Caveat Lector

Jim Franke, UChicago joint appointment, including running a humanities institute. Word of welcome! Talking about partnerships with other humanities-institute folks to work on interdisciplinarity, thinking about disciplines, and how that fits with Project Bamboo: dynamic relationships among disciplines, content of disciplines not fixed; universities haven’t reflected that dynamism, instead proliferating small fiefdoms. Humanities centers might be good campus partners in innovation and change!

(rundown of agenda, logistics)

First section, two questions for table-by-table discussion: “What do you hope Bamboo will accomplish?” and “Given what you’ve been hearing, what questions do you have about Bamboo?”

(introductions around the table)

A1: Want to see Bamboo touch all the stakeholders, including publishers and aggregators, scholarly societies. Need a laundry list of these stakeholders! People who haven’t gotten into the room, work with these orgs as a group, rather than one-on-one. LEVERAGE. Make them play ball!

A2: “Pub conversation” learning things by accident. How can those conversations happen more often and more systematically? Working with technophobes—how do I talk to them about how I can help them do their work better?

A3 (me): I feel underutilized. Because of my checkered background, I have a grab-bag of skills to offer that A&H people say they need, but I can’t make the connections. How do I make people aware what I can do, willing to take advantage of my services? How do I tell my higher-ups that I need to get out of the library into the community?

A4: Intersection of these sets of people, as public-services librarians. How do we develop services to support what researchers are trying to do? We’ve been slow in doing that.

A5: Central IT has not been supporting the research community for 15 years at our campus; how do we change that? Where are shared needs, and how can shared services address those needs? A&H are the have-nots on our campus; how do we change that?

A6: Curious what will happen. Research focuses a lot on work practices, why people do or don’t do what we want them to do with technology. Tools: Why isn’t there an iTunes for articles? Seems buildable! We’re 3/4 of the way there. How about recommenders (quality/use indicators), to deal with info overload?

A7: Folklorist, not “high culture” type. Strong public orientation. Bamboo needs to pay attention to humanistic materials. Because the materials are often not inside universities, universities let them slide. Nobody to count, describe, make available, digitize these collections. Organizing holdings cross-institutionally. Dealing with closed collections.

A8: Publisher; why is he the only one in the room? A lot of academic publishers are talking about these questions. Why can’t Bamboo engage that parallel conversation, bring it in? Libraries and publishers are talking, but NOT libraries/publishers/faculty. We need that triumvirate! If libs are going to branch out into production/publishing, faculty need to come into it. With IT in the background as a facilitator. Do humanists want to be “efficient/effective?” Is that the goal? Can the tech reproduce the “productive inefficiencies” of humanities studies? How does tenure connect into all this; very important to him as an editor. None of the stakeholder groups can determine how tenure will work by itself. But we have to talk about how to value this stuff vis-a-vis tenure!

We want useful efficiencies (e.g. in discovery process); we also like unique materials, things that nobody else is working with! Tension between finding whatever one wants and finding material that moves ideas in interesting directions and often gets buried. We don’t want to spend hours and hours sifting through haystacks! Because we want one thing, we may want its opposite too. Working out competing desires.

Publishers have to be on board for some things to happen, e.g. exposing metadata. We are impoverished if we leave them out.

What is effectiveness? Is it machinelike, or is it enabling you to do what you want to do the best way? Example: finding verb usages in paper versus electronic text.

Some A&H people are in full retreat from technology; they get sad and upset when told that models are changing. How to tell them that the world is moving with or without them? How to help them look forward?

What’s a “productive inefficiency”? Mind-numbing gruntwork, triggering a creative thought process, which wouldn’t happen if you’re just creating. For some people, you need the resistance between the mundane and the creative to do the best work. Unintended consequences of the speed at which work occurs. Do we think in a different way? Does it short-circuit thought processes? Example: transcribing texts by hand instead of OCR; only half of mind on work, other half freewheeling.

Dissertation: lots of side trips during the research process. Drafting threw them all away for a time, and then some got added back in—but all those distractions were necessary! A lot of these serendipitous experiences are replicable digitally (e.g. vague Google searches turning up odd results).

