brochures, flyers, slideshows, posters, web pages, wiki pages, and one mini-movie. I have presented at innumerable campus expos, showcases, lectures, symposia, conferences, and workshops. I have called and written my elected representatives. I have blogged. I have written articles and self-archived them, sometimes after polite and fruitful discussions with publishers. I have run any number of failed efforts toward building a community of practice among repository managers, each new attempt the triumph of hope over experience. I have cold-called librarians, faculty, department chairs, deans, and administrators. I have been to more meetings than ought to fit in the three years I’ve been doing this.

You needn’t be obsessed like my father the anthropologist and me. Believe me, that’s the last thing I’d recommend to anyone. If you cannot find even one thing you can do in the above list, though, I wonder about you.

I once explained to a pleasant elderly faculty member that the repository didn’t easily allow changes. “It’s like a roach motel,” I said. “Files go in, but they don’t go out. Once they’re there, they’re stuck.” Suppressed chuckles from librarians in nearby cubicles greeted that statement, and I returned from ushering the faculty member out to find that my colleagues had good-humoredly dubbed me the Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.

I loved the sobriquet, despite the unhappy truth of its depiction of institutional repositories. I have never liked telling faculty members that my services couldn’t do what they needed, and I’ve had to tell them that often and often. Worst of all, I couldn’t envision my services as anything my father the anthropologist would find useful, compelling, or even comprehensible; the promise of green open access was fading fast in the unforgiving floodlights of faculty diffidence. I looked around the open-access community for understanding and a path forward, but I found little to help or reassure me.

My father the anthropologist and I are alike in one way at least: we don’t suffer fruitless systems in silence. In one way at least, we are different: I cannot content myself with complaining to the powerless and uninvolved.

I don’t think there’s a community I operate in that my gadfly ways haven’t irked or even alienated. My library school. My librarian colleagues. DSpace developers. Green open access. Library bloggers. The DSpace Foundation. Library coders. Repository managers. The open-access community in general. While I accept all this as the price gadflies pay for being pests, it is no source of pride, nor is it pleasant. I have feared for my job, and like as not I deserve to. I have feared that the career I find myself in will not exist in five years’ time, and I have wondered uneasily whether my own behavior has hastened rather than forestalled that eventuality. I have been cautioned, questioned, belittled, berated, cut down to size in public, stepped cautiously away from, set up as homo stramineus, misquoted, deliberately or carelessly ignored—and much of it I have richly earned.

I have also been heeded. I have also made change. Not much, perhaps; certainly not all the change I wanted to make, wanted to show my father the anthropologist, wanted to offer the world. Even so, change is my gift to them and to you: my gift I offer in my much-abused hands on this Open Access Day.

Rodin, La Cathedrale.
Photo by Wallace Grobetz, via Flickr and the Creative Commons.

The beginning of the end for the institutional repository? You tell me.

I have to prepare an internal study about the usage of the documents available into Archimer, our Institutional repository, to justify the work we do on it.

We all know what I think, right? I even brought that opinion up-to-date recently.

I confess I’m a little surprised that this request didn’t come from a US repository. I’m also surprised that they seem to be focusing on downloads rather than uploads, so to speak, although I have the uncomfortable feeling that downloads may be all the ground they feel they can defend, and it’s crumbling under them.

I’m not surprised at all to see an IR forced to justify its existence. I’ll be utterly astonished if Archimer is the only one in the next year or three.

Go ahead and click over. The money quote I gave above isn’t the meat of the email. I’m still trying to work through the implications in my own head.

Required reading for repository-rats and all who love them: Palmer et al.’s investigation into institutional-repository methods and results. Given how rarely I praise research in this area, not to mention how often I complain bitterly about it, I hope my unalloyed praise for this report holds weight. It’s well-written, it’s well-supported, and it’s right in all the important ways. Like Margaret Henty’s article, which I have also had occasion to praise, it’s useful; I learned things I hadn’t known but have no trouble believing from it, and I’m an old dog as this field goes.

If you’re in the business, you can figure out pretty quickly who at least two of the three studied institutions are. (I’m still a little fuzzy on A, though I have a strong suspicion, but I know beyond a doubt who B and C are.) None of them, in case anyone is wondering, is MPOW, so I’m not feathering my own nest here.

