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.

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.

Herewith, some linkies.

• Toward a third way of doing digital humanities. Tom gets at a lot of the things that have always bugged me about the “but is it research?” schtick, and as another person who has chosen a “third way” to do the digital, I am in total agreement with what he says about the rewards thereof.
• Springer buys Biomed Central. Not to kill it off, I hope… but that’s a possibility. The fight is not won when a journal goes OA. The fight is barely begun. Now we know (though we should have known all along).
• One week to Open Access Day. Yay! Go hug a repository-rat. Just not me, because I’m sick.
• I have been interviewed. As usual, in the cold light of day even I don’t agree with everything I said, but what the hey. John asked some really good questions.

I’m embarrassed to say how many of these I didn’t know about (I’m on a mass-subscription kick this very moment!), and very grateful to JISC for undertaking this. Such things as this foster the community of practice repositories and their staff need so very badly.

Karen Brown, Dominican University. “Libraries and the Scholarly Process.”

Building on Judith Nadler’s talk. Things happening in libraries in support of scholarship; also challenges.

Three considerations: resources and materials, the scholar (and the process of scholarship), the institution (of librarianship). “Clouds” as metaphor coming up a lot.

Resources: the library provides systematic cataloguing/classification of materials. The way this is done hasn’t kept pace with current applications (e.g. Web 2.0). You used to have to know LCSH to get anywhere with your search, but that’s changing. We’re also starting to use visual metaphors, clouds of related terms, to help navigation (e.g. AquaBrowser). Learning how to help browsing, amassing resources, navigating the universe.

Personal information clouds: increased expectation to take your tools and resource access with you (mobiles, wireless networks, collaboration/sharing). How do we enable this in libraries? “Seed the clouds” to get info to people who need it.

Clouds of collaboration: large-scale projects, infrastructure investment, huge funding issues. Example: Making of America project. No one institution can do these things alone!

Q: Cloud is pretty from without, “debilitating fog” from within. So who is it that’s making the associations in AquaBrowser? How important is it to expose the identities of the cloudmakers? A: AquaBrowser works with subject terms as well as terms you add as you do your search. You end up with a mix of controlled and uncontrolled subject terms.

Free-associating reminds us that things we think of as new really aren’t. 25 years and four jobs ago, head of Educational Technology Center, working out how to use computers in schools. Controversial but interesting project. Why did/didn’t it work?

Project Athena: same questions as ETC, but different technology and more resources. Now? Opportunity to reflect on these questions again. Many policy questions revolve around copyright, which are threatening serious effects on scholars’ use of raw materials.

Under what circumstances should we think about things as following stage progressions? (To get to one stage, you go through previous one; you don’t regress.) If you organize process around this, it’s all about moving people forward on a determined path. Thinking about technology in scholarly work tends to presume a stage progression. Presumption is that until you do the simple stuff, you can’t think about the advanced stuff.

Different way to think about it: we are always facing choices. The choice set varies, but you have an everpresent array, and there isn’t just one path through.

An interesting thing about Bamboo is that it’s caught on like wildfire, and it’s really engaging people. Why? Because it’s interesting from a transactional-analysis point of view. Often, we get an “I’m okay—you’re not okay” viewpoint, where the technologists are automatically okay and anyone who’s not paying attention to technology isn’t. These interactions produce pathological results.

But is it just the techies doing this? A professor at UC complained that students weren’t paying attention in class because of open laptops; requested wireless turned off. Response: it won’t work, because there are other connection modalities. Response: this is not a technical problem, it’s a classroom-management problem, so cope! This is another “I’m okay—you’re not okay” transaction! I want what I want, I don’t care what you think, and if you don’t agree, you’re full of it.

Not okay/not okay transactions: Tech exists that works, but isn’t even slightly creative and doesn’t change the educational process. E.g. basic course-management system. Increases efficiency, but it doesn’t change a damn thing; both sides are thinking “I don’t really know how to do this, but I have to do something.”

Bamboo is different; all sides are trying to understand each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re talking with idiots, but no, we’re talking with smart people saying idiotic things; we have to pick through that and get into the other side’s head (why don’t they think it’s idiotic?).

