Caveat Lector

Everybody has the work thing that makes them grit teeth and wish for an Uzi. Mine is “I don’t have time to learn all that!”

$DEITY, do I hear that one a lot. Sometimes it’s a piece of software. Sometimes it’s a genre of software (wikis are a particular target, I have found). Sometimes it’s open access, or the broader questions of scholarly communication. Whatever it is, it makes me look around and wonder just what the hell profession I landed in, anyhow. I thought we were all about the knowledge-seeking? Guess that’s just on behalf of patrons, though. Our own professional issues we’re allowed to be deliberately incurious about. Or something.

Right. Yeah. Take the Uzi away from me. Thank you. This really burns my britches.

My current hypothesis is that librarianship has two paradigms for picking up professional knowledge: the single spray and the steady stream. I am an unabashed steady-streamer. I read professional stuff every gosh-darn day, liblogs and techblogs and online journals and reports and conference rundowns and whathaveyou. I’m not indiscriminate; I can’t afford to be. Some people in my very own subfield I don’t read, often because they raise my blood pressure uselessly. Some reports I get to the end of the exec summary and chuck; not worth the effort. Sometimes stuff is so bad I can only go “WTF?” and move on. Even so. Every day. Every day I read something. Something.

My reading patterns aren’t perfect; most of “the literature” passes me right on by. I did slightly better when I was teaching last fall, because I held office hours in the SLIS library and was in close proximity to the new-print-journals shelf. I’d do better if more libsci journals offered TOC newsfeeds; I’ll go to some effort to dig up something interesting-looking once I know about it. Honestly, though, most of my lit-awareness lives in my Bloglines these days.

Still. Every day. Every day I read something.

I get the sense a lot of my colleagues prefer the single-spray method of learning. You go to a conference or a workshop or some other kind of meeting. You learn what’s being sprayed at you in concentrated bursts. You bring back what you learned. You do your job and let the world fly by because you’re too busy to read, until the next conference.

I suppose this must work out all right for them. I just cannot, cannot imagine functioning that way myself. I’d feel as though I’d suddenly lost my sight or hearing.

This pattern, if I have it right, may have implications for the spread of open-access awareness among academic librarians. If we’re going to hit the single-sprayers, we have to hit the ALAs and ACRLs and state library conferences good and hard. I am not volunteering for this duty, y’all; I’ve been to one ACRL, and one was a lifetime’s worth for me. My distaste for librarian zoos is downright visceral.

But somebody’s gotta do it.

Several kindly librarians of my acquaintance tried to convince me yesterday that indeed I am a rockstar. Evidence clearly shows otherwise, but thanks to them anyway.

One told me (paraphrased), “I wouldn’t know anything much about open access if not for you.”

Y’know, I said academic librarians were largely ignorant of OA in Roach Motel, and I got some pushback on that. I’d like the pushers-back to kindly buy me a drink now. Yeah, yeah, you’re not ignorant, sure. I challenge you to find five others at YPOW not directly working with an institutional repository or OA publishing program who aren’t. Just five. I’m guessing that if you can even do it, it’ll take work.

Trailblazing. Bah. It is for the birds.

Meredith wrote quite a thoughtful post about rockstardom and how to achieve it. This post of mine? Is probably going to be labeled “sour grapes.” Well, so be it. I think there’s more to the story.

I am not a rock star in librarianship. Meredith and I both have second master’s, graduated at the same time, got jobs at the same time, blogged about getting jobs at the same time, got interested in social software at the same time (well, okay, I started blogging first, but that’s irrelevant)—and she’s a rock star and I’m not. Let’s pick through that a moment.

First of all, everything in Meredith’s post is absolutely true. Fill a need. Be passionate. Spend your own time and money. Make it about something besides you. Grow some guts. Network. Don’t let geographic barriers bar you from the opportunities available via web contacts. Self-promote. Second of all, I don’t think Meredith and I are all that far apart in raw talent. (If you disagree, leave me to my happy illusions, please!) Third of all, I’ve done nearly everything Meredith mentions. (Including spend money, gah. Like water sometimes.) Nobody’s ever accused me of a lack of passion!

But for me, that didn’t turn out to be enough. Hmmmm.

Let’s be frank. Some of it is right-place-right-time-right-topic caprice. The spotlight hit wikis just as Meredith did. She didn’t plan that; she couldn’t have. Some people do try to plan it, try to make spotlights that they can then inhabit. Sometimes it even works… but honestly, I think rockstars are different from attention-mongers, and I definitely have an internal classifier; don’t you? As for me, institutional repositories don’t have a spotlight, and very likely never will. So I could make all the right moves (not that I have; just sayin’) and still never be a rockstar. Nota bene, this is not an argument about who “deserves” rockstardom, not least because I find such arguments virulently poisonous; it’s an argument about who gets it, and a plea to people not to beat themselves up if they don’t. Sometimes it’s really, truly not you.

