First off was dropping my husband at work, which is nice for him because it cuts his commute time in half. Next, popping by the bird-paraphernalia store for forty pounds of sunflower seeds for the delectation of our local chickadees and finches, and the considerable amusement of one small gray cat on the other side of the window from the suction-cup window feeder.

After that I stopped at a coffeeshop for a chai latte and a peaceful hour of grading. Scheduling a quiz on the same day their position-description assignment was due was not the brightest thing I have ever done, but I shall make shift to manage. The quizzes are graded and recorded, and I’m chugging through the job descriptions. I’m amused by the number of them who have added two and two and set their fictional libraries in Middle-Earth. (”Helm’s Deep Library is an equal-opportunity employer. Orcs welcome!”)

Then it was the traditional stock-up trip to Woodman’s, which I do partly because some of what I buy I can get there for about half what it costs elsewhere, some of it I can’t find other places (what is the deal with dill weed in Madison? it’s out of stock almost everywhere I go!), and some of it is so hefty I’m much happier buying it when I have a car to haul it in. All told, I probably toted about a hundred seventy pounds of stuff in from the car when I got home: forty pounds of seed, two forty-pound boxes of cat litter, and fifty pounds (give or take) of other stuff.

I admit that I have a stockpile impulse, particularly when the outside world seems scarier and more uncertain than usual. Objectively, I know that I’m in amazingly good financial shape compared to most, that there’s a good bit of elbow-room in our finances (we don’t actually spend any of what my husband earns; we don’t even spend all of what I earn), and that I’m fairly frugal by nature. Subjectively… I stockpile. There’s no real harm in it, as reactions to uncertainty go.

I have a whacking lot more grading to do, but I think I may take a nap instead and see if I can’t shake the rest of this bug.

Herewith, some linkies.

• Toward a third way of doing digital humanities. Tom gets at a lot of the things that have always bugged me about the “but is it research?” schtick, and as another person who has chosen a “third way” to do the digital, I am in total agreement with what he says about the rewards thereof.
• Springer buys Biomed Central. Not to kill it off, I hope… but that’s a possibility. The fight is not won when a journal goes OA. The fight is barely begun. Now we know (though we should have known all along).
• One week to Open Access Day. Yay! Go hug a repository-rat. Just not me, because I’m sick.
• I have been interviewed. As usual, in the cold light of day even I don’t agree with everything I said, but what the hey. John asked some really good questions.

I’m not sanguine it’ll win, though. It’s good writing, and apropos, and there’s humor in it as well as solid storytelling—but it’s not happytalk. If I ever knew how to do happytalk, I’ve forgotten. If there’s a word for my Open Access Day blog post, it’s “edgy.”

I swear I don’t do this on purpose. I didn’t know what I was setting out to write as I was writing it; I just knew what the beginning was, and some of the bits in the middle. I got to the end finally and was dismayed. Sometimes, damn it, the writing writes me.

I’ve set it, if my Wordpress-fu comes through, to publish automatically at midnight on October 14. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves then.

I don’t think they meant that to be a shocker; they’d clearly grown used to their new situation. For MPOW’s delegation, it was a shocker. We have a considerable network of small libraries. I’m used to that, despite my sojourn at another institution whose library system actively resisted the establishing of small libraries. I’m so used to it that Purdue’s declaration shocked me, too. How on earth did they make that happen, I wondered. Wasn’t there great wailing and gnashing of teeth?

Since then, I’ve been pondering libraries and real estate, usually not simultaneously. (Yes, I’ve been a housing-bubble watcher since moving to DC. My coworkers then assured me airily that prices would never go down in the DC area. I wasn’t sanguine, but I kept my opinion to myself… so obviously I can’t prove at this late date just what my opinion actually was. People are saying the same thing about Madison at the moment. They’re wrong too, and trulia.com is starting to prove it.) My ponderings have led me to this: I wonder if at least some academic libraries are overinvested in public-service real estate.