Goal: getting to “I’m okay—you’re okay.” Releasing the potential we all suspect is there, in this interaction of tech and the humanities.

Table 1. Intellectual networking/self-interest; fieldwork/folklore. Listed out traditional networking processes (conferences, institutes, seminars, humanities centers, individual contacts and mentoring, etc). Eventually mailing lists came about, and they were different: enabled lurking (which is no good at a conference!), non-networking networking. Newer networking practices (undergrads and younger grad students): always in the network, multitasking with one task being networking, networks start at an early age and carry over across educational contexts, bigger networks than young scholars had before. In learning-management systems, networks are brutally cut off at semester end because of FERPA; conversations end abruptly. In networks outside university contexts, this doesn’t have to happen. No strong evidence of these networks among current-gen humanities scholars, but will probably happen.

Fieldwork/folklore. Collect a lot of data, but only a small amount of it ends up published/cited. Where does that primary material go? No incentive to collect/organize it, arrange it for IR, but IR doesn’t know what to do with it without that organization! Sciences notion of “waste data” that’s of use to someone else. E.g. Hubble telescope images captured incidentally, while tracking from one part of the sky to another, not useful to PIs, but useful to someone else! Not a practice of sharing data collection in the humanities (”if I go to Amsterdam to look at my stuff, I don’t ask anybody ‘hey, I’m going to Amsterdam, is there something I can look at for you?’”).

Table 2. IP/creation of new works. Talked about distribution too. Humanities consume IP to produce IP (e.g. media studies). Bamboo should push fair use hard and aggressively. What is the best approach? Model licenses, “bill of rights” (proclamation “we the scholars believe we have these rights to use your materials…”), e.g. use without permissions, non-exclusive digitization rights. Whatever Bamboo does needs to be open (source). Could be like JSTOR or DLF; pay-to-play, or RedHat Linux model (free to use, support costs). Google is aggressively digitizing stuff from the global south, stuff needing digitization for preservation purposes, but it’s the usual exclusive license; deal with the devil? are we being scooped by Google? can Bamboo help, by digitizing stuff in a more open and equitable manner?

Libraries/universities as publishers. Will they stand behind faculty who publish riskier (vis-a-vis IP) materials? How will they respond to cease-and-desist orders? IRs should be easier to use and operate!

Table 3. Delivery/presentation/dissemination. What is the architecture needing development to make things accessible? Indexing, search, scanning, delivery, flexibility. Assume that architecture exists; what does delivery mean? Building interfaces to resources based on target audience. Packaging relevant to content and audience. Information visualization!

Dissemination: assuming we want to reach a wide audience, it should be possible. Multiple delivery vectors. Simplifying access. Cheap access!

Presentation: networking techniques involving technology, e.g. Second Life, sharing slidedecks. Long-distance collaboration. “Interfaces” includes Google Earth tricks (Rumsey Maps). Is Bamboo a self-contained software stack, or a collaboration among developers of many different tools? Either way, you want connections/hooks into other technologies (such as 2.0 tech).

Serendipity: Pure luck in discovering something you weren’t looking for. Open to discovering unlooked-for possibilities throughout the Bamboo process. Tools exist already that facilitate this (clustering search engines, SemWeb stuff). Bamboo = slime mold!

Table 4. Creativity/recreating past methods. What does creativity mean? New discourse contexts, new products, new strategies; new forms of creativity. Related verbs: moving around, adapt, play, react, test, re-mediate, repurpose, experiment. Sometimes you have to be saturated with info to do this; sometimes you have to be expert. Limits and inspiration to creativity: technology, context, having a problem. Creativity killers: technology, form, control, isolation, pressure, no pressure, audience, rules.

What should Bamboo do? Figure out how to make tools that enable productive play without wasting time.

Recreating past methods: to understand what you’re looking at. Recreate an environment (e.g. of a play performance, of another culture or time). Recreate context (intertextuality, relations between art and politics, historiography). Recreating a model. Eventually, we become the past; how do we make transparent our work to those who come after us? Contextualized archiving, documentation via social tagging.

Table 5. Discovery. Of what? texts, images, objects (what we study), people (in communities, to network with), archives, tools to work with. Tasks: google, read, search, follow citations, etc.

