Caveat Lector

A couple-three things happened last week that (combined with another thing that happened some time past) have left me feeling vindicated on some of my less-happy opinions. I’m not exactly schadenfreudish about it; more a sense that finally, maybe, there will be some forward motion. That can only be good.

And I can say in all honesty that at least one such thing wouldn’t have happened at all if I hadn’t possessed a quasi-professional public soapbox firewalled off from my job strictly enough that third parties can’t easily get me in trouble for it. Because, the third parties in question? Have a history of getting people they find bothersome in trouble at work. In my case, they’re coming to the table instead, presumably having evaluated the available opportunity to dunk me in the soup and decided it either wasn’t possible or wasn’t worth the effort.

(Not that I trust them further than I could conveniently throw them, mind you. I’m optimistic, not stupid. Due self-protection measures are being taken.)

Over the last couple years I’ve learned that I can do professional writing, though it takes a hell of a lot out of me and I don’t think I will ever find it easy. Speaking is worlds easier, and whole universes more fun. (Combine Walt Crawford, to whom good writing comes as naturally as breathing, and me and you’d have one frighteningly effective public-figure librarian.)

I’ve also learned, though, that much professional publishing is limited-impact, especially when the goal is to motivate action (as my implicit professional-writing goal usually is). The thing I wrote for Library Journal wasn’t wholly bad, but it sank like a stone, to judge by the lack of reaction. My essay for Information Tomorrow—I was satisfied with it. It was solid if uninspired writing (and “solid but uninspired” is about the best I can do, folks). And when I wrote it, it broke some ground. When it was finally published, though… not so much with the groundbreaking. Kind of unfair.

If I’d waited for Roach Motel to be formally published, I suspect the same thing would have happened. I am not the only person saying some of what’s in Roach Motel (though I do, perhaps over-enthusiastically, think some of its observations and analysis are original). If I’d waited, why would anyone bother to read me? Or believe that I’d come up with this stuff off my own bat rather than reading it elsewhere?

As it is—I’ve laid my claim, with Roach Motel and with the NISO/PALINET talk, and people are listening, and wheels are slowly starting to turn.

There’s a taxonomy in all this, somewhere. (I am such a flippin’ librarian sometimes.) The blog is for open dissent and matters that won’t wait for my agonizingly slow formal-composition process. Speaking is for education and out-on-a-limb assertions. Professional writing is for persuasion, and open access to professional writing is for establishing primacy and expanding reach.

Perhaps it’s a sign of a hopelessly contrary nature that I need that open-dissent safe-space. Can’t imagine doing without it. Moreover, I’m just contrary enough to think that the blog’s helped my chosen profession as much as or more than anything else I’ve written for it. I’m satisfied with that.

In honor of Public Domain Day, I remind everyone that I granted Caveat Lector to the public domain quite some time ago.

When Creative Commons gets CC0 in gear finally, I’ll pop a badge and a license up, something I decided against years ago because CC0 didn’t exist.

Until then, take my word for it. I won’t sue. Honest.

So, not a day after I ask the hypesters to leave my damn blogosphere the hell alone, I get another tout email. Do you morons not read? (Yes, okay, that one answers itself.)

Here’s my new policy. I’m publishing any of those I get. Sans links. With names. Call it my little gesture toward turning over the rock and watching the little grubs squirm.

Hi,

We just posted an article “[article name deleted] “( [article URL deleted] ). I thought I’d bring it to your attention just in case you think your readers would find it interesting.

Either way, thanks for your time! Happy New Year!

Amy S Quinn

Email address was from GMail; headers gave no immediate reason to doubt that provenance.

Bite me, Ms. Quinn.

So Pew Internet has a new report out on people’s use of public libraries. This is the kind of thing Pew does, and while they need to fire whoever it is that slaps cutesy names on the demographics that shake out of their surveys (because “cutesy” has a really bad habit in their hands of shading into “offensive”), what they put out is generally at least worth reading and pondering.

The biblioblogosphere is usually pretty good about reading and pondering Pew stuff, but apparently Pew isn’t satisfied by its penetration therein, because they’re courting bibliobloggers in email behind the scenes. A few of the bloggers who have commented on the report thus far have noted that they were approached; most that I’ve seen have not. That doesn’t mean that anybody’s hiding anything; we can’t know which of them responded to Pew’s email and which just read the report and spontaneously found it interesting enough to comment on.

The email I got was fairly classy, as these things go; definitely not the kind of idiot PR spam that gets my back up. It addressed me specifically. It indicated more or less how my name came up and why I was chosen. No quid pro quo, not even wink-wink-nudge-nudge style. No arrogance. Really nicely done.

And it still bugs the crap out of me. I’m sorry, it just does.

One of the nice things about using blogs as a professional filter is the confidence I had that I was following people’s genuine interests, influenced by no more than their own curiosity and intelligence and the environment they exist in and interact with. These weren’t, in a word, people who were being told what to think, much less paid to think it. They weren’t being filtered, in turn, by any particular establishment, no matter how well-meaning, much less a vendor or other organization with enough dogs in the hunt to create actual bias. That’s useful, that is.

