Eat-Your-Vegetables librarianship alive and well

I recently attended the NASIG annual conference.  As is often the case at library conferences, I attended a pleasing variety of moderately informative programs.  But this year, two rather unusual things happened:

1. I attended a lively informal discussion of scholarly communication
2. I attended a program that made me deeply, viscerally angry

#1 was entirely refreshing.  Everybody in the room participated, freely expressed their hopes and fears about libraries’ ability to provide relevant support for the scholarly enterprise, and altogether ignored the self-archiving/open access cant that sometimes comes to dominate such discussions.  I’m by no means against open access, but I don’t believe the ability to self-archive published materials is the most compelling basis for an institutional repository.  To my delight, we spent the hour discussing everything BUT preprints.

I have some doubts about Library 2.0 and don’t consider myself a blog person, but #2  made me want to leave the profession and slam the door behind me.  The program in question (”Column People”) addressed the future of traditional published columns now that there are over 80 million blogs.  The presentation was replete with the usual snide putdowns directed at blogs and bloggers (they’re trivial, the writing isn’t polished, etc.) and cited as evidence this post.  I was indignant on Jane’s behalf, and also miffed that the presenters were so fixated on the medium that they ignored the message: our communication customs force us to work hard instead of smart.  Speaking of working smarter, I suggested that neither a blog nor a column will retain an audience for long without a feed or other alerting service attached, whereupon the presenter accused me of passivity (I prefer “efficiency,” but whatever).  I don’t consider myself a passive reader – I’ll perform a thorough lit review when the situation requires it – but columns aren’t research articles.  A sufficient number of informed and informative opinions come equipped with feeds that I feel no pressing need to seek out those that don’t.

Personal indignation aside, the exchange betrayed some toxic beliefs about user complacency that have broader implications for the profession.  There is no inherent virtue in painstakingly seeking out information that could just as easily be delivered (isn’t this the whole point of serial publications?), but we reflexively characterize users’ desire to have good information delivered to them as laziness or passivity.  This emphasis of process over product is one reason we have been marginalized in the information marketplace.  Sure there are some lazy users, but the sooner this profession gets over its misguided contempt for efficient information gathering that capitalizes on available technology, the sooner we can provide tools and services that really reach our users.

Experiments in new media

This week I had the opportunity to attend the De Lange Conference. The program included some very big thinkers in scholarly communication and the future of libraries. There was not a lot of breaking news here for anyone familiar with the discourse of scholarly publishing, institutional repositories or Library 2.0, but it was exciting to hear about it directly from the leaders and policy makers. Collectively, their message was that libraries need to engage with the digital future and do it FAST if they want to remain relevant.

The conference was supposed to be simulcast in Second Life, and I looked over a colleague’s shoulder as he got started using SL.

The good:

• Unlike a traditional webcast, you can see the other participants around you, and chat as a group or IM individual participants privately. It provided a sense of community that I thought was very cool.
• While we were getting oriented, someone’s shirtless avatar materialized in front of us, break danced for a moment and then inquired “Er du Dansk?” Priceless.

The bad:

• Danish break dancers aside, SL seems like a spectacularly inefficient way to deliver content. The environment took a painfully long time to render on a wireless connection, we had difficulty finding the venue (a publicity problem, not a SL problem per se), and when we got there the audio and video weren’t working.
• Everyone in SL looks like either a gigolo or Aeon Flux.

I’ll be curious to see what happens with SL in the near future. I don’t think it’ll gain a wide following for professional/educational applications like this conference until it overcomes some of its present limitations. I don’t just mean having the media working properly. We were greeted by someone named Vulva Vella the moment we entered the orientation space, and although she seemed perfectly nice I can’t imagine introducing her to most of my colleagues.

I heart the internet

Wow. I have been away from metaprojects for a while, but I just looked at my live site and discovered the little thumbnails that appear when I mouse over a link. The tubes become more awesome every day.

Culture clash

I just had the opportunity to attend Open Repositories 2007 back to back with ALA Midwinter. This was a very interesting juxtaposition, but it illustrated with alarming clarity the fundamental problems facing the library profession in general and cataloging in particular.

Since I am now the Boss Lady of Cataloging, this trip to ALA involved more attention than usual to cataloging-related programs. Two that particularly stood out were the Electronic Resources Interest Group discussion forum on RDA (the set of content rules that will be the eventual successor to AACR2) and the ALCTS Forum on the Future of Cataloging.

The path to RDA certainly seems to be an arduous one. The framers are taking a lot of criticism from the core audience (catalogers) for altering long-standing content rules for no particularly compelling reason. The digital library community finds the new rules so print- and MARC-centric that they don’t have much utility beyond the traditional catalog. My principal complaint about RDA is that it is so mind-bogglingly complex [cough FRBR! cough] that by the time it is actually published it’ll be 10 years out of date. Altogether, this is a terrible outcome, because the existing cataloging rules create some big problems for modern catalogs that a new set of content rules could solve and the digital library environment desperately needs rules that could be adopted in a straightforward way. I wish RDA had been built as a crisp, pragmatic set of rules that anyone could follow, with modular additions of more complex rules by and for the specialized communities of practice that need them. This, I think, would have been more agile in the short term and more sustainable in the long term than the behemoth that is presently taking shape.