The other day I was walking from a meeting with a valued colleague when she started on what I believe to be the Librarian’s Eternal Plaint: not enough time in the day. We all say that, every last one of us. I do. You do. We all do. Her edition contained something I don’t always hear, though. “… and we have to keep the library open and the desks manned somehow!”

Hm. Do we? I wonder. Do we have too many desks to man? Too many rooms and buildings to monitor (and clean, and secure, and provision with terminals and e-reserves scanners and circ gadgets, and route materials to, and put signs in, and…)? Maybe some of the staff and resource overhead that goes into routine space management and service-point provision could find more productive uses?

I don’t know the answer; I’m not being a fire-breathing revolutionary again. I just think we (writ large; this is a much larger question than just at MPOW) ought to be asking the question, instead of treating the spaces as sacrosanct. I think MfPOW might have been onto something, not spreading their human resources too thinly over too many spaces. Space is at a premium on college campuses. What could libraries gain in a space horse-trade? How much would general overhead costs go down with reductions in public-service square footage? Would we really need to build offsite storage if we got rid of public-service space in some of those branch libraries and stuffed the resulting empty places full of stacks (architecture permitting)?

I don’t know. I’d be interested in Purdue’s answers, and the reasoning behind MfPOW’s resistance to space expansion. I wonder if they’ve published about it. (And off I toddle to the library literature…)

I think this question is the real challenge of what I’m hearing called “embedded librarianship” to the library world order. Embedded librarians don’t need libraries-as-places; libraries-as-places just plain don’t make sense for the kinds of services they provide. They may need different spaces altogether, but we don’t quite know what those are yet, I don’t think. (If I were an embedded librarian, I’d want a good-sized office in the same building as faculty with a conference table and a big-screen computer monitor for group meetings and consults. Plus a serious high-speed Internet connection. But I don’t know if that’s right, if it’s what I’d still want, say, two years of embedded-librarian experience later.)

My gut instinct is prodding me quite hard, insisting that a lot of us are headed in Purdue’s direction whether we know it yet or not. Way back in the day (okay, okay, during library school; not that long ago), I interviewed a campus librarian who ran a small library, asking what she wanted more of in her day. Her answer? Unstructured time with individual faculty. Bumping into faculty in the hall, exchanging news, making her presence known, offering off-the-cuff help as well as making appointments on the spot to address in-depth questions.

What I didn’t see then because I took the space’s continued existence for granted, and see now because I am questioning the need for that space, is that she can’t realistically create those semi-random meetings chained to the desk in her little library. Is chaining her there just to keep the space open really the best situation, the situation that will make her most effective in her work with and for faculty?

Mind you, this battle is lost in many of the hard sciences. A librarian chained to the desk is a librarian faculty will never even meet, because they don’t go to the library, don’t think about the library, don’t give a flying flip about library-as-place. It is probably a lost battle among many undergraduates, too.

But it’s hard to give up space. Oh, it’s hard. Library traditionalism completely aside, it’s hard. Fundamentally, space is status in the academic context—you don’t have to work in academia terribly long before you start hearing about pitched battles over campus spaces, fought by many other stakeholders besides libraries. Moreover, giving up space feels disrespectful of the planning and effort that went into securing and running the space. It can even feel like closing off options for the future. From a human-resources perspective, small libraries represent mini-career-ladders for academic librarians to aspire to, in what has been a fairly flat profession and is becoming a flatter one.

Mm. I would really like to know what went on in those high-level library admin meetings at Purdue. I bet they were real humdingers. I just don’t think it’s coincidence that Purdue is able to be in the forefront of data curation in libraries in the US. They consciously reallocated resources away from keeping spaces open and toward other things.

I also heard something so wild about Roach Motel that I’m not even sure I believe it (which is, I hasten to say, the result of a skeptical mind rather than any lack of credibility on the part of my informant). I’ll be able to verify (and share) when the issue comes out. If it’s true (and seriously, people, this is wild), it’s a real testament to the power of an early OA preprint.

Occasionally an uncomfortable shiver travels up my spine at the thought that Roach Motel really may change the IR game—may, in fact, already have done so. I mean, yes, of course I wrote it to do precisely that—but hell, I never thought it would work. Who listens to repository rats? Even rats who have sharp-edged rhetorical flourishes and aren’t afraid to use ’em?

