I was wrong. I own that. I’m happy to correct myself in public.

There was a lot of high-quality material yesterday, and there’s been more today. I want to call out John Wilbanks’s keynote, Paul Royster’s talk, the Innovation Fair, and Catherine Mitchell’s talk this morning as being especially inspiring and helpful, with lots of ideas I can take home and try to get some traction on.

Quite a few people here are old-timers like me, but there’s also a healthy complement of people with new or in-the-planning-stages repositories. I’m impressed at how much has been said here that’s useful to both populations. That’s a hard balance to pull off!

The hallway conversations have been excellent as well, though I feel more than a little goofy about the number of people hunting me down just to say hi. On a purely practical note, the wireless is free and has been rock-solid, the food is fantastic, and the hotel staff at the Baltimore Renaissance Harborplace have gone out of their way to accommodate us laptop-toting nerds.

Good job, all, and I’m sorry I doubted you!

I had a lovely breakfast this morning with Jean-Gabriel Bankier, President of BePress. It’s a rare privilege and pleasure to talk shop with people who run the same kinds of shops that I do, and have a similar understanding of the problem space. Jean-Gabriel and I exchanged a lot of useful ideas about what we do, which I’m still chewing on in my head and will share with the rest of you, I hope, a bit later.

We sat down in the ballroom just as Heather Joseph was wrapping up her conference opening (sorry, Heather!) so that John Wilbanks of Science Commons could take the stage. Almost the first thing he said: “I am not a repository expert. I almost said ‘I am not a repository rat.’” I promptly shrank down in my seat, reddening.

He namechecked poor old Caveat Lector thirty seconds later, as an information source.

Five minutes after that, he showed a screenshot of this post, in which it takes me an hour to change one link. (CavLec sure does look pretty on the big screen. Rock on, William Morris!)

Twenty minutes after that, he used the “carrots and sticks” metaphor, which I certainly didn’t originate, but I have certainly used in this space.

That’s the weirdest feeling in the world, I tell you what. It’s like being the winning coach at a football game when the Gatorade barrel is upended over his head. It’s the feeling of victory, of vindication—but it’s also damn cold and damn wet.

I am a figure now, almost a Grande Dame ($DEITY help me), in the repository space. I can’t deny that or tiptoe around it any more, much as I would like to. 2008 has been a phenomenal year for me in terms of professional development: breakfast with Jean-Gabriel Bankier this morning (I mean, how cool is that?), a book out, a game-changing preprint, my first keynote, another bespoke article, several talk invitations, a contest-winning blog entry, some brilliant learning opportunities…

… and yet. I think most of us can fill in the “and yet.” I won’t do so here, as it could be hazardous to my job, which is in enough trouble as it is.

I got some email about that contest-winning blog entry from people who found it inspiring. Inspiring? It’s not inspiring. I didn’t write it to be inspiring. I wrote it to pose problems. I wrote it to express frustration. I wrote it to try to turn the profoundly sterile, even hostile environment IRs exist in into a narrative people will perhaps finally understand. But readers found that “inspiring.” Paging Stanley Fish! Why are my readers’ reactions so different from what I thought I was writing?

(Okay, putting my lit-crit hat on, I can see why. I piggybacked that essay on some memoir techniques that create certain reactions… right. Shutting my lit-crit brain up now. Onward.)

Jean-Gabriel ran an informal survey of repository-rats shortly before this conference, and one of the spoilers (sorry, Jean-Gabriel!) that he shared with me at breakfast this morning is that a galloping majority of the survey respondents consider their repositories highly successful. This blew his mind as much as mine.

I wonder if all of this is tied up together. I wonder if we are grasping at straws, pretending to more confidence than we have, because we are dispirited and afraid, and we don’t feel empowered to talk about it, because we’d have to admit that we’re not accomplishing what we want to accomplish. We’d have to say the unsayable—and it’s especially unsayable when budget cuts are in play, as they are everywhere.

I don’t know. I do know that I myself am grasping at straws. I do know that I’m wondering how long I can go on doing that. I think SPARC-DR and John Wilbanks have given me a bit of a second wind, and I thank them for that.

What I just realized today, watching one such stream of reactions to a conference keynote, is that a keynote doesn’t have to be right to be good. It’s got to resonate, and it’s got to be not wildly wrong, but the goal is to get people thinking—not necessarily to get them thinking just like the keynoter.

That makes me feel better about my Repo Fringe keynote. It wasn’t the best talk I’ve ever given, and I wish it had been better than it was, but it did the job it needed to do.

Him: We small furry egg-suckers are slightly more nimble than our lumbering reptilian counterparts. Hooray for evolution.

Me: Yea verily, let us go suck eggs. Um, wait… that didn’t come out right.

(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.

Feels weird.

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.

• 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!

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

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.