In my little pond, though, those days are so over. When well over half the people you bump into at a pretty good-sized (over 300 people) conference recognize your name, when an appreciable proportion of those actually make an effort to find you for a greeting or a question, when you are namechecked several times in more than one presentation in a mere two-and-a-half-day meeting—it’s over, honey. Time to learn to wave prettily and smile a lot.

I was right that Roach Motel has reached places that disreputable old CavLec couldn’t. That said, I also found quite a few fans of CavLec, disreputable or not, and a great many more readers, even if I can’t classify them as fans without considerable semantic violence. (Just say no to word abuse, people.)

… And that’s humbling. And weird. And even scary.

But there was a near-universal theme in the contacts I had with people at the conference, and it goes beyond mere notoriety. I learned a lot from you, people told me again and again. Now that, that is gratifying. That makes me feel valued and (in my rat-in-the-wainscoting way) valuable. Since I haven’t been feeling much of either of those lately, I can only be grateful.

So thank you. Thank you for coming up to shake my hand. Thank you for smiling at me. Thank you for talking to me and listening to me. Thank you for asking me questions; I hope my answers were even a little bit useful. Thank you, the two or three people who were surprised not to see me on the podium at the conference. (BibApp was supposed to be shopped to the Innovation Fair, but I was the one who was supposed to shop it, and I completely dropped the ball. Nobody’s fault but mine, and in fact, the conference extended my deadline, so really, there is no excuse for me.) Thank you for emailing me after the conference. Thank you, one and all. Your kindness, individually and collectively, meant more to me than I can conveniently explain.

One person at the conference was kind enough to be worried for my worklife over CavLec. It’s fair to say that certain parties consider CavLec a liability rather than an asset—and I’m certainly not arguing with them!—but it’s also quite well-established in blog terms, has outlasted several jobs, and like it or not, has had real professional impact. (Which weirds me out, but there you are.) Some liabilities aren’t important enough to make a fuss over. For the nonce, although MPOW isn’t generally as laissez-faire about these things as MfPOW and especially the World’s Coolest Boss, I think I’m okay.

Dan Chudnov, in the middle of a mostly-genteel blackmail attempt (whose spirit I wholly agree with), said pretty much what I think about the trouble that CavLec occasionally gets me into:

It can be freeing to say things everybody thinks but out loud and Annoyedly and annoyingly… Though, to be honest, I’ve been lucky enough to have done that one or two times along the way, and I know you know what I mean, we already established that. Here’s the difference: when I’ve done it, it’s pissed some people off, but it was me who did it, me with my name and face and the sincerity you can’t mock when it’s your name and your face and your voice and people are going to remember that combination.

Yes. Trouble isn’t fun, and I don’t intentionally court it; who needs the stress? But I’ll take my lumps when I’ve earned ’em, and though I’ve met people who don’t respect some things I’ve said here or the way I say them (and no more they should, either), I’ve never met anybody who didn’t respect my general integrity. That’s good enough for me.

There’s been a bit of buzz about the so-called death of the blog lately. Blogging is so 2002, don’t you know. Abandoned blogs, splogs, big names leaving their blogs behind them, new blogging blood siphoned off to Facebook and FriendFeed and whathaveyou, whatever.

Whatever. CavLec isn’t going anywhere. It’s not a notoriety magnet, it’s not a social tool, it’s not a tentative experiment with things 2.0-ish. Quite simply, it’s where I think stuff through, it’s turned out to be a fantastic tool for that, and I’ll never not need to think stuff through. Sure, it comes with side-benefits, more than I could ever have imagined. But those could all go away, and CavLec would still be worth something to me myself. Good enough.

And a last thank-you to all of you who read. Thank you.

I’m not sanguine it’ll win, though. It’s good writing, and apropos, and there’s humor in it as well as solid storytelling—but it’s not happytalk. If I ever knew how to do happytalk, I’ve forgotten. If there’s a word for my Open Access Day blog post, it’s “edgy.”

I swear I don’t do this on purpose. I didn’t know what I was setting out to write as I was writing it; I just knew what the beginning was, and some of the bits in the middle. I got to the end finally and was dismayed. Sometimes, damn it, the writing writes me.

