Caveat Lector

The other thing that Google Scholar will likely do is boost open access. People do love their full-text. People do love their no-firewalls, no-proxies, no-hassle access. The walls of the article-database providers haven’t been stormed yet merely because most people didn’t realize they existed. (My personal image for this is from Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth—people walking around an invisible city with their eyes on the ground, not realizing the city’s gone invisible simply because they aren’t paying attention.)

That just changed. I hope article-database providers are sitting in smoke-filled rooms figuring out what they’re going to do about their business models.

Some of them, no doubt, are scoffing at me right now. Joe Average isn’t gonna want the latest in information science, or medieval Spanish literature, or linguistics. It’s only those Ivory Tower eggheads, and they’ve all got access through their academic libraries anyway.

What they forget is that the Ivory Tower has been shedding people at an alarming rate lately. Without, I hope I need not say, lobotomizing us. I think they’ll find more interest in the arcane and the wildly technical than they would have guessed, if some of the access barriers come down.

Not to mention that some disciplines do produce juicy readable stuff. Aside from (ugh) Daniel Bell, all the scholarly material I’ve been reading for Information and Labor has been perfectly accessible to a non-specialist audience (which is good, because I am a non-specialist audience in this field!). There was, in fact, a rockin’ Jennifer Light article about women in the early history of computing that I desperately wanted to post about over on Misbehaving, but it’s stuck behind the Project Muse firewall, so a substantial chunk of Misbehaving’s readers wouldn’t have had access. Pity.

And if the mere existence of Google Scholar agitates toward more people getting to read articles like Jennifer Light’s, go Google Scholar.

Okay, two more things in this post, not just one. Google Scholar also marks a fragmentation of search effort that I think is incredibly, incredibly important. Librarians bemoan the image of Google as one-stop search shopping, even though if you look hard enough, searching Google has been fragmented for some time (Google News, Froogle, Google Image, etc). Previously, however, Google has split off search functions based on the genre of items searched.

Google Scholar is different. It’s split off based less on genre (I suppose that argument could be made, but I don’t personally buy it) than intended audience and complexity level of the content. That’s new. That’s interesting, because it’s not something people who aren’t reference librarians generally consider, and it’s definitely something they should. I think Google just took a great big whack out of our information-literacy training efforts, and I can’t find it in me to regret that.

Well, well, well. Isn’t this interesting. In my December site stats (such as they are, obviously), the browser share of Firefox plus Mozilla exceeds the browser share for Internet Explorer. (If I add the NetNewsWire share to “other browser,” because I can’t imagine any of them are using IE, IE is getting roundly pummeled.)

It may not last, of course. But I’ll gloat while I can (and glare at you dinosaurs who haven’t switched away from IE yet—what are you waiting for, Blogmageddon?).

A moment on the soapbox: A lot of screen-reader and other accessibility software still relies on IE. It’d be awfully nice if influential web-standards people would wield a clue-bat or two in that direction.

Because I am a bad person, I spent yesterday’s cataloguing class listening with rather less than half a brain to my colleagues’ project presentations. (Except for the one about dinking around with MARC records in Perl. How come Python doesn’t have anything as keen as Perl’s MARC module? Because, wow. What even I could get done… I know about MARC21.py, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as mature. Days I wish I didn’t hate and fear Perl.)

The rest of my brain occupied itself on some recent periodicals, specifically the latest issue of Searcher. Said issue contains a brief, circumspect, toe-in-the-water look at academic libraries becoming publishers, especially serials publishers.

Some especially good quotes near the end of the article pointed up the possibilities of partnerships with university presses. I hadn’t thought about that before, but it makes sense… and just now, something jogged loose in my head that makes it seem even more sensible.

That something being: Publishers, including university presses, do not know how to do electronic-text production. Libraries do not know how to do print-text production. A few exceptions in both directions, of course, but by and large, this has been and still is the case—meaning that libraries and university presses are in a fantastic position to shore up each others’ shortcomings, because publishers obviously do know how to do print, and libraries do know about doing electronic (they just call it “digitization,” is all).

The folks I’m keying Greek for (who as far as I know won’t mind me mentioning them here) appear to be just such a collaboration, though for books rather than serials. (Figures that this project comes out of Michigan. Those people are so far ahead of the curve that they’re close to running out of curve altogether.) When I got started on the work, I let slip for all the obvious reasons that I was a soon-to-graduate student librarian. My correspondent also has a library degree, and asked if I was interested in jobs at university presses.