It’s not all good. I embarrassed one good person doing her level best to run a good IR program, and I’ve apologized profusely and sincerely for that in private. (The only reason I haven’t done so in public is that my sense is that the person in question would rather the problem die quietly, if possible.) The published version of Roach Motel will eliminate the cause of embarrassment… but that doesn’t remove the damage the preprint did, or my culpability in letting it happen. I also made a bonehead-undergraduate error of attribution that I’m still ashamed of (and yes, Dr. Jacobs, that one’s fixed). And lastly, the bit about prophets and honor and their own country is much, much too true for my comfort.

Even so… I said some things needing saying, and they were read, and the way we’re talking and thinking about IRs is changing, and I think I’m content (pace the solecisms retailed above) with my small part in those changes.

However, the Swan and Brown report offers even comp-lit majors like me a little hope:

On the other side of the coin, there are data scientists who argue that it is not necessary to be a subject expert in order to do the job effectively. There are some fundamental data science skills that are generic in nature, such as dealing with confidential research, data description and metadata, software, copyright and intellectual property rights, and data storage. Although this is may be so, the core issue is that of effective communication between a data scientist and their research colleagues…

From a practical perspective, as demand for competent data scientists grows, so it will become necessary to cast the net as wide as possible. Subject knowledge is important, but so too are technical skills and people skills…

We must consider also the question of technical and computing aptitude…

Our online survey of current data scientists also showed that the data science community is evenly split on whether people skills are more important than technical skills for success as a data scientist – but then people’s opinions are often predicated on their own experiences and whether their own strengths lied toward the technical or people skills end of the spectrum. It is uncommon to find people who are excellent at both. We came across several examples of instances where people whose background was primarily computing and information technology became sufficiently familiar with the subject area of their specialist institutions that they were deemed to be effective data scientists.

In my mind, I compare this to the situation of librarians who become selectors or bibliographers in subject areas where they have no formal training. Let’s not kid ourselves, it happens, especially in the sciences. I’ve known some such—and paradoxically, they tended to be toward the more effective end of the scale. Admittedly, this is because they were people with courage sufficient to dive into an unfamiliar topic head-first, and such people tend to be naturally effective at whatever they turn their hand to. Sometimes, though, being buried in the subject is a positive disadvantage. Ever had a foreign-language teacher who was a native speaker, so embedded in the language that s/he couldn’t explain it? I have. I think this happens to scientists a lot.

I’m still reading the report, which is an evenhanded and intelligent one. I quibble with the idea that rigid terminology distinctions are appropriate at this early date, but I think the lines drawn in the report are useful ways to think about the problem as long as they’re not meant to reify it. I have most of the skills of the report’s “data librarian,” but some of the “data manager”’s skills as well. This is not a bad thing. It should be encouraged!

I only became a Zotero convert quite recently. Admittedly, this is odd, since I formerly worked for George Mason University, and I had the privilege to see Zotero in pre-alpha stage and was wowed by it even then. It’s only recently, though, that I have been writing enough professionally to make a citation manager worthwhile. Zotero does what I need it to (except for translating Emerald’s web pages into citations, and I could rectify that problem myself if I chose). It will shortly do many things that I want it to. It’s good software. I like it.

You are suing a product I like. I’m a librarian. I have influence over other librarians, and (occasionally) over faculty and students. Does this truly strike you as a wise move? Truly?

I’ll let other people, those with more legal savvy than I, opine about the merits of your case. I just want to make clear to you a potentially serious consequence of your actions, no matter what happens in court.

We’re developing a piece of software locally that is, among other things, a citation database, one we envision both importing into and exporting from. We’re having a lengthy meeting about it today and tomorrow, in fact. As soon as news of your lawsuit crossed the transom, an email went out from one of our devs saying “Um… importing/exporting with EndNote could be a potentially fatal idea.”