I’ve set it, if my Wordpress-fu comes through, to publish automatically at midnight on October 14. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves then.

Books, reports, survey results, whatever… if I run into it in the ordinary course of business (meaning, in my regularly-read blogs or via my hybrid FriendFeed/Twitter network) and think it’s interesting, I’ll blog it. Honestly, though, whether I blog something has less to do with whether I think it’s worthwhile or useful and more to do with whether it touches off something in my head. CavLec is not a link-blog; I use del.icio.us and FriendFeed for that. CavLec is where I think out loud.

Anything of that nature that you email me automatically goes in my “you annoyed me, and therefore I won’t talk about you on CavLec except pejoratively even if I might otherwise be interested” mental file. This is obviously not the file you want to be in.

So please, please, please take me off those mover-and-shaker email lists you’re compiling. Have somebody start you a blog, one interesting and human enough that I want to read it. (OCLC, Palinet, and Talis have done it; so can you.) Put somebody on FriendFeed who’s interesting and human enough for me to want to subscribe to. Those tactics might work, subject to my brain’s caprices. But do not email me. As I said a while ago when Pew Internet tried this:

I value my bloggy independence, as I have from the very beginnings of CavLec, and I’m ornery as a kicked mule. If you push me to read and talk about something you have a direct interest in, not because you think it’s useful to me, and not because you intend to put my input to some sort of practical use (as with, say, a standards draft), but because you want to create buzz? To hell with you. I won’t just not read or review it, I’ll be more than a little tempted to call you out in public… That goes double if you try to hide your interest from me…

I’m trying to help you here. I know y’all work very hard on what you produce, and you want to see it read and pondered. Tactics matter, is all I’m saying. This means you, “Jessica Disch” of PSBPR.com.

However, I did want to point out to CavLec partisans that there is now a commenting venue of sorts: my FriendFeed page, which imports CavLec’s RSS feed.

I’m okay with this, just as I’ve been okay with the LiveJournal feed as a solution to the oft-expressed desire of various CavLec readers to have a public place to shake me until my teeth rattle. Anonymous cowards need not apply; only FriendFeed subscribers can add comments. The comments don’t live in my living room, which I appreciate. Trolls can apparently be banned from further commenting, though I’m not quite sure of the mechanism there, not having had to employ it.

I hopped onto FriendFeed as part of an exodus from Twitter’s FailWhale. It turns out to be rather clever, especially in the design department. If you see something on your FriendFeed friends page that you don’t care to look at, you “hide” it. If you then ask to hide more things like that, AJAX dialog figures out intelligently what classes of things the thing you hid belong to, and offers you the chance to hide all of them. I don’t personally care about people’s Flickr feeds (yeah, sorry, not a visual person by nature), so I told FriendFeed not to show me them, and by gum it doesn’t. Clever and helpful. I like that in an app.

But anyway. You can now indulge your commenting urge. Go to it.

Well, as the owner of one of those blogs—thanks for taking better care of my reputation than I do. It’s appreciated.

This is not the first time. It got quoted in a presentation at OR ’08. It’s got thirty-some-odd saves on del.icio.us. A couple quick Googles indicate that it has been recommended reading in high places. A quick look at statistics on the repository I run indicates that it rapidly soared into the top spot on download numbers, beating out a popular journal whose top issue had been there since 2005. (It has since been eclipsed by several articles from an undergrad kinesiology journal. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

The thing ain’t been published yet. Moreover, the preprint version has several embarrassing errors (I fixed the boneheaded mis-citation of Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical, and Economic Aspects, I promise). Nevertheless, it’s out there and it’s making waves. If ever there were a demonstration of the impact of preprint-posting, Roach Motel is it.

From a whuffie perspective, this is jaw-droppingly astounding. From the vastly more important practical-results perspective… well, we’ll see. An extremely common reaction to it is “Yeah, isn’t that awful? But it’s not happening here, oh, no.” No wonder we don’t have a community of practice. We can’t get our heads out of (ahem) the sand long enough to notice each other, or tell the truth.