Some of the rockstar machine is inextricably tied up with societal appearance norms that privilege certain looks over others. This is an unpopular thing for me to say, but so be it; it’s true. Meredith comes one hell of a lot closer to this society’s standard for attractiveness than I do. There’s a bloody good reason I keep pictures of myself off the web; it’s far better for me if the Internet doesn’t know I’m a dog. Again, this is not an argument about just deserts—well, okay, to some extent it is; appearance ought to be largely irrelevant, but it’s not, and that has some evil, evil knock-on effects. People of color don’t get a fair shake in this or any field, and yes, the markedness of their appearance compared to the white-bread norm is partly why. Women don’t get a fair shake in tech for similar reasons; we’re capital-D Different. What I’m saying is, if rockstardom is your goal, it’s worth thinking about where you are with regard to appearance. You can be plain, even as mud-fence ugly a woman as I am (note that ugly doesn’t matter as much for men as for women), and still do fine; it’s a disadvantage that may, however, disqualify you from actual rockstardom. Life isn’t fair.

Certain demeanor expectations also operate in the rockstar realm. Library rockstars are, logically enough, what we think librarians ought to be: genial, fun, optimistic, helpful, gregarious, pleasant people—but not too in-your-face about anything (again, especially for women; men have more leeway here), and certainly not deeply anti-establishment (for several possible values of “establishment”), because that’s intimidating. Think about the library rockstars you know, and see if I’m not mostly right. Now me, I violate these norms regularly onblog, on-mailing-list, and in my speaking and writing (Roach Motel was one gigantic exercise in norm violation in the IR subfield; it shocked one of its reviewers!). I don’t see how there can be any doubt in this world that it’s made me an unlikely candidate for rockstardom.

I’m not alone. I have good friends in librarianship who are just that leetle bit too iconoclastic to be rockstars; I adduce Bob “boats against the current” Molyneux as a good example, since he’s gone more or less public about it. They find their places, most of them, as I’ve found mine; sometimes very high places (you know who you are, person I have in mind!). More power to ’em; sometimes a damn good hole-poking skeptic is worth a dozen rockstars. But sometimes they chafe. Sometimes I chafe. Rockstars tend to keep their chafing to themselves, or to a tight circle of friends. Not an absolute rule, just a tendency.

Ah, me. Discouraging the young again. I should be ashamed, I suppose.

Look, folks, rockstardom isn’t the only face of success. In spite of my bulldog’s face, in spite of my snark, in spite of everything, I am quite as successful as I need or want to be. I found work in my heart’s home. When I need to say something serious about what I do, I can get it said and hearkened to, here or even (to my own surprise) in The Literature. (I could do considerably more, even, if I were a more fluent writer than I am.) In spite of the people I’ve alienated (and they are not few), I have my own network of well-loved colleagues and friends; I’ve never been lonely in this marvelous profession. If rockstardom got dumped in my lap, I’m honestly not entirely sure what I would do, but I lean toward “running and hiding,” because I have serious being-around-hordes and travel-hassle limits, and rockstardom would stomp all over them.

(I have an evil brain. It is now projecting images of 1984’s Room 101, with me shackled to the chair and rockstardom lurking and lashing its tail behind the little grate, with me screaming, “Do it to Sarah! Not me! Sarah!” Yeah. Evil. Um, sorry, Sarah.)

Most of all, I have the luxury of defining success for myself. I fully and freely acknowledge that non-tenure-track academic librarianship has its discontents, but they pale to insignificance beside the phenomenal freedom of picking my own goalposts. Rockstardom, even in easygoing librarianship, has been known to turn into the Russian’s plaint in Chess:

Now I’m where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven’t won at all!
Running for my life and never looking back in case there’s someone right behind to shoot me down and say he always knew I’d fall.

No, thanks. That’s not a life I’d even want to risk having. See my sidebar! And think good and hard about your own goalposts, please, before you set your sights on rockstardom.

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?

Well, this sucks. And because I love pointing out when my crystal ball breaks, I’m on record saying I didn’t think it would happen.

I look forward to seeing how faculty react. They might rise up in anger. Or they might cower under their desks. I’m not sure any more.

If I were the Georgia State library, though, I’d play hardball. No e-reserves for anybody, and let faculty go whine at the AAP.

I am reading through the repository case-studies that Les Carr put together for the Open Repositories ’08 conference. I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in institutional repositories at least skim.

This is the real deal, folks. Real repository-rats running real repositories dealing with real problems and achieving real successes, speaking in their own voices unmediated by discourses of fear or open-access dogma. Stop hanging on every word from the Big Thinkers. This is where the action is. These are the people I was trying (in my stumbling fashion) to speak for when I wrote Roach Motel.

