This week I'm trying something new. I have been in the habit of blogging at the end of the week, but my exhausted and frustrated Friday posts make me feel like a walking attitude problem. Thus, the Monday blog and some nifty things I'm working on right now.
1. Praise be for technical difficulties, which forced me to install a new version of the MarcEdit utility. In doing so, I came across the very thing I have been looking for: an EAD/MARC crosswalk. Terry Reese is my hero! Perhaps the days are numbered for one of MPOW's sillier practices: transcribing finding aids from EAD to a paper workform, then transcribing them back into MARC.
2. I have been working on an ETD proposal since last October, and it will finally see the light of day. The graduate studies committee I have been working with wants to unveil it for the university administration, and hopefully legal counsel won't obstruct it for too long. ETDs come with many associated intellectual property issues, but plenty of other universities have covered this territory already. Since we are a late entry in this event, we actually have a great opportunity to see where repositories are going and build ourselves a rights environment that will be favorable to us over the long term. For example, we would like to retain an unambiguous right to share our ETDs with cooperative repositories with which we are affiliated – this environment already exists in a small way, and we can prepare ourselves for it to happen in a big way. It's all very exciting, and in my next life I might be an intellectual property lawyer.
3. Meanwhile, my fellow bloggers will have to fill me in on Lawrence Lessig's visit, because I'll be meeting with several other metadata geeks about preservation metadata. This is largely uncharted territory – we just don't know that much about digital preservation at this point, so this is likely to be a policy discussion as much as a technical discussion. I get the feeling, more through abstract hints and forensic evidence than actual communication, that MPOW is on the verge of a massive digitization effort, so I'm hoping that my research on behalf of the TDL consortium will have an application here. And, you know, yield a publication or two.
4. A post without strategery would be like a day without sunshine, so here we go. It is clear that in order to meet its significant objectives, MPOW will have to overcome some deep-rooted aspects of its organizational culture. These include risk aversion, passive resistance to change, and a reluctance to commit to specific objectives or policies. I do not know how to overcome these factors, other than for the people who want change to keep pushing a little at a time until resistance becomes futile. Nudge, nudge.
