Caveat Lector

I had an oddly productive week at work this week. I’m not complaining, seeing as how most weeks I walk home thinking “what am I doing here, why can’t I get anything done, and what bloody use am I to anybody anyway?”

(Yeah. It’s just about that bad, most weeks. Have I mentioned that being a repository-rat is an uncommonly demoralizing job? I have? Oh, good.)

This week was not like that. This week I was included on a lunch with not one but two associate deans, and I managed to say reasonably intelligent things and plug not just the repository, not just my colleagues’ work on the scholarly-communication committee, but also a nascent ETD effort that I’m (miraculously) quite hopeful about.

This week the repo passed 7000 items. And yeah, I got a shrug and a mumble about that from a high-level library administrator, and yeah, that’s uncommonly demoralizing, but still—I did it, it’s done, and now I can work on the next thousand. (Eight hundred and fifty-some, actually.) What’s better is that even by the Les Carr metric, I am improving. More stuff is trickling in from more people at more campuses. Holy hell, it has been a slow process, but something is happening.

This week I introduced the repo to a colleague in the library. Here I am actually going to praise DSpace: starting from nothing, I had a new community and collection up, a new eperson added and assigned submitter rights, and the first item ingested with her watching, within about twenty minutes. She now (in her own words) “gets what the repository is about” and will be an advocate. I couldn’t be happier about that.

And this week I finally made enough noise to make a dent in the DSpace development process. Having been more or less dared to put my effort where my kvetches are, I started an ad-hoc, informal “hey, DSpace repo managers; let’s get together and talk about stuff” process—and what the hell do you know, people got together and talked about stuff. Not a huge wave of people, but given the disaffection toward the DSpace development process I’ve seen, twenty people giving up an hour for an online chat is pretty damn decent. With a little bit of luck, the numbers will grow over time, a coherent user constituency will arise that devs will have no choice but to listen to, and DSpace and its long-suffering userbase will be better for it. I’ll drink to that.

My other hat at the moment is my teaching hat, and that has kicked into high gear this week too, seeing as how they’ve GONE AND FILLED UP MY CLASS OMGWTFBBQ. Yeah. Um, sorry. Slightly nervous about this. More than slightly. For one thing, I think the buzz for my class has probably outstripped my ability to deliver. For another, what worked with eleven students is going to be a struggle for forty. (FORTY. OMGWTFBBQ.) I think I have a syllabus that will work, and thanks to Jason Griffey, the final project is much, much better than last year’s… but we’ll see. I hope people don’t think I walk on water, because sploosh.

There’s a whole ’nother can of worms about teaching, involving rules intended to prevent the exploitation of adjuncts which actually prevent anything like “clinical faculty” from existing, but bah, I’m tired and ambivalent about the whole thing anyway and not going to explain it right now. Suffice to say this may be the last time I get to teach the class… but it may not be, either. Gears are grinding, wheels are turning, and all I can do is teach the best I can and await the outcome.

On the whole, though? A good week.

I just did something I’ve never done before: cited an article of mine in another article I’m writing.

Feels weird.

Roach Motel will appear in Library Trends 57:2 (Fall 2008). I remark upon this for the simple reason that someone asked me, because they want to cite it in something they’re writing.

This is not the first time. It got quoted in a presentation at OR ’08. It’s got thirty-some-odd saves on del.icio.us. A couple quick Googles indicate that it has been recommended reading in high places. A quick look at statistics on the repository I run indicates that it rapidly soared into the top spot on download numbers, beating out a popular journal whose top issue had been there since 2005. (It has since been eclipsed by several articles from an undergrad kinesiology journal. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

The thing ain’t been published yet. Moreover, the preprint version has several embarrassing errors (I fixed the boneheaded mis-citation of Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical, and Economic Aspects, I promise). Nevertheless, it’s out there and it’s making waves. If ever there were a demonstration of the impact of preprint-posting, Roach Motel is it.

From a whuffie perspective, this is jaw-droppingly astounding. From the vastly more important practical-results perspective… well, we’ll see. An extremely common reaction to it is “Yeah, isn’t that awful? But it’s not happening here, oh, no.” No wonder we don’t have a community of practice. We can’t get our heads out of (ahem) the sand long enough to notice each other, or tell the truth.

I admit I’m sort of looking forward to the SPARC IR meeting in November (which I am planning to attend, and present at if possible), because Roach Motel should be out in print by then. I’ll be happy if it informs discussion, happier still if it informs policy, happiest of all if it inspires action. As yet, though, all it’s accomplished in meatspace that I’m aware of is getting several people angry at me that I don’t at all need angry at me, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

No, what I’m really pondering at the moment is the impact I am having on my chosen profession, sometimes intentionally… and sometimes not so much so. Honestly, I’m starting to be—startled? unnerved? weirded out? Something. Not so much by Roach Motel, which I knew all along was something of a Molotov cocktail, as by all the other stuff.

Whenever I check my referrer logs these days, I see a hit or two from a library-student blog or Somebody Else’s Courseware (which of course I can’t get into, thank you, AAP and FERPA). I mean, every time. Warping the minds of the young and impressionable, that’s me, I guess. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does; after all, I taught library school and have every intention of doing so again.