Do you see, Thomson Reuters? Do you see? If you don’t settle this nonsense in a fashion that leaves Zotero intact, the open-source software development world will fear to interoperate with you. If EndNote isn’t already dead, this will kill it, because our little project is hardly the only one of its type. We are legion, and you have shut yourself away from us. You have no one to blame for this suicidal course but your own legal and executive team.

And if you take away Zotero, trust me, Thomson Reuters: it won’t be EndNote that I switch to.

If you’re in the business, you can figure out pretty quickly who at least two of the three studied institutions are. (I’m still a little fuzzy on A, though I have a strong suspicion, but I know beyond a doubt who B and C are.) None of them, in case anyone is wondering, is MPOW, so I’m not feathering my own nest here.

Money quotes:

In general, the basic aims of universities in investing in IRs—to collect, preserve, and provide access to their research output—seem misleadingly simplistic compared to what IRs are actually attempting to accomplish, and what they will need to do to identify and successfully implement functions that are not redundant or risky and of high value to faculty.

This is exceedingly well-phrased, and it gives me to ponder somewhat about how I characterized the tension between repository-rats and other librarians (including but not limited to library administrators) in Roach Motel. Faced with a “basic aim” that is impossible to accomplish, repository-rats naturally nose about for other problems to solve (and the report makes that strategy quite clear, addressing its benefits and drawbacks even-handedly). I think I have traduced my ratly colleagues and myself in Roach Motel by expressing this process purely in terms of nervous rats seeking job security and self-justification, and I’m sorry for that.

The truth is, I want to be useful. We all do, all of us rats, even if not everyone is exactly like me in usefulness being a fundamental work drive, what gets me out of bed in the morning. If we can’t be useful in IRs’ “basic aim,” and often we can’t for reasons well outside our control (this being a major theme of Roach Motel), we actively look for other problems, do our best to make ourselves useful in other ways. These problems fall almost exclusively outside IRs’ supposed “basic aim,” which naturally confuses other librarians.

The intellectual property (IP) obstacles involved in populating IRs consumed significant amounts of time and resources and can be a drain on other core development activities.

No argument here. IP is a swamp, and it’s not a swamp that most IR planning processes anticipated. The report’s discussion of how faculty and IR staff build boardwalks through the swamp is trenchant and well worth reading.

Unlike other aspects of repository building, liaison networks with faculty were already a functioning part of library operations and are now serving as essential human infrastructure in IR development.

While the subject orientation of liaisons is being exploited in IR development, there seems to be much less application of their experience in collection development, management, and evaluation—areas of expertise that are highly relevant but need to be revised for the IR collection model.

Liaison librarians are essential to a well-functioning IR, and their essential-ness is most of why the maverick-manager and no-accountability staffing models are often anti-patterns. I didn’t make this clear in Roach Motel, and I now think that was another goof-up on my part. The key, as I hope I did make clear, is library administrators setting clear and realistic goals related to the IR for all their staff: repository-rats, liaisons, cataloguers, and others alike.

I tend to be a little bit more of the traditional librarian, because I don’t know TEI, and I don’t know SHTML. [I suspect that should have been 'XHTML,' and that the error was in transcription rather than originating from the librarian interviewed.] I don’t know XML. But, it’s pushed me to try to understand that a little bit better. … But what I see happening is … and actually over at the library itself, is this beautiful combination of understanding the structure of information, and understanding the code that goes behind it, and how to make it usable to the people who want to access it.

Liaison 15, whoever you are, I salute you as a valued and respected colleague! I will be quoting you to my LIS 644 students, because you are an exemplary librarian. If we ever turn up at the same conference, please introduce yourself; the drinks are on me.

Perhaps most important to the viability of IRs, however, were those [faculty] who found that the IR solved a particular information problem they faced in the everyday practice of scholarship.

I said something quite like this pretty bluntly in Roach Motel. I’m pleased to see it supported, because I could only assert it, not back it up.

Digitization was seen as a productive correlate service.

I said that, too, and I stand by it. The analog-digital divide is not something I made up. The tension comes in, I think, because digital librarianship’s usual careful, meticulous digitization and description methods cannot function here; there’s just too much material. Archivists’ “more product less process” epiphany may well be the way forward.