I didn’t think I was, at the time, but now I’m starting to wonder. Somebody’s got to do the production-liaison work if these partnerships are going to fly. Who’s hiring that somebody, then? Is it the libraries or the presses?

Sigh. For some reason, when I say no, it doesn’t stay said. I got a call from one of my friends at Maybe-Client, urging me in—well, maybe not the strongest possible terms, but pretty darn strong ones nonetheless—to reconsider.

So, you know, me being me (the word “jellyfish” comes to mind), I’m reconsidering. Because I don’t like the project, but I do wholeheartedly support the goal that the project exists in service to. Because I don’t like being yanked around (who does?), but I do still like the people who have been doing the yanking.

And of course because I am too much the ant to look forward to an entire semester with no income. Some people can do that kind of thing. Some people even like it, wouldn’t live any other way. Me, I get bloody nervous.

It’s only a project. How bad could it be?

I am not the world’s most avid conference-goer. Lots of people tell me, “Oh, you just have to go to this one!” and my immediate response is invariably “Why?”

That said, I like going, when I can. If I had more money and vacation time to throw around, I’d go to more conferences than I do.

Some people will tell you “It’s the presentations, stupid!” while others will tell you “It’s the people, stupid!” and still others will say “It’s the tutorials, stupid!” Eh. Depends on the conference. But there’s a lot to be said for scoping out the people at conferences, as Len Bullard did (and, for what it’s worth, I agree with Len’s assessment of all the people in his list I happen to know).

Some folks I’ve met at conferences could tell me to jump and I’d ask how high. (Some few of them are in Len’s list.) Some folks I wouldn’t so much as take a step out of my way for. Either way, I know. And when a project crosses my notice, I can take a look at the list of people supporting it and make a pretty good guess both whether it’s going to fly and whether I want to be involved. This is valuable, because I’ve had enough bad projects and bad jobs to last me the rest of my life.

So conferences are good.

This comment of Len’s I just had to share, because it tallies so well with my early experience of technical conferences:

And that is what the younger crowd needs to see: leading by example. It is waaay too easy on the web to become bloodless or crusty. If there is to be a better world, they kids have to see how the one they have is being made better now. Employers do themselves a big favor exposing their younger employees to the best in the business.

Every now and again, scanning recent visitors to Caveat Lector yields a clear-as-day case of something I’ve posted getting passed around the office. A previously-unknown host pops up from nowhere and sucks down three or four hits at either the main page or an individual post (surprise, surprise, usually a polemical one), then clicks around the archives more or less aimlessly.

These days, the hosts tend to be from libraries. It’s actually mildly intimidating, the libraries and library-affiliated organizations presently surfing Caveat Lector. I mean, sheesh, do I have to catalogue my cat pictures now?

It does, however, give one to think on the utility of category-specific RSS feeds. I shall ponder. Because librarians are busy people who don’t need my cat pictures.

Addendum: Huh. They’re already available, thanks to WordPress; I just need to add links to them. Well, perhaps I shall, then.

I just sent off the files for the Greek-keying job, six days early so go me. (I’m not always a layabout, even when Greek is involved.)

I’m not entirely sure which part of a browser handles things like placing a Unicode dot-under (&x323;, if anyone cares) beneath a character, but I have to say, it’s a right ugly effect in Firefox. Functional, mind you, but ugly. The dot meanders here or there to the right or left of the character’s midsection as it sees fit.

Eh, well. Algorithmic character layout, what can you expect?

Well, okay, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna take the consultant gig.

And I’m also going to work for the Digital Content Group, however temporarily. I’m a student, so they’re going to pay me student hourly rates. They don’t have to (I told them they didn’t have to), but it seems they will. And since they’re getting a real pro for student rates, I think I’m going to let them do it.

An actual job job with DCG looks as elusive as ever. I got more of the story on how the hiring freeze works, and I have to say, unless something changes, I don’t see how DCG can make room for me. Depressing. This is genuinely what I want, yet I don’t see much of a chance at it.

Eh, well. Six months before I have to start making the really tough calls. A lot can happen in six months.

Occasionally, it’s not good to be right. Yes, folks, it’s the annual get-the-mail, open-the-envelope, SCREAM-LIKE-BANSHEE, go-get-checkbook property-tax ritual.

It was bad this year. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.

But on the plus side, my left arm didn’t hurt today at all. Not even a single solitary twinge. For the whole day. And I did things like brushing my hair, going to the store, putting on backpacks and taking them off, doing exercises, all that sort of fun stuff.