Money quotes:

In general, the basic aims of universities in investing in IRs—to collect, preserve, and provide access to their research output—seem misleadingly simplistic compared to what IRs are actually attempting to accomplish, and what they will need to do to identify and successfully implement functions that are not redundant or risky and of high value to faculty.

This is exceedingly well-phrased, and it gives me to ponder somewhat about how I characterized the tension between repository-rats and other librarians (including but not limited to library administrators) in Roach Motel. Faced with a “basic aim” that is impossible to accomplish, repository-rats naturally nose about for other problems to solve (and the report makes that strategy quite clear, addressing its benefits and drawbacks even-handedly). I think I have traduced my ratly colleagues and myself in Roach Motel by expressing this process purely in terms of nervous rats seeking job security and self-justification, and I’m sorry for that.

The truth is, I want to be useful. We all do, all of us rats, even if not everyone is exactly like me in usefulness being a fundamental work drive, what gets me out of bed in the morning. If we can’t be useful in IRs’ “basic aim,” and often we can’t for reasons well outside our control (this being a major theme of Roach Motel), we actively look for other problems, do our best to make ourselves useful in other ways. These problems fall almost exclusively outside IRs’ supposed “basic aim,” which naturally confuses other librarians.

The intellectual property (IP) obstacles involved in populating IRs consumed significant amounts of time and resources and can be a drain on other core development activities.

No argument here. IP is a swamp, and it’s not a swamp that most IR planning processes anticipated. The report’s discussion of how faculty and IR staff build boardwalks through the swamp is trenchant and well worth reading.

Unlike other aspects of repository building, liaison networks with faculty were already a functioning part of library operations and are now serving as essential human infrastructure in IR development.

While the subject orientation of liaisons is being exploited in IR development, there seems to be much less application of their experience in collection development, management, and evaluation—areas of expertise that are highly relevant but need to be revised for the IR collection model.

Liaison librarians are essential to a well-functioning IR, and their essential-ness is most of why the maverick-manager and no-accountability staffing models are often anti-patterns. I didn’t make this clear in Roach Motel, and I now think that was another goof-up on my part. The key, as I hope I did make clear, is library administrators setting clear and realistic goals related to the IR for all their staff: repository-rats, liaisons, cataloguers, and others alike.

I tend to be a little bit more of the traditional librarian, because I don’t know TEI, and I don’t know SHTML. [I suspect that should have been 'XHTML,' and that the error was in transcription rather than originating from the librarian interviewed.] I don’t know XML. But, it’s pushed me to try to understand that a little bit better. … But what I see happening is … and actually over at the library itself, is this beautiful combination of understanding the structure of information, and understanding the code that goes behind it, and how to make it usable to the people who want to access it.

Liaison 15, whoever you are, I salute you as a valued and respected colleague! I will be quoting you to my LIS 644 students, because you are an exemplary librarian. If we ever turn up at the same conference, please introduce yourself; the drinks are on me.

Perhaps most important to the viability of IRs, however, were those [faculty] who found that the IR solved a particular information problem they faced in the everyday practice of scholarship.

I said something quite like this pretty bluntly in Roach Motel. I’m pleased to see it supported, because I could only assert it, not back it up.

Digitization was seen as a productive correlate service.

I said that, too, and I stand by it. The analog-digital divide is not something I made up. The tension comes in, I think, because digital librarianship’s usual careful, meticulous digitization and description methods cannot function here; there’s just too much material. Archivists’ “more product less process” epiphany may well be the way forward.

Depositors and liaisons alike commented on how many faculty members could not differentiate between open access scholarship and scholarship that was available through the library.

Open-access movement, this is to your address, I think. You haven’t made that nearly clear enough, and it’s a problem. What did I say once? Oh yes, this, in the context of e-reserves quarrelling: “We have to draw a thick black line connecting what faculty do and what they have access to, because right now they don’t see it.”

I can’t pull quotes from the faculty members, because everything the report quotes from them and about them is so good and so right and so real. I’ve had all those conversations before, every last one of them.

Policy and criteria-based selection and evaluation are not typical. Instead, developers have been quick to capture collections not encumbered by copyright constraints, offering access to a growing base of local technical reports, grey literature, and theses and dissertations.