Connections? Theme in department reaccreditation hearings: everybody has to rethink what their standards are and what their dissemination modes are. Have to legitimize digital formats in addition to traditional ones. UPresses are getting hit economically, and are not willing to crank out “tenure books,” universities without presses are freeloaders on those with, what about audience? Economic model of UPresses is altering. On one hand, opportunity to present work in different formats; on other, shrinkage of traditional outlets.

What presses/societies are talking about: how to produce digital books, how to get over the hump? Establish electronic series, grabbing up important scholars first so that young faculty can feel comfortable publishing.

What about graduate students? Where do they fit in? At MPOW, we want to bring grad students into the conversation. They’re the next wave; we want to grab them now. Some graduate students are very forward-looking, not Luddite at all! What they know can even spread to faculty. But you can’t assume they’re more technical. In LIS we face this problem constantly. Base tech level of techie students has gone up, but the low end is still very low.

Good to hear from students whose desire to do digital work shut down by hostile departments. What about info literacy training, too? What level of digital familiarity are we going to assume from our students in the future, as opposed to what we’ll teach?

What communities is Bamboo going to impact? Faculty, grad students, undergrads? IT as training partner. Undergrads have to be taught how to do research; what we’re doing is breaking down research into its components. If undergrads don’t know how to do research, can they contribute to Bamboo discussions? True, but we want to make sure we pay attention to the impact on them, and recognize that they’re already pushing the boundaries.

What are the publics for Project Bamboo? What aren’t? Performing arts hits the whole public. Scholars pull material from everywhere. Commonalities between us and eScience, perhaps the small sciences? Maybe Bamboo will touch a lot more disciplines, because of interdisciplinarity. Do we have enough interdisciplinary types in Bamboo? What kind of technical needs will come up, as projects interbreed disciplines?

Hard to know what the audiences are (looks like everybody right now!) until we narrow down a bit more what we’re talking about. Some of us don’t need new tools; we need help doing the work of making what we have available. Some of us do that kind of labor, and need projects! And who knows what we could do with cheap undergrad/grad labor that was digitally aware?

I want Bamboo to open all the doors so I can do whatever I want, and not find “their software” a barrier. Metasearch, no more competing interfaces. Don’t want Bamboo to be a barrier, new standards. But I’d rather have a silo than an unscoped universe of stuff most of which I don’t want. Bamboo can’t be so inclusive that the tools are dumbed down to uselessness, or unusable within specific communities.

(Pulling the larger group back together.)

Chad Kainz, UChicago, and David Greenbaum, UC-Berkeley. Both responsible for shared-data and IT support services at their respective institutions. Rich Meyer, logistics. Sara Ware, event coordinator.

84 institutions globally participating in Project Bamboo; “exceeded our wildest expectations”

Thanks to Mellon Foundation for funding “how we can make it easier for institutions to support the work that goes on in the arts and humanities;” the way to do that is through conversations.

Ida Noyes Hall, once the women’s student union. Now, career placement services, School of Business stuff.

Bamboo Project is thinking about the world we live in, the projects we do, and realizing that it takes a lot of different people to make everything work: IT, faculty, researchers, librarians, IS, etc. Problem of code that no longer runs; takes a lot of effort to sustain over the long term. Do we know what is possible? How have we been affected by e.g. Google (Books, Scholar, Maps)? Connecting our resources and knowhow with commercial services has enormous potential; what are the ramifications?

Central question: How do we work together to make it easier to foster innovation in the arts and humanities, through development of shared technology services?

(discursus on bamboo and how it fits as the project name: organic, flexible, sustainable, etc.)

“Arts and humanities:” intentionally broad scope; performing arts, history, philosophy, humanistic social sciences, etc. “advance research:” pushing for transformation as well as increasing efficiency and effectiveness. “shared tech services:” moving away from isolated projects and silos to shareable, reusable, mashuppable services; everything from massive shared-data stuff to the “wild west” of Web 2.0.

Cyberinfrastructure: three interlocking Borromean rings (Dan Atkins). Behavior/organizational science, users/communities of practice, IT. In the arts and humanities: common understanding of practices, directions, commonalities among humanists, librarians, technologists; shared tech services; models of organizations, partnerships, and social cooperation among the stakeholders.

