This is not an end; it is a beginning. We haven’t cleared the obstacle course; we’ve barely set foot on it. There is so much to do, so much to save, so much to fix.

What I want in the next four years is for the notion of the res publica to come back to the fore. The public thing. Public. That which is larger than any of us, that which we all contribute to and lean on and derive benefit from. That which surmounts our differences and our competitions and our private fears and our ugly hates. That from which public libraries and land-grant universities sprang. The public thing.

It has been lost, I think, and I want it back.

It’s a ridiculously beautiful day for November in the Frozen North. Knowing how badly they overheat my polling place (which is in an apartment complex for seniors, so you know why, but even so), I dressed lightly and still felt a good bit too warm. All of us were bemused by the lady who got into line a fair distance behind us… with her cat, a short-haired tortie. We decided that the cat was probably too young to vote, but who knows what they’re doing for election observers these days?

I walked directly to work from the polls. The line between town and gown was clearly demarcated today in chalk: every campus sidewalk is chalked practically solid. Not all of it was partisan or get-out-the-vote exhortative. Very thoughtfully, some students chalked arrows and directions from the southmost campus dorm toward that dorm’s polling place. I stepped carefully around those. Good kids, these kids today. I approve of them, even if I’m not exactly sorry that I won’t be assailed on every walk around campus any longer with “Have you registered to vote? Do you know where your polling place is?”

Incidentally, whoever designed Obama’s campaign logo is an utter genius. It’s attractive, distinctive, and versatile while being easy to copy, even in chalk on the sidewalk. No small design feat, that. I am deeply impressed.

I suspect I shall have a hard time holding my students’ attention this evening, especially with talk about computer security. Ah, well. The kids are aight.

Thomson Reuters’s strategy here looks even more like a loser than it did when I first commented on it. They got themselves dissed in Nature. Ouchies. Bad PR aside, they’re not just losing the open-source developers and the network effects by now: they’re losing actual end-users, who are now unsure what they are allowed to do with the style files they have constructed. Reasonably enough, they aren’t happy about that, and I’m seeing noise about migration.

GMU cancelled its EndNote license, which makes sense because Thomson sued GMU on the basis of violation of license provisions, not anything overarching like copyright or trade secret law. Losing the GMU site license probably isn’t a big deal to Thomson Reuters. What is a big deal is that other universities, if they have the sense $DEITY gave a flea, are now scrutinizing their EndNote site license to see if there’s anything Thomson Reuters can gig them on. I’d expect that EndNote salesfolk will have some awfully squirmy questions to answer, next license-renewal go-round.

One of my students did her mini-job-talk last night on Zotero, which spurred a little discussion of competitors afterward. Consensus was that on quality of user interface alone, Zotero is light-years ahead of EndNote and RefWorks. This is a conclusion with which (no surprises here) I wholeheartedly agree. So what is Thomson Reuters doing instead of improving its product? Suing its users. Because that always ends well, yup yup.

Congrats, Thomson Reuters legal and strategic teams. Sure looks like you’ve succeeded in lawyering your own product to a slow and painful death. Heckuva job there.

One is an outlier. Two is a curiosity. Four in a week is a trend, and I want very badly to know what in the world is going on here.

If you’re in this situation or know someone at an institution who is, I’d appreciate an email, confidentiality guaranteed. Why is this happening? What do these institutions expect to gain? What workflows are they planning for? What content are they targeting? How are they planning to ingest it? Who are their role models in this space?

I don’t want to think these people are stupid or unaware. Neither stupidity nor cluelessness is typical of librarians. My only other hypothesis is that smaller institutions have different needs that they believe IR software can fill. Gosh, I hope that turns out to be correct.

It’s just not true that open access isn’t about the journal literature. There are salient and cogent (if not necessarily good) reasons that it is, no matter the chosen road, no matter the rhetoric. What is it we’re asking faculty to self-archive? Theses and dissertations, yes; faculty are much happier mandating somebody else’s behavior than their own. It’s not faculty’s books, though, for economic and public-relations reasons. It’s not their learning objects; that’s Somebody Else’s Problem. It’s only secondarily their data or their gray literature; many OA dogmatists look down their aristocratic noses at that stuff, and others (myself included) question the technological fitness of the green road to accommodate such materials.

Yes, we’re talking about the journal literature here. Of course we are. The third sentence of the Very Brief Introduction starts in with “scholarly journals don’t pay authors.” If we weren’t talking about the journal literature, why would repository-rats get so much flak from the likes of Stevan Harnad when we take in other things?

So follow Dr. Marcus’s train of thought here: if the journal literature isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, why would he waste time fighting for open access to it? There’s a lot to fight for in the world!

I’m not unsympathetic to that argument, myself. I’ve got two journal articles in press, and I’ve written essays for essay anthologies. Scholarly and professional publishing is a pain in the nether regions. Reviews, permissions, style requirements, citations, last-minute changes, copyright-transfer agreements, spare me—and by the time it’s actually published, it’s out of date. Roach Motel was trenchant and prescient when I wrote it and posted its preprint. By the time it’s published, a year or more after the preprint, it’ll be a stale bagel, the golden age of its impact long since passed.

Why did I bother? Dr. Marcus has it right. For all I’ve made vastly more progress among those in the know with CavLec than anything I’ve gone through the publication wringer with, some people can’t see anything or anyone if they’re not formally published. It’s a game. It’s a stupid, slow, expensive game, but I play it because I have to. Dr. Marcus doesn’t have to any longer, and more power to him for it. Why shouldn’t he ignore those of us who are still enmeshed in it?