The ALCTS Forum on the Future of Cataloging was as sobering as I anticipated. This is not a group that gets excited about technology; in the packed ballroom I saw two laptops. Casey Bisson’s segment about making our catalogs compatible with users’ preferred tools was great, and kudos to the organizers for inviting him, but he followed another speaker whose message was “Don’t worry so much about digital stuff, because lots of users would rather use print. Which by the way we should keep around in case the power goes out” [mad strategerist rends garments in despair].

Open Repositories was sure a sight for sore eyes. It was exciting to see creative people solving the biggest problems with open source repository technologies, namely that they are clunky and demanding to configure and use. Both Fez (Fedora) and Manakin (dSpace) are nifty web interfaces that dramatically extend the power and versatility of these systems, and it’s great to see these tools evolve and mature.

This was a technology conference and yes, there were laptops aplenty in the audience, but the most striking difference between this conference and ALA was cultural, not technological. The open source community has a palpable aura of confidence and a problem-solving mentality. If you have something to add to the solution you can be part of the community, and ambition and creativity are noticed and admired. This is a pretty dramatic contrast with traditional library conferences, where technology is largely regarded with suspicion and a whole caste of volunteer bureaucrats seems to exist to enforce arcane procedures and haze newcomers. I’m on the fringe of that bureaucracy and I try to use my powers for good, but come this fall I’m going to see what’s being offered in the department of computer science.

Adventures in EAD

I have lately been working on refining an XML transform that will render our EAD finding aids in MARC. I think the end result has turned out OK, but it is far from optimal. I am hampered by several things:

1. I’m not very expert at manipulating XML. A transform is basically a logic puzzle. I <3 logic puzzles and I think I’m picking it up pretty fast, but my bag of tricks mostly consists of what I can extrapolate from other peoples’ work. One evening as I was fiddling with an aggravating portion of this transform, Significant Other wandered by and casually suggested that I use regular expressions instead. I (rather impolitely) declined the suggestion, but he’s right – my methods are terribly inefficient. If I want to do this well, I’ll need to take some classes.
2. EAD incorporates some questionable formatting. One example is having nodes (fields) that contain both text and subnodes (subfields) that also contain text, such as unittitle and unitdate. Although various XML gurus have offered a simple workaround for this, they also tend to waggle their fingers and tell you not to format your document like that in the first place; nonetheless, there it is in the DTD. MARC may be problematic in many ways, but this particular way isn’t one of them. Everything lives in a subfield.
3. Inconsistent markup makes everything harder. When the earliest of these finding aids were marked up, I think there was also not a good sense of how these files would be used in the future, how essential it is to follow the same process every time, and how unseen code really matters on the web. When the metadata is not predictable, it becomes necesssary to either tinker with the end product, or build all sorts of exceptions into the transform. The same is true of human-mediated retrieval, but it’s especially problematic for an automated process that can only do what you build it to do and nothing more.

On the Culture of Politeness (for a Friday)

MPOW is sometimes accused of having a culture of politeness, but clearly we still have much to learn from these guys:

Academic #1: I am so honored.

Academic #2: No, I am so honored.

A1: No sir, the honor is mine.

A2: Respectfully sir, the honor is mine!

A1: I beg your pardon sir, but the honor is entirely mine!

…

Honorary degrees: taking politeness to the next level.

On the importance of drinking the Kool-Aid

At present, MPOW appears to be retreating from what is arguably its most forward-looking project, a major collaborative enterprise that won’t start to bear fruit for any of the participants until a couple of years down the road. Although we contributed a fairly large sum to participate in the project, I thought we all understood from the outset that we were embarking on a daring experiment, not buying a turnkey system. Lately, though, it seems like we are much more interested in articulating the reasons why the project won’t succeed than doing what we can to ensure that it will. This is personally embarrassing to me and also, IMHO, a bad strategic position for MPOW.

I’m not generally a faith-based person, but my recent foray into strategery has taught me that sometimes we have to believe in something to make it real. I’m completely in favor of debate, discussion, and inquiry, but if the bottom line is that we just don’t believe in the outcome then skepticism doesn’t serve any constructive purpose – it just becomes a polite, faux-academic way of tearing down something we didn’t really want to do anyway. It appears that MPOW is having a crisis of belief at every level these days, and it’s starting to take a toll on those who are committed to and excited about change.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. My most treasured project just got a green light, and although I know it will unfold more slowly and cautiously than it should, it will ultimately go forward because it must.

