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.

DSpace finally, finally, finally has an up-to-date list of vendors. I can’t speak to how good any of them are (though I’d trust some of the named individuals implicitly based on what I’ve seen of them on the DSpace lists), but just having the list is a vast improvement over the previous situation. Good job, DSpace Foundation!

I’ve mentioned before the excellence of scholarly-publishing executive Mike Rossner, and he’s gone and done it again. Right or wrong, it takes a special sort of courage to break ranks and call out your own kind in an extremely fraught conflict. Rossner’s letter is useful as an anti-FUD device.

For those of us hoping for motion on an initiative similar to Harvard’s, this month’s SPARC Open Access Newsletter is a must-read. Amid the straightforward history and lucid analysis are tantalizing tidbits about how it was done. “Enlist Peter Suber” sounds like good strategy to this rat!

This is awesome. We so very desperately need more repository managers blogging. (No, I’m not the only one; I know at least two others besides Les, but their blogs aren’t heavy on IR-related content.)

I met Les at Open Repositories ’07, which is why I’m going to take a chance that he’ll be amused by this post’s title. News via Open Access News, as usual.

Couple-three linkies, just to tide folks over until I have my brain back:

• The latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter. If you are an academic librarian and a CavLec reader and you do not take ten or fifteen minutes to read the opening article, which is a brilliant and quite hopeful look at the “State of OA”—well, bah, there’s nothing I can tell you, is there? Because you clearly haven’t been listening to a word I say. Seriously. Read it. It is that good.
• A by-the-numbers but still worthwhile article on women in techie librarianship. May I please say how amazingly grateful I am that the author, Eva Miller, didn’t do the usual thing that’s done with women-in-careers articles, namely, include all kinds of irrelevant family detail? That’s a cheap sexist trick, intended to provide wink-nudge reinforcement to the whole kirche-kuche-kinder thing, and it just gladdens my wizened little heart not to see it.
• A tart, cogent, and useful reminder that there’s no easy way out of privilege. I memoried that one, because I need to read that or something like it every so often.

Karen wins the Intarwebs. That is awesome.

It’s a great article, too, with which I am wholly in sympathy. Check it out. (Apropos of nothing, it seems as though nearly everybody writing intelligently about library catalogues is named Karen. I can think of four without even scratching my head. How did that happen? If the OPAC is the unit of suck, then perhaps the Karen is now the unit of sense?)

If you are a repository-rat, you are required to read Sale’s now-published explication of the Patchwork Mandate. Sensible stuff, although I would like to see it reformulated by someone who understands what power and influence librarians do and (more importantly) don’t have in the university setting.

The key question to my mind goes something like this: “Okay, I went to ten decision-makers. Three think it’s a good idea, but aren’t going to bet their relationship with their department’s faculty on it. Five are wantonly clueless and don’t want to avail themselves of a clue-by-four. One is actively hostile to open access. One is on the point of retirement and doesn’t care as long as she doesn’t have to actually do anything. What do I do now?”

Add to this that influence hierarchies in academia are weird, as weird as—well, as they are everywhere else. It’s not clear at all to me that going to department brass is the automatic right move; for one thing, department brass rotates frequently and may have only a tangential relationship to actual departmental power. Sale’s good about identifying some other possibilities (such as high-output faculty), but it’s not as simple as that, either (what if high-output faculty are actively resented in their department for the height of their output?). And how much influence, leaving aside actual reporting hierarchies, do faculty in a single department or a single institution really have on each other, anyway? Isn’t the discipline a greater one?

But that leads us to intransigent disciplinary leaders, and… sigh. It’s never quite as easy as it looks. That said, I hooked a department chair myself last week, and I’ve every intention of putting the ol’ patchwork-mandate screws on.

• The University of California’s suggested faculty response to the scholarly communications crisis. I cannot begin to express how much I love this. Marvelous, wonderful, and I wish I could stand to live in California, because let me tell you that’s where the action is. If I have time I’ll blog and comment on some choice quotes.
• There’s no housing bubble in the DC area. Yeah. Right. (I am so very continuing to rent.)
• The CURES Act. It is a good thing. Write your congresscritter.
• Dan Chudnov on barriers in libraries. The money quote: “If anything, we might guess from the fall of the wall in Germany that barriers will fall… The choice we librarians need to make about the fall of our own barriers — and, I’ll predict, 2006 is the year to make our choice — is whether we wield the hammers ourselves, or whether we read about it online.” Hell. Yes. And I have some thoughts on this in a DSpace context, which I’ll have to keep saving up for later.
• Hold on to your hat… somebody’s gettin’ eaten alive for even thinking of running a repository on Windows. (I happen to agree that this is an inane idea, but I kept my hands off the keyboard because I didn’t care to be quite this, er, emphatic.)
• Locals: c’mon to the Fairfax Choral Society auction. A couple copies of David’s book are on the auction-block.

I encourage all my techie-librarian readers to subscribe to Dan Cohen’s new weblog. Dan is CHNM’s Director of Research Projects, and CHNM’s research projects have a lot in common with what digital librarians are considering and doing.

(Bias note: Everybody knows I work at Mason, right? And I’m hoping that CHNM will pass one or two of their earlier projects to me for archival. That said, I think CHNM is tremendously cool, and will still think so even if I don’t get my hands on their bytes.)