I did manage to sleep wrong on my neck last night, such that the right-side scalenes hurt like the dickens most of the day. But an application of heating pad this evening cleared most of that up, and you know? That’s normal. It will pass. You know how you know you’re healing? You know you’re healing when not every ache and pain is a horseman of the Relapse Apocalypse.

An old book, a modest old book, warped red cloth covers curving protectively around the brittle pages, with a retiring polka-dotted border and no title, no external identification at all save for the stickers added to the spine by a librarian or archivist:

I was careful with it, when it was handed me by the Digital Content Group man; he watched me rather narrowly at first, but seemed satisfied by the way I treated it. I have been around old books since I was a child, borrowed them, bought them, read them. I know how to handle them. I respect those unadorned covers with the fraying corners. They have done their work well.

But the book is old, published in 1882. The verso of the title page proclaims in purple dye-stamped lettering that the Wisconsin Historical Society received the book December 17, 1895. Its pages were cut fairly neatly, which is a blessing, since not all books were so kindly treated. Even so, the pages are grey, and their top edges are starting to ravel and crumble.

Ireland under the Land Act proclaims the title page in a well-spaced all-caps serif, the rest of the page in restrained, modest variants on all-caps and small-caps, save for the regal touch of “London” in faux-blackletter, and the brief, mild italic copyright statement. The printer’s mark, in contrast, is a wild, whimsical W-shaped flower-ark built on a serif C, presumably for the publisher Chatto & Windus.

Law books are given to these weird little touches, I have found. When I was proofreading the Hispanic Seminary’s transcription of an old Aragonese fuero years ago, I was captivated by the bizarre cartoons in the margins, of people and beasts and half-people-half-beasts shooting arrows and throwing stones at each other. Scribes get bored, and doodle. I expect some of my old DTDs or (horrors!) SGML instances hold some less-than-wholly-temperate comments relating to problems with the data modeling or the transcription.

Someone with more sensitive fingers than I have might be able to read this book blindfolded, the printing has so dented the pages. Not smooth, these pages, not at all, not around the edges and not on the printed surface. Do people who whinge about the “feel of the paper book” have any idea about this? I doubt it.

My job? Proofreading the OCR and sharpening up the existing TEI markup for the electronic edition of this book. Not a difficult job; it’s got some tables (including one gigantic one that will take me some hours to capture correctly), but it’s nothing I didn’t do for Liberty Fund, a few jobs back. (I can browse their library and see my own work there—not directly, more’s the pity, but transformed into HTML. It’s my work, though. I like seeing my own work.)

I’m rescuing this book. I’m renewing it. Materially, it is a modest thing; it exists for the sake of the words, and the words are what I am recasting anew. So the old red covers don’t have to endure the touch of many hands, and the pages don’t have to risk crumbling altogether as they are turned. I preserve the words, and the intent of the artisans who put the words on the pages, as best I know how. This is, stripped to its essentials, what I do. I rescue the souls of modest old books for new readers and new uses.

And it irks the life out of me, turns me purple and speechless with fury, when people (more often than not, librarians!) loftily proclaim that I do this because I have no respect for the physical codex.

Respect goes two ways.

I need to get on the stick and get some job apps out there. I took a look at my email and del.icio.us folders, and interesting things are piling up unanswered.

(By the way, on the topic of under-utilized but extraordinarily useful library job-search sites: the Association of Research Libraries jobs page. Stuff here I just haven’t seen anywhere else.)

Because, yeah, in fairytale-ville the Digital Content Group would snap me up right away, but I’m afraid I live here instead. At least I tried, though. Time was I’d have sat around waiting to be noticed, but nobody can accuse me of that this time; I don’t have to sit around thinking “if only I’d gone for it.”

Chatting about progress on David’s second Ph.D preliminary paper, David held up one of his sources and said, “And [Professor X] had the gall to suggest…” The suggestion had to do with Emeritus Professor Y, with whom Professor X has… issues.

(Emeritus Professor Y is also a personal friend of mine from back in the day. That doesn’t actually affect the analysis and suggested action following, but by way of bias disclosure…)

Professor X has delayed this second paper by about six months, with incessant demands that David read largely irrelevant bibliography and insert more-or-less idiotic theoretical constructs. Professor X has not been polite about his demands. Professor X has, in a word, acted like a great big wanker throughout this entire process.

“Do you have to have this guy on your dissertation committee?” I asked, because I am getting sick of X’s shenanigans.

“Well, I could disastrously insult him…”

“Something short of that, I think.”

“Er, well, theoretically I’m in charge of the composition of the committee, but…”

“No buts. Get rid of this guy.”