But it does bother me, just as CavLec getting linked to and quoted is sometimes bothersome. It’s that damn context thing again. Grrrr, it’s irksome.

What it boils down to is that very much against my will, I’m finding myself self-censoring on CavLec because like it or not, it’s a large part of my professional face, and as such, it needs to be polished to a brighter sheen than I have heretofore employed. This annoys the living hell out of me. It wasn’t supposed to be this way!

And I don’t have a solution. But, again, I’m thinking about it. It’s a good time for that; I’m six-squared years old today, which invites the yearly navel-gaze.

So, I got a lot of stuff off my to-do list, what with vacationing, doing the Midwest Library Tech Conference, and surviving data-curation bootcamp (“drop and give me five METS files!”). Unfortunately, stuff just keeps creeping back on. If I make a list, I’ll feel better. Well, I won’t, actually, but I’ll feel more motivated.

• Draft of authority-control article for Cataloging and Classification Quarterly due mid-July.
• A lot of prose on the IR I run for next Thursday’s face-to-face meeting. (Gah.)
• Finishing writeups for the researcher-data-practices report I’m writing part of. (Five down, three to go.)
• Revamping readings, assignments, and topics for 644. (Goodbye, RFID; hello, e-science.)
• Setting up a Drupal install for 644. (I’ll use campus’s evil, convoluted, crashy course-management system when campus puts a gun to my head. Not before.)
• Moving my web presence off Dreamhost, because I’m so sick of their downtime I could spit. In the process, working up a refreshed design for CavLec and (if I’m really lucky) moving all the blogs I host to WPMU for easier management.
• Scaring up co-PIs for the IMLS 21st-Century Librarianship grant I have in mind. Writing said grant.

There may be some other stuff for fall; depends on whether SPARC accepts my proposal to talk about the BibApp in November. But I’m not thinking about that. Too much else to do!

I’d like to welcome my good colleague Shane Beers to the biblioblogosphere. Shane took over my duties at George Mason, and has done a lot better with them than I ever did. I’m happy to see other repository managers blogging, and thrice happy to see Shane.

He brings up something that I’ve heard from other people as well: annoyance at my insistence on the phrase “repository-rat” to refer to librarians who manage institutional repositories. Some of that is me, and some of it is deliberate and calculated rhetorical strategy. It seems worth picking apart.

The “me” part, I confess, is of a piece with my steadfast refusal to take myself and what I do too seriously. Back in the day, I called myself a conversion peasant. Now I’m a repository-rat. I’m stubborn about this, and I don’t anticipate changing it… but I also recognize that it leaks into how I refer to other repository managers, as well as the specialty as a whole, and I see how that can feel like disdain.

It isn’t. It takes quite a bit of dedication to stick with IRs, and an impressive array of skills to manage one well. (I’m not saying I do, mind. Not for me to say. But I’m steeped in this field, I know whom I respect, and I know what they are capable of.) Moreover, these dedicated, skilled people have to persevere in the face of widespread ignorance, apathy, and even opprobrium directed at them, never mind lousy software and badly-stacked odds.

Which leads me to the rhetorical-strategy bit. I feel like a rat in the wainscoting, ignored and despised and isolated. Why shouldn’t I? Why should I be any prouder of what I do than my employer (which has partially defunded my service), my profession (which barely acknowledges I exist and makes no effort to support me), or the open-access movement (which openly insults me when it doesn’t ignore me)? Why should I pretend to support and respect I don’t actually have?

And why is it uniquely my responsibility to redress these issues? If the institution I work for, the profession I have joined, or the open-access movement I am part of would like me to stop referring to myself as a rodent, howsabout they toss me a bone so I can move up the animal taxonomy a bit?

Like the immortal archy, I see things from the under side. There’s use in that, I maintain, just as there’s use in colleagues such as Shane asserting themselves to raise the profile of our work and the esteem in which it is held. I’m on their side, I truly am—I just approach the work from a different angle.

insects are not always
going to be bullied
by humanity
some day they will revolt
i am already organizing
a revolutionary society to be
known as the worms turnverein

—Don Marquis

So, I promised a look at the latest beating-things-with-rocks project. Voilà tout.

This took me a heck of a lot of time, considerable beating things with rocks, and of course I’m not completely happy with it—but for a first try at video making, it’s not half bad.

Next time, I’ll turn up the gain on the video-camera microphone, figure out why the hell Keynote adds about three seconds of extra time before some slide transitions but not others and make it stop, and figure out why on earth iMovie made my poor little video pixellate at one-second intervals.

If you’re going to do this: Fanfic and vidding have the concept of a “beta,” somebody who looks at what you’ve done and points out the stupid bits so you can fix them before they’re inflicted on the world. YOU WANT ONE. I showed my Twitter friends a preview yesterday. I had managed to fsck up the affiliation of one of my interviewees. One of my Twitter friends noted it, and I was able to fix it and redo the vid before I made a complete jackass of myself. Major thanks to her, and she knows who she is.