Depositors and liaisons alike commented on how many faculty members could not differentiate between open access scholarship and scholarship that was available through the library.

Open-access movement, this is to your address, I think. You haven’t made that nearly clear enough, and it’s a problem. What did I say once? Oh yes, this, in the context of e-reserves quarrelling: “We have to draw a thick black line connecting what faculty do and what they have access to, because right now they don’t see it.”

I can’t pull quotes from the faculty members, because everything the report quotes from them and about them is so good and so right and so real. I’ve had all those conversations before, every last one of them.

Policy and criteria-based selection and evaluation are not typical. Instead, developers have been quick to capture collections not encumbered by copyright constraints, offering access to a growing base of local technical reports, grey literature, and theses and dissertations.

This squares with my experience, and is a logical outgrowth of “basic aim” failure combined with the IP swamp. The only thing I can add is that I believe it would take a heavy load off many repository-rats’ minds if realistic selection criteria and priorities could be made explicit, such that in pulling together local tech reports, grey-lit, and ETDs (not to mention datasets), we’re confidently fulfilling our mandate instead of cautiously creeping outside it wondering what will happen to us when we get caught. Another positive outcome would be a realistic reassessment of just how much work it takes to capture peer-reviewed material legally, and resource provision to match.

By the way, any resemblance of the title of this post to an excellent episode of The Prisoner is purely intentional, ’cuz I’m just too much of a geek for that not to tickle my funny-bone (… connected to the…).

Mm. Yes. Can’t imagine why such a character would resonate with me, even then… truthfully, I’m at once intrigued and appalled that my character was apparent so early as my sophomore year in high school.

He had to die. I understood that even in high school, and I understood that more was happening than mere plot. It is to Shakespeare’s credit that he took a historical necessity and made it a dramatic necessity. Now that I am older, I understand even better; honesty and excellence without charisma and politico-psychological awareness are not proof against treachery born of calculated cowardice. It is not Prince Hal who dooms Hotspur; it is not even Hotspur’s own weaknesses, many and tragic though they are. It is Northumberland and Worcester, those canny self-preserving politicians. (Shakespeare must have liked his Hotspur at least a little, to have gloated so in Worcester getting ‘the guerdon of his guile,’ as E.R. Eddison would have put it.)

I have a weakness for well-constructed drama leading to a sense that the denouement is perfectly inevitable and perfectly fitting. Henry IV Part One is pure brilliance in that regard. The finely-wrought difference between the relationships Hal and Hotspur have with their fathers (leaving Falstaff out of it for the nonce, though I wholeheartedly agree that Falstaff is Henry IV’s foil) makes me happy. No matter how unhappy Henry is with his wastrel son, he trusts him enough to leave him be, and when Hal makes a real promise of reform, Henry accepts it and acts upon it, though every ounce of sense must suggest otherwise. Northumberland squanders his son’s excellence because he will not, cannot believe in it.

You’re probably wondering what brought this on. Last weekend was a rental-car weekend, and I decided to splurge big on American Players Theatre tickets. It couldn’t have been more glorious weather for it, and there won’t be much more glorious weather in the Frozen North, and Henry IV Part One is my favorite Shakespeare play (edging out King Lear by a nose), so off we went. The pale-faced half-moon showed to beautiful advantage during the play; I could only smile at that.

We stopped first in Festge County Park for a few good walks and a picnic dinner. The nature trails there are unmarked (except at trailhead) and single-foot narrow, but worth the traversal. Summer is meditating giving way to autumn: hickory nuts and acorns litter the ground, spiderwebs are everywhere, burr-plants attach their cargo hopefully at the least provocation, and the trees look a little tired even though most are still deep-green. We happened upon a cute little toad in the woods, and an impressive woolly-bear in the picnic area. I brought a beautiful melon, caprese salad, baba ghanouj and hummus with pita to put it on, a bag of Terra Chips and a box of gingersnaps, and we were well content. I certainly can’t complain about the tomatoes, eggplant, basil, and melon from our CSA farm!