Step one: workshops (this is the second of four). Step two: “Exploring Scholarly Practices” Sept 2008 at UC-Berkeley (roundup of workshop results). Step 3: identifying services.

Also building demonstrators and pilot projects: to explore commonalities, demo services, experiment with new app models, test ideas, promote collaboration among stakeholders.

Documents: workshop reports, finally a proposal for implementation.

Workshop structured to engage at institutional level. Each team from an institution has to have at least one A&H faculty member and one IT/library person; rest of team flexible. Organizational and industry participants are those with sincere interest in Bamboo, desire to promote academic innovation, desire to create sustainable models; they are here to explore relationships with funders, museums, library consortia, companies (e.g. Sun).

A lot of conversations have already happened, but usually in a siloed context; what Bamboo is doing is bringing those conversations together.

Success conditions: Understand A&H practices enough to design tech services. Create a roadmap for shared tech services. Identify priorities. Find organizational, staffing, and partnership models that enable these services to be sustainable and ongoing (e.g. “digital humanities center,” embedded tech inside departments, an extension of the library). Build a core set of institutional and organizational collaborators who will work toward the goals of Bamboo (”last folks standing,” can’t run an implementation project with 84 institutions!). Make opportunities for new collaboration.

(rundown of project leadership. Wireless is getting stressed, it looks like; I am closing unnecessary windows and services.)

Principles of community design to be used in Project Bamboo: “Listening tour” (Cohen, GMU), guided by framework of goals and a commitment to action; flexible over time based on what they hear. Create “upward spiral of conversation” (Broughton, UC-Berkeley). Translation between communities of practice, driving toward a common language. On tables is a page for adding terms to their glossary. Search for commonalities, but respect context and uniqueness. Define responsibilities of participant institutions, and implementation priorities. Create a “we,” not a “you/us.”

Q: what is to be implemented at the end of this process? A: whatever comes out of the workshop as opportunities to make tech more shareable, or enabling community collaboration, or helping people find opportunities to share. Could be lots of things. Maybe a web-services framework to expose services. We don’t know yet what the answer is! Depends on what we hear. How do we capture “what has been done” and help people know where and how to start? What standards and specs are relevant, important, worth supporting and sharing (APIs, discipline-specific standards and practices, etc)? Avoid reinventing wheels.

(There’s a dictionary-exchange standard kicking around somewhere! I didn’t know that. Anybody else?)

Q: Will Project Bamboo engage standards orgs, e.g. TEI-C? A: Maybe at the roadmapping stage, where we ask who’s been tackling these problems already… problem is that project plan changed after Berkeley workshop and will continue to change. They have already been in contact with someone at TEI-C.

Q: As workshops continue, will the desired participants shift? A: We have to get to a tech roadmap, so we frontloaded with faculty now so that we can grab the techies later. Also, easier to grab faculty now, when semesters are ending. Narrow participation list, but not exclude participants. They are thinking about how to manage virtual collaboration for this project, so that physical participation isn’t essential. Want to ensure that this remains an A&H-driven project throughout.

Q: Why not imagine a way for all 84, or 800, institutions to implement? A: We’re hoping to find a collaborative model allowing large numbers to engage. But at some point, we have to differentiate roles among partners; some will carry heavier loads and commit more resources.

Q: Six deliverables identified, process and timeframe set. But workshops change iteratively! How does that affect analysis at the end? A: Right now, what’s changing is the workshop series, more of a fine-tuning thing. After Berkeley, less emphasis on finding commonalities, more on respecting and learning about uniqueness. Sometimes unique doesn’t turn out to be, but you don’t know until you ask and explore. Start going through the data after the Paris workshop.

Q: What about audiences? Self-selected group so far. What other publics are involved? Broader public, public intellectuals, other communities who wouldn’t come to Project Bamboo. A: Grant talks about research, but definition of “research” quite broad. Several of us very interested in public side of teaching and engaging; it has been brought up often. If we do this right, we’re making models that help public engagement as well.