I admit I’m sort of looking forward to the SPARC IR meeting in November (which I am planning to attend, and present at if possible), because Roach Motel should be out in print by then. I’ll be happy if it informs discussion, happier still if it informs policy, happiest of all if it inspires action. As yet, though, all it’s accomplished in meatspace that I’m aware of is getting several people angry at me that I don’t at all need angry at me, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

No, what I’m really pondering at the moment is the impact I am having on my chosen profession, sometimes intentionally… and sometimes not so much so. Honestly, I’m starting to be—startled? unnerved? weirded out? Something. Not so much by Roach Motel, which I knew all along was something of a Molotov cocktail, as by all the other stuff.

Whenever I check my referrer logs these days, I see a hit or two from a library-student blog or Somebody Else’s Courseware (which of course I can’t get into, thank you, AAP and FERPA). I mean, every time. Warping the minds of the young and impressionable, that’s me, I guess. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does; after all, I taught library school and have every intention of doing so again.

But it does bother me, just as CavLec getting linked to and quoted is sometimes bothersome. It’s that damn context thing again. Grrrr, it’s irksome.

What it boils down to is that very much against my will, I’m finding myself self-censoring on CavLec because like it or not, it’s a large part of my professional face, and as such, it needs to be polished to a brighter sheen than I have heretofore employed. This annoys the living hell out of me. It wasn’t supposed to be this way!

And I don’t have a solution. But, again, I’m thinking about it. It’s a good time for that; I’m six-squared years old today, which invites the yearly navel-gaze.

I got all the other yarinareth.net blogs up and running in a jiffy. No sweat. WordPress export, WordPress import, ba-da-bing ba-da-blog. (Li, I can’t remember what the name of your theme was. If you remember, let me know… or feel free to dig up a new theme.)

CavLec? Was a problem. I couldn’t use the WP export, because CavLec is so gargantuan the export command timed out, and I couldn’t convince OldWebHost to help me make it work. So okay, I did the SQL dump, checked it, and lit out for greener pastures.

It’s supposed to be easy to restore a blog from a SQL dump. Change the table names to fit WPMU, import, done. Except not so much. Go to blog, get white screen sans error messages. Well, that’s just great.

After contemplating my rock collection, I picked up the bit-at-a-time SQL rock, playing only with the tables I knew I would need. I suspected the issue was that the wp_options table from the old blog was playing hob with WPMU.

Well, I was wrong, but the tactic did enable me to figure out what the problem was… the wp_posts table in WPMU was missing two fields (post_lat and post_lon, and why I need to geolocate my posts I’m sure I’m not sure) that the SQL dump had. So okay, I add the fields to the table, cut-and-paste the INSERT clauses just to be safe, and what do you know, I seem to have a blog again.

There are issues. Image links from this blog (and all Yarinareth blogs) are umpty-broken. I have the images and will fix when I can. But for now, I’m just happy to have my BLOG BACK.

(Incidentally—yes, I have been reading it *gasp* onscreen. Buffle’s screen is a bit small to run Preview in single-page mode, which is frankly what I prefer, but oh well. It does well enough for the purpose.)

Solove spills a lot of ink (or pixels, if you prefer) on misunderstandings of the Internet rooted in the public/private question, from teenagers who think adults have no right (or worse, no ability) to read their blogs to people who find communications they had thought private compromised in the most public and humiliating of fashions.

My question is a little different, though related. It is this: To what extent am I entitled to attach context-dependent social expectations to a corner of the Internet that I control? May I expect that the social context I believe I am writing in will be respected when my writing is discovered in other contexts?

Bleh, this is easier to explain by example. In meatspace, different spaces come with attached social norms. I can put my feet up on my own couch, but not anybody else’s (unless I’m told it’s okay). I don’t pay for dinner in a friend’s home, just as I don’t bring a guest-gift to a restaurant. I say things about my workplace environment in my apartment that I would never say to a colleague at work. (What? Don’t tell me you don’t. I don’t believe you.) Interestingly, my workplace has a social norm that certain conversations take place in local coffeeshops rather than on campus.