The only complaint I have about American Players Theatre is that the audiences are too polite. I did my best to be a proper groundling, laughing and cheering and hissing as appropriate, but I tell you what, Midwesterners are just not constitutionally capable of the groundling way of being. This is a pity, because my sense is that the company is more than capable of playing well off groundlings.

I thoroughly enjoyed David Daniel’s Hotspur. Although I understand that the production was trying to ground Hotspur in his basic churlishness, and I think that a reasonable decision, I do also think it a pity they cut his speech about honor from which this post’s title is taken. Leaving aside that it’s my favorite speech in the play (edging out Falstaff’s brilliant cynical battleground response to it by a nose), Hotspur’s idealism is his fuel and his raison d’etre; the blind recklessness it generates is his tragic flaw if you are a resolute Aristotelian (which I admit I’m not; I think tragedy is a systemic and interpersonal rather than purely individual phenomenon, and I hope this post speaks to that belief). Yes he’s tactless, yes he’s thoughtlessly stubborn, yes he’s a headstrong idiot—but it’s because he is too in love with his ideals, understands them too well and too thoroughly, to bend himself to earthly compromises, and the APT production lost that.

Both Henry and Hal, by contrast, are of the earth. Henry IV does not come out any too well in his own plays: a haunted conscience-stricken regicide, a rationalizer, a battleground coward (“the king hath many marching in his coats”), a cold and censorious father. Hal learns leadership in all its essential inglory from this father, and what the lack of leadership leads to from his second father Falstaff. (Hm. Falstaff as Northumberland’s mirror. Discuss.) Like his father, Hal employs whatever rationalizations come easily to hand to justify his bad behavior—the business about being a playboy now to make his reformation later all the more amazing is just weak sauce. Like his father, Hal learns to do what he must even when it hurts when the situation calls for it; the slaying of Hotspur and the rejection of Falstaff (and the hanging of Bardolph in the subsequent Henry V) all speak to that. Hotspur cannot bend so far, and so he is broken instead. Like his father—and I have argued that this is his father’s sole redeeming quality—Hal trusts his family, treating his younger brothers as brothers when he ascends to the throne, where a lesser king might have suspected or even executed them.

I would be remiss not to mention Brian Mani’s gorgeous Falstaff. It was such a perfectly comfortable performance; Mani managed the false paunch and the antiquated insults with equal easy glee, and the stage lit up with energy whenever he was on it. The hard edge here is that Falstaff and Hal are consciously and cruelly using each other, Hal for release, Falstaff for future illegal and immoral favor. When it comes down to it, neither really likes or appreciates the other. Hal grows beyond his self-indulgence when necessity demands it; Falstaff cannot, repeatedly does not, and that is why he must be turned away at the last.

It was a fine production of a play I love, even if I think the mashup needed a little work. (Henry’s death scene was, I’m sorry, interminable, and it didn’t fit thematically, either. The Greek convention of offstage deaths and Messengers could have been used to advantage here!) Though the drive home was a trifle scary owing to the lateness of the hour and intermittent fog, I wouldn’t change a thing—I had a glorious day.

Quite a few of my friends are struggling acutely with health problems of late. As I gird myself to go back to the doctor and reassess my own cardiovascular issues, I find that I feel compelled to do this kind of local travel, learn my area and hike in it and take advantage of the best that it offers, while I still can. “Able-bodied” and “financially solvent” are temporary and contingent conditions at best. It’s important that I make the most of them.

There is language rattling around in Congress that would destroy the NIH Public Access Policy. The actual bill introduced by Conyers is probably moribund if not dead. The concern now, as I understand matters, is that the anti-NIH language could be snuck into another bill.

The Open Access Directory is doing its part in a way that will help us all, no matter what it accomplishes in the Congressional wrangle. OAD has a page of publisher policies vis-a-vis the NIH Public Access Policy, and they are asking us all to investigate a publisher (one with “No known policy as of…”) and update the page.

Robin Peek asked me to publicize this effort, which I am most happy to do.