The prophet Jeremiah was an interesting fellow. Bit of a Cassandra; he told inconvenient truths that no one cared to heed, doubtless in part because he was such a gloomy-gus. (Lord Dunsany in the Pegana cycle points out that the divine hardly ever hands down happy prophecies, so if prophets want to be anything other than gloomy-guses, they have to lie their prophetic arses off.) You have to admit, the poor guy did his best. Flashy presentations, props, the whole bit. Put up with all kinds of abuse, too, and kept right on telling truths, even when he bitterly resented the awkward positions truth kept dumping him into.
He is, of course, the source of the word “jeremiad,” which word Alma Swan used in a lovely interview by Richard Poynder (do click at the bottom of the post to read the whole thing, even if it is a PDF!) to characterize my on- and off-blog writings about the state of institutional repositories in the United States. My computer’s onboard dictionary offers “a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes” by way of definition, although my internal mental lexicon (somewhat uneasily) suggests a definition closer to “philippic.”
Okay. I’ll cop to that one, either way, and I’ll also admit to considerable fellow-feeling for poor old Jeremiah. I am also not-so-faintly amused because I’ve kept a good many serious woes off the blog. Had to. So it goes. (Even the Roach Motel preprint is very slightly bowdlerized. When I get the edits for it, I’ll make the final decision about whether to go with the full or the expurgated version.)
The truth is, I don’t like the frame of mind I’m in with respect to my work. I am fully aware of the degree to which I frighten, disturb, frustrate, annoy, and anger other people in my field. None of that is my aim. I express myself in the way that I do partly because the growing sense of helplessness I live with has built up a good solid head of steam fueling my personal frustration levels—I would like to contribute more than I feel I do or can given my present circumstances!—and partly because I am not in a position of power or influence, and I therefore have to yell myself hoarse just to be heard. (It doesn’t help that institutional repositories are a bit of a void; we don’t have one big soapbox, but fifty small ones. Most of the time I don’t know whether I’ve been heard. It’s entirely possible I’ve been yelling louder than I need to.)
I get the distinct sense sometimes that people wonder how on earth I get away with what I say. Allen Renear greeted me at ASIST with “Hi, Dorothea. Still causing trouble, are you?” Er, yes. Often. Intentionally or not, I live my life in the tradition of Shakespearian and Calderonian wise fools, who shout what no one else will whisper into the ears of kings too mad or self-obsessed to listen. I’ve stepped a bit outside the proper fool’s boundaries lately by becoming angry and lashing out, I admit; but that’s the frustration talking. When I’m in a better frame of mind, I remember the gentle, clear-sighted, humorous detachment that is the fool’s gift.
Another thing about the wise fool: he’s usually dead by the end of the play. Lear’s fool. Clarín in La vida es sueño. Old Jeremiah has good literary company in his dangerous profession.
Sorry, tangent. I get away with saying what I say the way I say it for a few reasons. One is that honesty redeems a good deal of my bad behavior. (I’m fairly sure I’m not the only open-access public figure for whom this is true; if you’re in this field, you know who I’m thinking about and I needn’t name names.) People recognize that I believe what I’m saying, and now and then they even appreciate that I don’t obfuscate. Another is that for the most part (and with one or two notable exceptions, such as the AAP), I don’t personalize conflict. However hacked off I may be, I’m not hacked off at you, I’m hacked off at abstract inefficiency or general blindness or dysfunctional systems. A third is that I don’t usually open my mouth, especially in a philippic, before I’ve chewed the matter over in my head. Like it or not, I generally make sense, manage to articulate observations and the patterns I can derive from them cogently. Even the people who dislike the way I say things have trouble dismissing what I actually say.
I have a particular strength in the area of systems analysis relating to data flow. (Not “information” flow, much less “knowledge management.” Data flow.) I have no earthly idea why I’m good at this; I was never trained for it and don’t analyze at all systematically. But I’m good. Workflows, interaction design, data design—given enough reliable input (and I’m inexhaustibly curious about people’s one-on-one interactions with data), I see where data go and what people do with them, and I see where systems fail. Just about everything important I’ve ever written or spoken about ebooks or design or scholarly communication or institutional repositories comes out of this weird gut intuition I’ve got about the inner workings of data flows. I can’t explain it; I’ve just gotten enough feedback on its insights over the years that I trust it. If I were religiously inclined, which I’m not, I might even draw a parallel with prophecy.