To an extent, there are analogues to this segregation-by-space on the internet. LiveJournal norms are not LinkedIn norms are not Ning norms are not Facebook norms are not Twitter norms are not MetaFilter norms. So one option for the individual wanting her written output to be read in a particular way with particular allowances is to find a space whose norms and affordances roughly correspond with the desired reading. This is, I think, partly why I have a LiveJournal.

That doesn’t solve the whole intellectual problem, though. What social norms can be attached to an individual’s own webspace? How can she enforce them? What happens when her work appears outside the context where her norms operate?

Take CavLec. It is written on webspace I pay for. I installed the software, back in the day (though I admit I rely on one-click upgrades these days). I make a point of disclaiming connections between CavLec and my employer, even to refusing to acknowledge CavLec in many professional contexts despite the considerable amount of writing I do here that is relevant to my profession. (I’ve done it, once or twice. I got to Project Bamboo on the strength of it. I do go out of my way to avoid doing so, though.) I even put a warning in its very title, for those overeducated enough to recognize it as such.

How responsible am I for limiting my language to what others will find—not just acceptable, but attractive and persuasive? Am I required not to name names? Not to cuss? How free am I to go beyond the professional persona? I used to be a good deal more personally open on CavLec than I am now. Some of that is that I’ve been specifically asked not to blog about certain things, and I respect that, but some of it is just… damn it, my context seems to have shifted out from under me, and I’m not sure I’m entirely happy about it.

I suppose I’d like CavLec to feel more like my living room than it does these days. I’m not sure what to do about that… but I’ll be thinking about it.

He brings up something that I’ve heard from other people as well: annoyance at my insistence on the phrase “repository-rat” to refer to librarians who manage institutional repositories. Some of that is me, and some of it is deliberate and calculated rhetorical strategy. It seems worth picking apart.

The “me” part, I confess, is of a piece with my steadfast refusal to take myself and what I do too seriously. Back in the day, I called myself a conversion peasant. Now I’m a repository-rat. I’m stubborn about this, and I don’t anticipate changing it… but I also recognize that it leaks into how I refer to other repository managers, as well as the specialty as a whole, and I see how that can feel like disdain.

It isn’t. It takes quite a bit of dedication to stick with IRs, and an impressive array of skills to manage one well. (I’m not saying I do, mind. Not for me to say. But I’m steeped in this field, I know whom I respect, and I know what they are capable of.) Moreover, these dedicated, skilled people have to persevere in the face of widespread ignorance, apathy, and even opprobrium directed at them, never mind lousy software and badly-stacked odds.

Which leads me to the rhetorical-strategy bit. I feel like a rat in the wainscoting, ignored and despised and isolated. Why shouldn’t I? Why should I be any prouder of what I do than my employer (which has partially defunded my service), my profession (which barely acknowledges I exist and makes no effort to support me), or the open-access movement (which openly insults me when it doesn’t ignore me)? Why should I pretend to support and respect I don’t actually have?

And why is it uniquely my responsibility to redress these issues? If the institution I work for, the profession I have joined, or the open-access movement I am part of would like me to stop referring to myself as a rodent, howsabout they toss me a bone so I can move up the animal taxonomy a bit?

Like the immortal archy, I see things from the under side. There’s use in that, I maintain, just as there’s use in colleagues such as Shane asserting themselves to raise the profile of our work and the esteem in which it is held. I’m on their side, I truly am—I just approach the work from a different angle.

insects are not always
going to be bullied
by humanity
some day they will revolt
i am already organizing
a revolutionary society to be
known as the worms turnverein

—Don Marquis

I am hard at work on a little movie for MPOW, to be shown at an arts-and-humanities symposium in (yikes yikes yikes!) two weeks (yikes!). This turns out to be surprisingly simple and even enjoyable, given Keynote, Garage Band, a video camera, a digital audio recorder, lots of neat pictures from MPOW’s collections, and a hell of a lot of time and elbow grease. I have yet to see whether Keynote’s QuickTime export works as advertised, but if it does, I will be a very happy camper.

Come to think of it… I should probably check that on Monday. You think?