Resistance is futile

I recently returned from ALA Annual. Like a lot of people I was fairly trepidatious about New Orleans, but the city did itself proud. Despite the wilting heat and iffy infrastructure, the conference seemed to go off pretty much without a hitch. The highlight of the trip was, of course, the delicious food, but I also went to programs!

The ALCTS Networked Resources & Metadata Interest Group (soon to become the Metadata Interest Group, yay) put on a couple of interesting sessions. A program on rights management weighed in at a hefty four hours, but covered a lot of interesting territory regarding rights and institutional repositories. Among the highlights, Scholars’ Bank is distinguishing itself as a singularly thoughtful IR venture in terms of both content and policy, and a medical society publisher had some interesting things to say about the issue of versioning. In his experience, most authors aren’t sure which version of a journal article they are permitted and/or obligated to post to fulfill their various responsibilities to granting agencies, research institutions, publishers, etc. and was concerned about uncorrected versions of articles getting into the hands of unsuspecting readers. Relating to long-term rights management, an interesting point came up at the NRMIG discussion group the next day: considering that one of the most important pieces of data to have about a document for rights management purposes is the death date of the author, name authority practice that emphasizes conflict resolution over completeness (dates aren’t recorded at all except to resolve a conflict, and death dates are optional) has compromised a potentially rich source of rights metadata. Sigh. Along with preservation, rights management is still uncharted territory for libraries.

I decided at the last minute to attend the ALCTS President’s program, which featured David Levy of the University of Washington talking about “mindful work” and the use of technology.  Levy talked about the historical precedent for “productive leisure” and the fact that our ubiquitous technologies often intrude into our space for thoughtful introspection (he neglected to mention that, in the past, much of that productive leisure was made possible by a large underclass that worked more or less continuously from childhood until death – class warriors, do your worst).  He was an engaging speaker, and it’s hard to disagree with his essential point that we need to find a balance between the technologies that compete for our attention and the inner space needed to think. However:

1. I just don’t understand the concept of information overload.  There has always been too much information to process – scientists complained about this phenomenon four centuries ago.  It is the job of every person, and especially the job of every information professional, to meter their own information intake to a satisfactory level according to their own interests and priorities.  I don’t see why there needs to be a “movement” to address this.
2. This presentation dovetailed nicely with other arguments floating around the profession that we need to start providing more effective tools for our USERS so they can spend less time searching and more time learning. However, I got the sense that many people in the audience were looking to this program to validate their sense that technology is oppressive and harmful to OUR quality of life. Noooo!

“XML is the bizzomb”

Famous (and true!) words from a colleague at a nearby university. It has been months since I have posted anything on account of feeling tired, overwhelmed, and pretty much unenthused about professional matters. But, of recent note:

• Scott Plutchak spoke at a conference I attended. He didn't say anything earthshakingly radical, but he did identify the present day as the most exciting era, information-wise, since the time of Gutenberg. True. Sometimes I lose my sense of wonder about how much is possible now.
• I attended a statewide virtual meeting of the TDL metadata working group via iChat. The group included one member that none of the rest of us (who have been working together for a year) has ever met in person. Then we saved the whole chat for future reference. Awesome! We don't have any urgent projects at the moment, but we parsed out some future projects and verified that chat was a viable environment for a meeting. Although it is somewhat less cool, text may be preferable to video chat which seems to have some latency issues. We also determined that we <3 ETDs, XML, and wikis and are a bunch of major nerds.
• I'm back on the case on the EAD/MARC transform. It's pretty nifty so far and I'm amazed that by spending some time fiddling with X, I'll ultimately be able to turn A into Z in milliseconds, with total reliability. It's slow going so far because I'm not as good at manipulating XML as I should be and I'm still learning my way around the new editor, but I really want to complete this piece of the project without enlisting the web guru!

Some days I really <3 my job…

A modest proposal

I discovered yesterday that MPOW is firmly committed to precisely the scenario described in this article. I'm not actually suggesting that we start firing colleagues in their golden years, but this situation is really starting to chap my hide. Why?

1. At this stage of my life, I'm more concerned with buying a house than with buying all the beer I want.
2. I and my technology-forward colleagues – mostly new and/or junior members of the profession – are being asked to create a vision for the future and be invested in its outcome to a level that, in my opinion, far outmeasures our status, authority, or pay grade. This problem is not exclusive to MPOW; in many different arenas my professional cohort is being asked to provide policy recommendations and other critical directions to those in more official leadership positions.
3. In addition to doing much of the innovating, we are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to wrangle resources and policy decisions from administrators. This makes #2 a lot more strenuous than it needs to be.

I wish my professional education had prepared me better for #3, because there's a lot more to overcoming internal resistance than merely writing a good proposal. It takes organizational intelligence, fortuitous timing, and compromise. A litigious tendency doesn't hurt, either…

ETA: Just this morning a colleague gave me an interesting perspective on #2. Despite our relative youth and inexperience, WE are the ones who feel most compelled to take the long view because we will be spending several more decades in the profession. I thought that was interesting.