So here I am in Chicago at the Project Bamboo kickoff lunch, MPOW and the Project Bamboo folks having been extremely accommodating of my last-minute sneak in the back door. Because I’m paranoid about these things, herewith is my disclaimer: Project Bamboo is not paying me except in conference food, and MPOW pays me, but doesn’t pay me to blog. I made a nuisance of myself to come because I am very excited by and hopeful about what Project Bamboo is doing, and if I can help that along with a blog post or two, I’m perfectly happy to.

MPOW had a last-minute cancellation, so I am apparently filling in on its official slate of researchers despite the “blogger, Caveat Lector” listed as my affiliation. This is a slightly odd place to be, truthfully. I do write, I do publish, and I do research—after a fashion, in an applied and pragmatic way that a good many humanities scholars of my acquaintance would sneer at. I’ve also seen the research process from the publishing-services side, and as a librarian and an open-access advocate, I’m as steeped in faculty behaviors and practices as an outsider can be.

As voluble as I usually am, I may be keeping my mouth mostly shut for this one. If I can, I’ll contribute… I’m just not sure I’m quite the input they’re looking for. We’ll see.

For now, welcome to Project Bamboo!

Okay. All you Keynote users out there. I’m one too. Can we come to a general agreement on something?

CUT IT OUT WITH THE GILL SANS ALREADY.

Look, I like Gill Sans. I like it a lot. It’s a snazzy, readable, generally handsome font. But it’s the default in a bunch of Keynote themes, and it is supremely overused.

I’ll quit using it if you do. No, actually, I’ve quit using it already. (Hi, Optima Bold!) There’s a wild, wonderful world of fonts out there—let’s use some of them!

Michael W. Carroll’s whitepaper on the NIH policy is a useful document for all repository-rats, not just those who have NIH grantees to worry about. Lovely tidbits in there on various aspects of copyright vis-a-vis scholarly communication. Recommended.

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!

I will be going to this JA-SIG conference in April. (It looks as though I will be doing a Manakin tutorial, although things are not set in stone yet.) If you are too, I’m interested in sharing a room. The conference hotel rate looks startlingly reasonable.

If you’re going and you’re from Madison or coming through, I’d also love to discuss carpool arrangements. There’s bus service, but it’s at awkward hours.

Chances are I’m self-funding this thing (ran out my fiscal-year funding on ASIST), so I really appreciate chances to hold down costs.

The University of Southampton’s Les Carr has started a blog!

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.

When everything about me is remarkably random, why just eight? Nevertheless.

1. Despite considerable unfondness for the Harry Potter books, I just agreed to play Hermione Granger in a (rather deconstructionist, or I wouldn’t have done it) HP RPG. I am still wondering whether to have my head examined.
2. I appear to have gone up a second dress size. This is annoying, because I don’t really want to go clothes-shopping. It was, however, probably inevitable.
3. I’m still waiting to hear about the potential paycheck-enhancing activity I applied for. Latest news is that I may hear sometime this week.
4. I am liking the CSA thing so far. Anything I don’t manage to use up generally makes good soup stock.
5. I’m in a bit of a book doldrums at the moment. Nothing seems interesting enough to yank me away from the laptop. The fantasy-authors research guide may be partly at fault here, in which case I’ll get over it.
6. I’m considering a Netflix or Greencine subscription; there isn’t a good video store in anything like walking distance from our apartment, and with the demise of University Square 4, it’s even hard to see movies on the big screen.
7. I don’t like mushrooms. I can tolerate most uses of portabellas if I have to, but those slimy button things? Ugh. And black olives are a bit strong for me, though I cook with olive oil regularly.
8. Aside from a year or so during which I cut my hair short, I haven’t really changed the ways I wear my hair since high school. Sometimes I wonder about this, but really? What I’ve got is cheap (because my husband can trim it), functional, and good enough—what’s the point of slathering lipstick on this particular pig?

You’re tagged if you wanna be. Ipsa dixi.

Went to Loreena McKennitt concert last night. Was fun! Also ate about a bucket’s worth of veggie sushi. (Wasabi Autumn rolls. GET THEM, for they are most excellent. With a side of the ever-reliable veggie tempura rolls. Thus ends the commercial, with apologies to Walt.)

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.

Quoth the marvelous Karen Markey: “Giving users a Boolean-based system to search digitized texts is comparable to giving Captain Kirk a Mercury-era space capsule to travel the galaxy.”

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.