And now I don’t know how far I can trust the filter any more, and that’s a loss to me.

A number of bibliobloggers I respect have written policies about reviews and whatnot. I’ve resisted that here, because hell, I’m just a one-horse blogger with an antique (in web terms) theme, too ornery to mess with and too inconsequential to court. Best I can tell, in fact, I’ve lost readership in the last year or so; it’s been kind of a weird year, personally and professionally, and I can well believe old CavLec hasn’t been up to scratch lately.

But in the interests of transparency, I may have to change my mind. Here’s the deal. 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, as I’ve just done with Pew. That goes double if you try to hide your interest from me (which Pew was smart enough not to do).

Don’t mess in my biblioblogosphere, hypesters. I resent it. And bibliobloggers: it will help me, for one, if you disclose this stuff. Nobody has to be as ornery as I am about it, but as a blog reader, I would like to be able to take these faux-grassroots stunts into account as I read.

May I just say that the results of this search are freaking me right the hell out?

Somebody needs to revise the Worldcat relevancy algorithm. STAT.

(And no, I didn’t intentionally go do a Worldcat ego search. I just needed some results so I could see how they’d designed their results and item-metadata pages, so I typed the first name that came to mind.)

Busy. Dammit. I can’t escape teh busy. Not for five minutes.

I’ll be out of town Sunday through Tuesday at the NISO/PALINET thing. Slides are done, but I haven’t scripted them, so guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow? (That and next week’s class lecture.)

If that’s not enough, I’m up for fifteen minutes at a local teaching/learning tech thing on the 13th. I can cannibalize existing presentations to put that together, but I still have to do that (and we just won’t talk about the two hours I spent on a meeting yesterday over this, because I am rapidly forming a personal rule that anything on which I have to spend more meeting time than actual doing the thing time is not worthwhile).

And Roach Motel is due shortly, and while I think it’s quite done enough to give to an editor without cringing—I took a pass through and fixed a lot of structural problems that were causing unnecessary repetition, and have I mentioned that I’m really not a very fluid and polished writer?—I haven’t formatted it the way they want and I need to do that.

And I’m so overdue on a book review that let’s not even talk about how overdue I am on the book review. I’m taking the book with me to read on the plane.

And I’ve basically promised to make a stab at integrating some PREMIS into Manakin, because that is the officially-blessed way of solving my friendly file-format descriptions problem. Wish me luck with that.

If that’s not enough, toss in some fairly massive upheaval in both personal and professional lives, none of which I feel justified in blogging publicly. Suffice to say that while both situations are unsettled, both are improving and I am cautiously optimistic about both—but none of it does anything useful for my stress levels, right?

There may be blogging. There may not be blogging. I’m busy.

There is likely to be more Manakin blogging; the redesign proceedeth apace and I have some tidbits to share. I merely remark briefly that I do better relying on my own hacktastic CSS skills than using other people’s beautiful elegant solutions. I tried the Holy Grail. I spent days trying to get it to do what I needed, and that was just in Firefox—I looked at it for the first time in IE yesterday, and it was horrendously, unbelievably, irretrievably broken. I gave up shortly thereafter, and within 45 minutes had something that is working fine in Firefox, and probably won’t need more than a few box-model tweaks in IE.

In passing: I read this report (PDF) on the fate of social-science post-docs, and was struck by the sentence “Funders, policy makers, disciplinary associations, universities, and graduate faculty need to recognize that the PhD in the 21st century is preparation for employment.”

I… I… I got nothin’. I can’t think of a blessed thing to say to this. Except a loud and boisterous “BEWARE!” to anyone thinking of entrusting their lives to a doctorate in a social-science discipline. (Including LIS.)

I am the Annoyed Librarian. Come the heck on, people, didn’t you all suspect already? There ain’t nobody in this here biblioblogosphere more annoyed than I am.

Library school? All over it. The stupid job-shortage lies? Oh yeah. Technology uberhype? Annoys me past reason. Pointless ALA shenanigans? I’ve expended more verbiage on that than anybody, and I don’t even belong to ALA.

You knew. ’Fess up. You all knew all along (because hey, writing styles like mine aren’t a dime a dozen, you know?) and you’ve just been humoring me.

Jenica, Michelle, Rochelle, Laura, just give it up. Poseurs. You can’t out-annoyed me. I practically invented annoyance!

??? ! ?! !! ? !!!

I may at some point come up with coherent commentary. I’m not counting on it, though. I’m still stuck at “Bwuh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are days when my own natural writing style embarrasses me. I’m not sure it should, but it does.

Being linked by a Chronk blogger is one of those days.

Maybe I need a Gut Reaction category, so people will know I’m not being wholly buttoned-down about something and so perhaps they shouldn’t link me in buttoned-down environments. Argh.