Archiving and “data hygiene.” You expect what you work with (primary text editions, etc) to have certain levels of quality; what is good enough? If it’s not good enough, who can fix it? Allow users to help, but are they skilled enough, and who judges their corrections? Distributed Proofreading as model. Add metadata/tagging to add value.

Archiving issues: versioning. what should get archived? what does an archivist do? IRs versus dark archive vs. OA archive. Preservation and format migration.

Table 6. Social connections. Social networking. Building, contributing connections. (Reprise of academic social practices.) Status, trust, and respect in established and sustained connections. Role of leadership.

Enrichment. Adding value. Enriching content, for ourselves and others. Visualization, annotation, pattern recognition, digital surrogates and how they help us enrich content. Discovering, adding new knowledge vs. adding new methodologies.

Table 7. Public/community involvement. Maybe not all that common? What does the community do? Folksonomies, meaning-making, disambiguation, putting things in context, changing the public sphere. Would like to see: two-way processes, removing barriers to public involvement in classroom contexts, libraries, etc. Connecting to community to make our work relevant. E.g. internships, oral history, service learning, surveying, offering work for sale. Is the connection with the public discipline-specific? More incentive in some disciplines than others. Does engaging with the public make work less valuable academically? Facilitating delivery, discovery, participation by academics and public.

“Smashing.” All had it in common! Literal and figurative. Questioning established forms of publication. Promotion and tenure. Boundaries (academia/public, disciplines, teaching/research/service, teaching/learning, faculty/staff, faculty/student relationships), perceptions of library and IT, hegemony of print.

“Confessing stupidity.” When can you do this in the academy? Feedback loops for improvement. Accountability, learning from mistakes, exploring dead ends (where is the “journal of null results”?). Need authentic, meaningful peer review; very challenging to do, to receive, to get people to do. Acknowledging boundaries of knowledge.

What do we want, in the end? Reflective practice, continuing engagement in process. Submitting non-traditional materials in tenure and promotion packages. Taking risks. Re-evaluating how we provide feedback. Celebrating mistakes. Collaborating across boundaries. Being involved in peer review and critique. Exploring new forms of publication and distribution. Giving stuff away!

Folklorist on English faculty: finding intelligence and beauty where no one expects to find it, expanding the historical and archeological record on what it is to be a human being. Current research: duck boats (land/water).

III.4: “For the humanist, the library is his/her laboratory, the place in which is found or hidden the raw materials of research.” His reaction: the library is not raw! The world is raw. 75% of the world isn’t anywhere near a library, never mind the scholarly record—that is rawness. 75% of our lives is bills! So much of the world isn’t in records, not in any library or archive or museum.

Library as place from which he draws data and into which he puts products. No. Instead: putting in notes from fieldwork, in audio/video form as well as text, and he wants infrastructure so these data can appear in libraries finally! The new-media landscape lets him capture this, lowering the cost of production/documentation. Ordinary people can produce broadcast-quality work. Beyond notion of “multimedia” (the more the better) to expanded, more flexible production that fits your topic, without broadcast media’s constraints.

Presentation available online.

Q: How do you see your role now that many of the people you study can produce their own work? Are you becoming more meta? A: Becoming more of a collaborator. Engaging students in projects and conversations instead of passive knowledge inculcation. Really what he likes!

Q: Does this materials put different demands on the library vis-a-vis preservation and access? A: Yes. Some of this material has to be access-restricted, at least for a time. Courtesy to subjects, not just IP questions. Increases the number of stakeholders and the layers of things to think about. Interesting circular process: as they gather/curate stuff and increase access to it, it makes us uncomfortable, but people are also bringing us stuff and then examining and reusing it themselves.

Q: What do you think about what libraries call collection development and collection management? We might not want to restrict access. A: He’s as confused and torn as everybody else by that. Realizes he ought to meet with campus librarians more often; they have their own culture, passions, and limitations. Is going to go home and make that appointment! (Applause.)