Themes I saw:

• The library running the repository deposits most of the content, be it content from faculty/researchers or library-generated content. Unmediated faculty/researcher deposit is a pipe dream.
• Faculty and researchers haven’t heard of the repository qua repository, even the ones who use it. (This is identical to their behavior faced with library-purchased electronic resources. That the library is involved, that there’s a service involved, with people behind it, just doesn’t register with them.)
• Running open-source repository software is a hassle.

None of this should surprise anyone… and yet it will, I’m sure.

My personal thanks to all the people who wrote case studies. Keep writing, please! Write, and speak, and represent. We can’t progress until we have a fair, truthful sense of where we are, and to get there we have to hack through a right jungle of obfuscatory rhetoric and unjustifiable happytalk.

Also, I owe Les Carr an apology; he offered me a sneak peek at these in return for my reactions, and I never did get back to him. I couldn’t be happier that these have a good home.

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.

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!

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.

The mandatory NIH public-access policy goes live today. The sky does not seem to be falling (I just checked), but you wouldn’t know that from some of the reactions I’ve heard. Since this week has been declared OA Week, I thought I’d kick it off by retailing some of the things I’ve heard that worry me, with all appropriate serial numbers filed off.

I haven’t heard any worry over the fate of publishers. If I were a toll-access publisher, I would be worried by this. As I’m not, I’m not.

Without undue tooting of my own horn, let me say that my concerns about recalcitrant publishers have proven to occupy a lot of faculty brainspace. I don’t live in the medical-research realm, so I don’t know how much of this worry is futile handwringing and how much identifies a genuine problem. I only know that deans are worried particularly about protecting their junior faculty, who already find publishing an uphill climb. The sooner we all address this, the easier we will all find the compliance process.

I have heard a lot of worry over the versioning problem, from faculty spanning quite a few disciplines (with the understanding that “NIH grantee” implies a fairly narrow range to begin with). “What happens when copyediting catches real errors, or changes the thrust of an argument?” runs the basic version of this question. “The version in PMC will simply be wrong.”

This is not a silly or uninformed objection. I used to work for a publishing-services bureau; I know full well what “final” peer-reviewed manuscripts look like before and after copyediting. Let me tell you, a good copyeditor is worth his or her weight in diamonds, and it warms my text-artisanly heart that faculty realize this as well. Final manuscripts can be disasters; research faculty can be terrible writers and terrible writing teachers.

I saw a suggestion that copyediting happen before the journal-submission process. I’m sorry, but no, that won’t work. Part of the copyediting process involves bashing the manuscript (citations especially) into journal style, which obviously can’t be done until the journal has been chosen. Another part is marking it for typesetting, which is intimately connected with each journal’s particular typesetting practices. You can’t just pick copyediting up and dump it in front of manuscript submission; you’d only add a step, slowing the whole publication process down and increasing its cost.

At present, the only workaround for this (as I understand matters) is working with a publisher cooperative enough to replace PMC’s manuscript version with the published version. These publishers exist, but they are not exactly numerous. For PR purposes if for no other reason (and “accuracy” is a plenty good enough reason all by itself), I think it would be wise for PMC to work out a way for PIs and other authors to fix errors in their manuscripts. I have heard the versioning problem called “a flaw in the policy” and “suicidal” by people in very high places.

Another difficulty has to do with the principal investigator’s responsibility under the policy, given that the PI is likely not an author (much less the first or corresponding author) on every single article coming from a given NIH grant. This is a tough one to resolve, given that the buck has to stop somewhere, but I would suggest at the least that first/corresponding authors as well as PIs be able to approve manuscripts and offer corrections.

Reading the NIH’s comment stream, I see that the too-much-work backlash has begun. In my cynical way, I tend to ignore this particular objection (trusting in Swan’s research on mandates to back me), but if we open-access advocates want to be smart about this, we will sort out how to help libraries offer third-party PMC submission services. (Disclaimer: MPOW does this. It was not my decision, though I support it wholeheartedly.) PMC could help us all by providing a deposit API (preferably based on SWORD) that those of us with institutional repositories could program against. Not only will that allow people like me to get in on the repositing action, it will help institutions monitor compliance and provide useful services (such as local PMCID/NIHMSID databases) to faculty. As mandates become more numerous, local services become even more important, as they allow faculty to become accustomed to one deposit interface, not a dozen. Please, PMC, set the example here!

Confusion about the policy is rampant, though MPOW is doing its level best to calm the waters. I do worry about institutions that are letting this slide—which is most of them! I suggest that the NIH target marketing efforts at libraries as well as researchers. MPOW and other institutions like it prove that we can help. The problem is that not all of us know we should. If the NIH isn’t working with SPARC to clue in the larger research-library community, it should be.

Happy Open Access Week!