This squares with my experience, and is a logical outgrowth of “basic aim” failure combined with the IP swamp. The only thing I can add is that I believe it would take a heavy load off many repository-rats’ minds if realistic selection criteria and priorities could be made explicit, such that in pulling together local tech reports, grey-lit, and ETDs (not to mention datasets), we’re confidently fulfilling our mandate instead of cautiously creeping outside it wondering what will happen to us when we get caught. Another positive outcome would be a realistic reassessment of just how much work it takes to capture peer-reviewed material legally, and resource provision to match.

By the way, any resemblance of the title of this post to an excellent episode of The Prisoner is purely intentional, ’cuz I’m just too much of a geek for that not to tickle my funny-bone (… connected to the…).

I am not talking like a pirate at you today. In return for this courtesy, I would like a small favor.

There is language rattling around in Congress that would destroy the NIH Public Access Policy. The actual bill introduced by Conyers is probably moribund if not dead. The concern now, as I understand matters, is that the anti-NIH language could be snuck into another bill.

The Open Access Directory is doing its part in a way that will help us all, no matter what it accomplishes in the Congressional wrangle. OAD has a page of publisher policies vis-a-vis the NIH Public Access Policy, and they are asking us all to investigate a publisher (one with “No known policy as of…”) and update the page.

Robin Peek asked me to publicize this effort, which I am most happy to do.

A friend of mine dropped an email to say that I should have been cited in this examination of IR-related Cooperesque personas. Oh, please, who cites blogs in stuffy old librarianship? I’m cool. Call it great (or at least thoughtful) minds thinking alike.

The money quote from that article is this:

It was assumed that the users desired an open-access archive of primarily published research materials generated by the faculty and graduate students, but the users actually desired a network where teaching and learning materials are shared, potential collaborators are identified, and participants’ research is promoted to institutional colleagues.

It was assumed. “Mistakes were made.” Mm-hm. They didn’t need to cite my personas. It wouldn’t have hurt them to cite Roach Motel on the subject of faulty ideology, or faculty not using something that has no value to them, however. They get a pass, though, because Roach Motel is still only out in preprint.

The article is worth reading in its entirety. They did the work I didn’t and couldn’t, pulling together enough user interviews to base their personas on something other than instinct and anecdote, and to their everlasting credit, they didn’t flinch away from conclusions that are not encouraging for IRs as they are designed and run today. The chief problem with the article is that none of their personas is a librarian. It’s impossible to understand the situation of IRs without the librarians who authorize, plan, build, and run them. Doing so leaves you with “it was assumed.” Assumed by whom, pray, and why? And to put a Harnadian spin on the matter, if we build faculty a whizbang collaboration space that doesn’t actually make any literature open access, is what we’re building really an IR? Will it achieve what we (we librarians, remember us?) wanted to achieve in the first place?

Anyway. Read, ponder, learn.

Also click over to Mark Leggott’s Repository in a Box. Built atop Fedora (a point I will return to shortly), this is a mashup with Drupal that faces head-on the reality that them that has (content) gets (content). Leggott has built a system that gathers citation data, freeing faculty of the need to enter it themselves and giving them incentive to correct and augment it.

I’m dubious about the strength of that incentive, personally, given the English experience with the Research Assessment Exercise. Les Carr can opine more fruitfully than I on that subject. However, any incentive is better than none!

The technical underpinnings of this work read as pretty solid to me. The one link I’m mildly dubious about is going straight to FOXML from RefWorks; on principle, I would want to go through SWORD, but sometimes pragmatism trumps principle—SWORD isn’t completely baked yet. I look forward to the release of this software, because I’m enough of a Drupalista to be able to get along with it, and I’m just starting to learn a bit about Fedora.

I get the sense sometimes that the decision to run an IR on DSpace is, in the United States at least, a variant on “Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft.” Of the three open-source repository packages, it is the most demanding on hardware and (ironically) the hardest to install and get running. (I got Fedora running on my desktop Mac at work in fifteen minutes. Seriously. Try that with DSpace, I double-dog dare you.) Compared with Fedora, DSpace is rigid and all but impossible to stack other technologies on, as Mark Leggott has done with Drupal. Compared with EPrints, DSpace is an unusable mess, particularly on the back end.

(If you sit Chris Gutteridge down with a beer, as I was able to do in Edinburgh, he will happily tell you that he revamped the EPrints deposit system for usability after trying to deposit something in an EPrints repository and being appalled at the number of clicks and keystrokes it took. He did a good job of it, too. On my more evilminded days, I have wild daydreams of forcing the entire DSpace development inner circle to screenscrape back issues of a journal or newsletter and then deposit every single last article through the DSpace web UI, one… by… one. Much would be learned, I believe.)