Judith Nadler, Library Director, University of Chicago Library. “The Library as Partner in Research and Scholarship: The Case of Bamboo.” On first reading the Project Bamboo proposal, thought it was a miracle: we could all see ourselves in it, and it was clear that the library could be deeply involved. Libraries have much to bring to Bamboo, and learn from it. The library brings a history of partnerships with scholars in building, describing, preserving, and serving information (key mission of the library!). Acquiring and selecting content, making spaces for storage and use of collections, involvement in mass digitization. Content management and digitization: describing and organizing, offering access, archiving and preserving. Service models: help desks, user education and instruction, faculty outreach and consultation.

Models of sharing and collaboration that may be helpful to Bamboo: coordinated collection development, interlibrary loan, shared physical storage, cooperative description, collaborative systems development (yeah, I’m not so sure about this one), collaborating with faculty.

Facing the future: exposing hidden collections, decentralizing resource-control and metadata creation (devolving some of it onto non-librarians because we can’t do it all), finding new collaborators (including via 2.0 approaches such as tagging), using new and emerging technologies better.

What we can learn from Bamboo: New roles for the library, e.g. are we just content repositories, or content validators? New tools and services we can offer (new collaborative tools). New content types (aside from the traditional publishing stream). New outreach models and services (e.g. IP expertise).

Biggest benefit of Bamboo: maximize the value of collective expertise! Instead of “build it, and they will come,” let’s “build it together.” (What a great formulation. I will be borrowing it. Often.) Too often, we’ve built and nobody’s come; this will be different.

(Agenda overview.)

Exercise: On a good day, what do you (as a humanities researcher) productively do in service of research? How about during a longer period of time (semester, term, year)?

(Great discussion at my table, but I’m holding out to participate rather than blogging.)

Chris (dressed in, um, a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and conservative tie—and the mere fact that I of all people mention this might just be indicative of, um, something) answered a few questions about Mellon’s involvement with Project Bamboo.

Mellon has been asked many times to put a list of all their funded projects on their website, pour encourager les autres. Mellon can’t do that, because most of those projects don’t exist any more; they didn’t transition to a sustainable funding or support model after the Mellon money ran out. That is part of the impetus behind Project Bamboo: to put such projects on a firmer footing by having the right people (IT and librarians as well as scholars) in from the get-go.

Why were Chicago and Berkeley chosen as the first Bamboo institutions? Because they already had multiple stakeholders inside the institutions talking together about humanities-computing issues. Mellon’s paradigm for funding projects is to jumpstart programs with their money that then become sustainable on their own. Chicago and Berkeley looked like good places to start.

What Mellon wants to avoid is more unsolicited proposals (nota bene: they don’t fund unsolicited proposals!) corresponding to the pattern of the Canonically Bad Humanities Proposal. The CBHP goes something like this: “We have a bunch of stuff that at least one humanities scholar is interested in. We want to digitize it. We want to put it on the Web. We want open access—that is, we might want open access except open access sounds like a commie plot (I LOLed, I really did), but it might catch on, so we want to keep the option available. We want to completely reinvent the wheel; you’ll notice that our proposal takes absolutely no cognizance of anything that has ever been done before in digitization. Give us lots and lots of money, Mellon!”

Mellon has a unit that funds things like this (although they prefer that the projects be important to more than one scholar!). But the CBHP comes up so often that it’s dead obvious we need better models for getting this work done. Moreover, the reward structure in the humanities militates for the CBHP; to get a digital project valued at all by a tenure or promotion committee, the PI has to be the only PI, because these committees have no idea how to value less prominent contributions. This needs to change too.

Chris asked all participants to answer three questions: “How does Project Bamboo benefit me? How does it benefit my institution? How does it benefit my discipline or profession?” Altruism is not a sustainable base for this project. If it’s not perceived as personally and professionally beneficial, it won’t fly.

Olsen’s brief talk spoke of John Unsworth’s humanities primitives, and asked whether “similarity” might be such a primitive. He demoed the potential of n-gram comparison tests for establishing similarities among texts (I couldn’t help remembering that horrible project from the Department from Hell where we were doing exactly this by hand for various adaptations of La Celestina), and posited that similar statistical tests of similarity could work for images, videos, and sound as well.

I’m afraid I’m in a Thénardier hotel—one of those hateful places where everything, including the Internet, costs extra. I have a synchronous online commitment tomorrow evening, so I’m going to wait a bit longer and then buy one day’s access, so that it’ll cover my appointment. Then I’ll log on and post this.