Honestly, if the open-access movement is suddenly waking up and finding that it doesn’t like being in bed with journals, it has no one to blame but itself, for blinkered vision, crippled rhetoric, and hobbled technology. Climbing out of the pit we have digged will be a tough business, because many of our allies still believe the line of hooey we were dishing out; read the Rand Corporation’s report on the subject of what librarians want from open access if you don’t believe me.

Still, it’s good for Peter Suber to come up against the real-world results of the aforementioned pit. He’s someone I trust to engineer a rhetoric reevaluation.

The vagaries of daylight-savings mean that for the last week or so I’ve been walking to work through utterly glorious sunrises, the ones that look so stupidly fake when painters try to reproduce them. You won’t catch me complaining about it—until next week, when I won’t see them any more.

The weather was so odd this spring that we didn’t get our usual raft of coots on the bay. They’re back now. Coots are not graceful birds; they are little black bobbing blobs with white beaks, and for all they’re quite social, they can also be quite mean to each other in close quarters. It’s rather astonishing that these birds manage to migrate, as bad as they are at flying. Watching a bunch of them deciding to shift location is a hoot: they splash-splash-splash their feet along the surface of the water flapping their stubby wings as hard as ever they can, eventually lifting heavily off the water and lumbering on a few yards before they splash down again feet-first, looking relieved.

They come by ones and then dozens, until there are hundreds on the bay—and they’ll go just as quickly, in the space of a few days, when the cold becomes too much. We’ll see them again in spring… and in the meantime, there are other things we’ll be busy at, we who stay.

At the Purdue e-science conference, I first ran into the DRIADE project, and was surprised and dubious to find out they were using DSpace as the back-end for it. I never did explain why that bothered me so, partly because I couldn’t quite articulate why. I think I can now: it’s a question of where the behaviors associated with a given set of files reside.

DSpace and EPrints make certain assumptions about the files they take in. Key for our purposes is that they assume that all they have to do to mediate between a file and its end-user is serve it up in response to a request. Ask, give, end of story.

For a preprint, postprint, article… that’s fine, no worries. For a thesis, it may suffice, but theses are becoming more complex these days. Music theses at MPOW usually involve digitally-recorded performances, which (intellectual-property rights permitting, which they often don’t) one would wish to stream. Computer-science theses often include software, as one would expect. My husband is accumulating a tidy collection of spreadsheets working on his linguistics dissertation.

For a dataset, this ask-and-give assumption is pure disaster. Hardly anybody wants a whole dataset boiled down into a single file. Hardly anybody creates a dataset that way. Sure, they’ll tell you they just have the one spreadsheet, but that doesn’t count the data dictionary and the lab notebooks and the field notes and the et cetera. What’s more, datasets don’t want to be treated as unitary objects; ask-and-fetch just doesn’t work. Query, slice-and-dice, facet, analyze, number-crunch, mash up—that’s what people want to do with a dataset. They want it to have an API.

And all DSpace and EPrints can do is say “durrr, here’s a file.”

Of course this is why all the interesting data-driven development is happening on Fedora, which lets you build as much introspection and as many connections as you care to. The facet of that I find both fascinating and troubling is that Fedora’s very flexibility leads to a balkanization of the data contained therein. My data repository may allow operations on certain kinds of data that yours doesn’t, and vice versa. It’s good and necessary to do that kind of experimentation, but it also makes me wonder how much good we’re doing the research enterprise if some data drives around in a Lexus while the bulk of it is stuck on a Vespa.

Anyway, I have asserted that IRs as currently architected are not the solution to the data deluge. Now I’ve articulated why not. Go forth and ponder.

And wake up with what appears to be mild food poisoning.

This is just cruel and unfair. Sure, if the G-7 can’t get its act together, a little food poisoning will be a drop in the bucket (so to speak). I get that. Leave me to my tiny individual misery, please.

First off was dropping my husband at work, which is nice for him because it cuts his commute time in half. Next, popping by the bird-paraphernalia store for forty pounds of sunflower seeds for the delectation of our local chickadees and finches, and the considerable amusement of one small gray cat on the other side of the window from the suction-cup window feeder.

After that I stopped at a coffeeshop for a chai latte and a peaceful hour of grading. Scheduling a quiz on the same day their position-description assignment was due was not the brightest thing I have ever done, but I shall make shift to manage. The quizzes are graded and recorded, and I’m chugging through the job descriptions. I’m amused by the number of them who have added two and two and set their fictional libraries in Middle-Earth. (”Helm’s Deep Library is an equal-opportunity employer. Orcs welcome!”)

Then it was the traditional stock-up trip to Woodman’s, which I do partly because some of what I buy I can get there for about half what it costs elsewhere, some of it I can’t find other places (what is the deal with dill weed in Madison? it’s out of stock almost everywhere I go!), and some of it is so hefty I’m much happier buying it when I have a car to haul it in. All told, I probably toted about a hundred seventy pounds of stuff in from the car when I got home: forty pounds of seed, two forty-pound boxes of cat litter, and fifty pounds (give or take) of other stuff.

I admit that I have a stockpile impulse, particularly when the outside world seems scarier and more uncertain than usual. Objectively, I know that I’m in amazingly good financial shape compared to most, that there’s a good bit of elbow-room in our finances (we don’t actually spend any of what my husband earns; we don’t even spend all of what I earn), and that I’m fairly frugal by nature. Subjectively… I stockpile. There’s no real harm in it, as reactions to uncertainty go.

I have a whacking lot more grading to do, but I think I may take a nap instead and see if I can’t shake the rest of this bug.