And if you’re even thinking about building the system that would satisfy the personas in the Maness et al. article—forget about building it over DSpace. Just forget it. Sheer madness. Fedora is the right choice, the only possible choice.

For the last month, I’ve been running an ad-hoc requirements-gathering process on the DSpace mailing lists and IRC channel. I’ve learned a few things from it. One is that getting librarians to speak up in a discussion even faintly technical is like pulling all your teeth at once. I am quite unhappy about this; never mind that it doesn’t speak well at all for my profession, it’s ludicrous to ask a passel of developers to read our minds. No wonder the ILS is in such a sad state (open-source aside). Relying on, or even hoping for, librarian input can be just plain deadly.

The other thing I’ve learned is that the DSpace development process is significantly underresourced given the state of the codebase and the needs of the stakeholders. I don’t have a quick fix for this (and as I must, I have mythical man-months in the back of my mind) or even a useful suggestion. I can only observe that it’s standing in the way of progress. I can gather all the requirements I want—and despite my grousing, I think I have gathered quite a bit of useful input in the last month—but it don’t mean a thing if none of it can get built, and I’m currently hearing a lot of “we can’t build this; we’re volunteers” from the developers.

As always, caveat lector. Caveat emptor as well. If I were Harvard especially, I’d be looking really really hard at Mark Leggott’s mashup, because it goes a long way toward nipping a potentially damaging faculty backlash (against extra work) in the bud. Try that on top of DSpace. Even with SWORD, which at least makes something like that possible, it’s a tall order.

In all honesty—I’m having a much easier time of it learning how Fedora ticks than I ever had learning DSpace. Partly that’s because I’m an old unreconstructed markup geek, so little XML files hold few terrors (and FOXML is actually pretty elegant, as these things go; it’s definitely nicer than METS), but partly it’s the effect of a sanely-designed system.

Anyway. That’s what’s caught my eye the last few days. Read, ponder, learn.

I’m pretty open in my belief that Europe in general and the UK in particular are a goodly distance ahead of the US in taking repositories (and repository-rats) seriously and moving them forward. Two things that came across the transom today confirmed that impression.

The first was the JISC-sponsored Rights and Repositories workshop. I want to go to something like this. I’ve always had to deal with rights issues (beyond the ordinary rote stuff) ad-hoc and mostly unsupported. With ad-hoc problems, that mostly works, but I feel as though I’m tiptoeing through minefields. Just the validation would be nice! Note also that half the morning speakers are real repository-rats dealing with real problems in real repositories, and that the entire afternoon was repository-rats talking amongst themselves rather than Talking Heads (or worse, Big Thinkers) talking at them.

The second thing was the announcement of the SPARC IR meeting program. I will be going to this, because I can’t very well not, but I must confess I haven’t been entirely enthusiastic about it… and I’m still not. Except for “oh, hey, they got a speaker from DRIVER!” DRIVER, of course, is a European initiative.

They don’t have talk topics up yet, so maybe I’ll be blown out of the water by their brilliance and relevance. I hope so. As I look at the Program Committee, though, I see one name I recognize as belonging to a repository-rat. One. Even if the real number is double or triple that—that’s insufficient, and it’s disturbing, and it’s frankly insulting. Come on, SPARC, I expect better than this from you. It’s past time you figured out that some of us on the ground might actually know our needs better than your Big Thinkers.

What really makes me roll my eyes, though, is the “marketing practicum for repository advocates.” With, forsooth, not a single repository-rat on it. That’s silly, because how can you discourse learnedly about marketing something you don’t know anything about, much less have ever marketed? I fully expect this session to be a mishmash of thunderingly useless generalities and condescending head-patting.

The real problem, though, is that if this benighted country still hasn’t managed to figure out that marketing repositories is completely useless in the absence of a value proposition, well… we’re behind, that’s all there is to it. Behind the times and wallowing in it.

I wish JISC could cross the pond wielding a great big clue-by-four, I really do. I pledge that I will do my level best to be a nice, pleasant, politic repository-rat when I go to SPARC-IR, and I’m saying so publicly as an added incentive to keep my word. But I have a terrible, terrible feeling I’ll find it a strain.