More to the point, other people trust what comes out of my data-flow intuition-space. I can’t explain that one, either, but it’s true. When I write or speak something I’ve intuited, people believe. Way back in the day, the very first talk I ever had any success with, the one I gave for Microsoft Research—it was crude and unpolished, but it came out of that intuition-place, and by gosh they took it seriously. My London talk came from there. So did much of Roach Motel. So does my unvarnished frustration with DSpace—I see all these wonderful data flows that I can’t get into because DSpace is in the way! Also, of course, the interaction among DSpace, admins, developers, repository-rats—I see destructive patterns, they annoy me, then I annoy everybody else by pointing them out. So it goes. Intuition, or prophecy if you will, isn’t always—or indeed ever—comfortable.
So, yes, jeremiads. We’re at a weird place in the United States (and Alma Swan was kind enough to agree with me that the US is lagging Europe and Australia badly) with regard to the constellation of problems around several sorts of digital data created by the research enterprise. Academic libraries have been pushed as far as admitting that collecting and caring for these data might be a good idea, although there are pockets of vigorous resistance even to that mild suggestion. These same libraries are not, not at all, convinced that they have an active role in the process of data collection, much less data creation. What’s the difference? It’s the difference between opening an institutional repository and filling one, between throwing up an Open Journal Systems installation and being an actual press.
Meanwhile, research enterprises in the States are creating their own data systems (and by “system,” let me be clear, I mean humans as well as technology), mostly ad hoc. Some of them are very effective, to be trusted without an instant’s hesitation. Most are not; some oughtn’t be trusted to live out the week. At MPOW, I see examples of all of these. I also extrapolate that an immense amount of redundant effort is going into parallel development of solutions to common problems, which offends my efficiency-loving sensibilities—and not just mine; I adduce the NSF DataNet grant effort and some noises I hear coming out of the NIH about no longer grant-funding itty-bitty data-centers as evidence.
My chief concern, which is partly personal and partly much broader, is that by the time libraries decide that solving this problem—solving it actively, with money and staff as well as lip service—is within their mandate, it will be too late and we’ll have been shut out of the solution. What I have to lose if that happens is obvious. What the problem-space has to lose, well… I wish it were more obvious than it seems to be. To me it’s obvious, but I’m just pining after work I’d like to do, so why heed me?
An alternate way things might well play out is that by the time the research community decides it needs librarians, both libraries and librarians will have disclaimed the problem, disgusted by (among other things) the painful institutional-repository experience, and frightened by the vastness of the problem’s scope. That would be a shame… but I see it happening already.
The reason I’m up in arms is that my gut tells me we’re at the crucial crossroad, where everyone decides who has which piece of this pie. Infrastructure, finance, and staffing decisions made now will reverberate for decades. I’m not sanguine that the decisions being made will be the right ones, and if walking around with a wooden yoke on my shoulders would draw the right attention to the problem, I would do that. I can in fact be patient, very patient. I put myself through library school doing data entry! But my gut is screaming at me that there is no time to waste if matters are to work out well, and I believe my gut.
Jeremiah learned that one of the curses of prophecy is foreseeing one’s own failures. I’ve been right beside him on that one for much of the last year, and it’s a deeply unpleasant place to be (for no fault of Jeremiah’s).
That said… and to end this on a hopeful note… I think Roach Motel is accomplishing what I wanted it to, and that gives me real hope. I know it’s being read; not only is it already the second most popular download from the repository I run, I am already seeing things like Alma Swan’s interview, hearing from people who have read it—and some of them are people in positions of power and influence. What’s more, it’s making them think, and one or two are even acting on it. Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine—Simeon, not Jeremiah.
Finally, a small correction (Poynder’s error, not Swan’s): I am no longer at George Mason University. The most excellent Shane Beers is doing the honors there. I work for the University of Wisconsin.