Check out the sidebar! It is stylin’, with the new Creative Commons Zero license! That does mean that this design, such as it is, is gankable as well—it’s mine, I did it up from scratch, so it isn’t immediately derivative of anybody else’s. I’m boggled that anyone would want to gank it, because I am so not a design talent, but I’ve seen it written up a few places as an example of good (or at least unusual and interesting) design, so what the hell.

I am hard at work on a little movie for MPOW, to be shown at an arts-and-humanities symposium in (yikes yikes yikes!) two weeks (yikes!). This turns out to be surprisingly simple and even enjoyable, given Keynote, Garage Band, a video camera, a digital audio recorder, lots of neat pictures from MPOW’s collections, and a hell of a lot of time and elbow grease. I have yet to see whether Keynote’s QuickTime export works as advertised, but if it does, I will be a very happy camper.

Come to think of it… I should probably check that on Monday. You think?

Last week was something of a Week. One of those weeks that feels a week and a half long, you know what I’m saying? But worthwhile, all of it.

Les Carr is a gentleman and an amazingly good sport. Some time ago, he emailed me asking about the distance of Madison from Chicago, and setting some dates for a possible visit. Which I promptly double-booked with a System repository meeting in Baraboo. Go me.

Les not only took my husband and me and my colleague Kristin Eschenfelder out to dinner Tuesday night, he drove out with me to Baraboo and contributed significantly to the meeting. (Props also to the other meeting participants for welcoming Les; they didn’t have to, and I appreciate it a lot.) I had a great time (despite the weather), put a couple of cogent edits into Roach Motel based on dinner conversation, and very much look forward to running into Les again. Next year, in Atlanta!

There’s probably some sociology somewhere on the genesis and growth of communities of practice. I can say that Les completely gets that repo-rats (sorry, Les, I know you hate that term) don’t have one and need one badly. With him, me, the REPOMAN folks, and one or two others on the case, maybe something will actually grow this time. (And, Les? I officially forgive you for your name being on this piece of ill-considered ideological smoke-blowing, and I’m sorry for eviscerating it in Roach Motel. Well, no, I’m actually not sorry, but… you know how it is.)

Roach Motel has been hacked on, given a kiss, and sent back to the editors. It’s imperfect. There’s a lot I didn’t say that I probably should have, and some things I beat on that probably didn’t deserve it. So it goes, and I must say I’m relieved to have it gone. Good riddance. Next time I’ll write something cheerful.

I spent most of my Saturday at a Free Culture event sponsored by the library. How cool is it that going to these things is really part of my job? It was a fantastic day, well-planned by people who weren’t me, and I’m honored to have met Nelson Pavlosky and Gavin Baker. I also, you will be glad to know, behaved myself with perfect propriety in front of an ACS editor (which takes fortitude!) and helped get the repository message out to people who hadn’t heard it.

The most valuable part of a valuable day was the after-party, in which Gavin and Nelson passed on immense amounts of wisdom about starting a campus Free Culture group. I know one of the students on the steering committee, and I plan to put as much time and effort into the new chapter as they’ll let me.

One of the things that a community of practice does is restore resolve and enthusiasm when they flag. I feel much better about what I do than I did a week ago today, and here’s my chance to say how much I appreciate the people who came to Madison and helped me feel that way.

I met today with the systemwide committee that’s working out where the repository I run goes in the future. Les Carr was there. He was awesome, and so was the meeting.

This is not, you understand, something I usually say about meetings. Meetings are not awesome. Meetings are for the most part necessary banality. But this? For me (I will not speak for the other attendees), this was a frickin’ awesome meeting. My mind just exploded all over the landscape. It’s a wonder I could drive home at all.

I don’t feel comfortable yet talking about the substance of this awesome meeting. There’s a lot of work and politics yet before the substance of the awesomeness can become reality.

I can, however, comfortably mention that probably the most valuable member of an extraordinarily valuable committee is the committee skeptic, the one who isn’t sure why the committee included them in the first place, the one whose hand goes up first with a question, the one whose questions are always tough and always on-point.

This librarian’s value to the committee is inestimable, and I am hunting for ways I can make that more widely known. Skeptics are often reviled, $DEITY knows. Me, I consider them means for discovering my weak and blind spots before I go making a fool of myself. I love me a good skeptic, and it’s my good fortune that this committee has one of the best.

Watch this space late in the year. I think we might just surprise you.

Completely coincidentally, I received reviewers’ comments back on Roach Motel today. What with those (which were, ahem, rather substantive; further proof that I am not the library world’s next Walt Crawford) and today’s big news out of Harvard, I’m going to have to rewrite the whole enchilada.

I tell you what, though, that’s going to be a much more cheerful and enjoyable task than writing it in the first place was. It’s going to be a completely different article when I’m done… because there’s been a sea change. There’s hope. There’s a pathway to point to. There’s a whole new class of interesting technical problems to suggest solutions to!

People who think I’m a grumpy old bat on the basis of the Roach Motel preprint may be surprised at just how enthusiastic I can be when there’s reason to be…