“… so I’ll give him a chance, and if he gets in my way…”

“He’s delayed this paper six months! What do you need, a blinking neon sign? He’s trouble! Get rid of him!”

And there the matter stands, for now, but I intend to pursue it as long and as harshly as I need to. David is nice. David will go along to get along in the short term, whatever it costs him in the long.

I’m not nice at all, not even a little bit, and I want David handed that goddamn degree sooner rather than later. Which means I’ll be evil about making him stack his committee with people who won’t yank him around.

What really sucks about all this? I hate being dragged into it. I hate that it’s become my problem; I don’t want the tsuris that goes along with a Ph.D, which is in some part why I’m so adamantly against pursuing one for myself—and yet here I am, coping with Somebody Else’s Tsuris. I hate it. I hate it.

But, hell’s bells, somebody’s got to, or he’ll never get out. I’ve seen stupid dissertation fights before, and I know what they lead to.

Gah. Hate this hate this hate this. Hate it. With a criminal passion.

The latest issue of College and Research Libraries has an excellent article by Eric Novotny on what patrons actually do faced with OPACs. (Abstract online, full-text available to ALA members only—and does it annoy the heck out of me that the American Library Association hasn’t embraced open access? Why yes, yes it does; the ALA’s scholars and publishers should set the example we want need other scholars and publishers to follow.)

I’m not actually very good at introspecting on my own search behavior (and, to SLIS’s shame be it spoken, I haven’t been formally taught search strategies), so Novotny’s descriptions and characterizations of strategies were useful to me. (I should really read a good solid book on search, both doing it and examining how others do it. Any recommendations?) The real gold is near the end of the article, however, where Novotny politely but firmly tells librarians to grow up and stop clinging to overelaborated search screens and obscurely-rationalized results-presentation formats.

I think part of the reason people like Novotny need to say things like that is that librarians are terrified that someone will take their elaborate search strategies away from them if patrons are presented with a Google-like box. Come on, get real. This isn’t either/or; it’s both/and.

And the fact is that the 80/20 point applies here too—only 20% of the searches need 80% of the sophistication. Known-item searches usually don’t. Just-getting-started, “what’s out there?” keyword searches don’t. Which means that presenting the sophistication all the time is offputting overkill. Let’s not do it, hm? (And the OPAC screenshot from Novotny’s article is revealing—busy as a parent the day before Christmas, lots of combo boxes, options options OPTIONS options options. Bleagh.)

The impression I get is that a lot of librarian resistance to OPAC changes stems from wanting a sophisticated user rather than a sophisticated system. Because, you see, really sophisticated systems hide complexity. A well-designed, sophisticated building hides all its structure, plumbing and wiring, for example. Sure, a sophisticated user of a building can dodge all that stuff if it’s lying all over the floor, but let’s get real here; we don’t want to be that sophisticated about our buildings, any of us.

OPACs are still hanging their plumbing and wiring out there for everybody to see. They’re about as sophisticated as a command-line interface in the era of the GUI. Novotny doesn’t often slip into the plaintive, but even he seems shocked at how little his “experienced” subjects knew about bibliographic structures. Sorry, dude. That’s plumbing and wiring, and it’s long past time we hid it.

There’s a fascinating irony here that I cannot possibly have been the first person to point out. Librarians hate complexity in computer systems. They’ve turned over vast amounts of control over library systems to vendors because they simply don’t want to deal with the complexity. They don’t want to become sophisticated computer users! (And in this, I should say, they are remarkably similar to the general population. It ain’t just librarians, or Linux would have taken over the world long since.)

Yet librarians want their patrons to become sophisticated searchers, so that librarians don’t have to alter their search systems and strategies.

Well, look, the open-sorcerers are finally starting to grow up on this point. Surely librarians can too?

Per the Wisconsin Mini-Courses site, David’s got another Sindarin class for April. I thought he’d asked for two, but apparently not.

Not to be alarmist, but if you’re local and you want to do this, don’t wait. My job situation is uncertain. We may be moving as early as May or June. This may be the last class he gives in Madison.

And I made an error talking about the TORN chat sessions. David will be at the moderated session on Saturday at 5:30 Eastern; he’s not scheduled for the unmoderated one a day later. I’m going to try to nudge him into popping in anyway, but no guarantees.

If you want to send a question for the moderated chat, send it to thehalloffire (at) theonering.net. Anybody can send; you don’t have to be a site member or a known fan or anything like that.

Spouse: “I want an academic job.”

Five short words that strike immediate and profound terror deep into the heart.

CavLec is a PG-13 blog most of the time, so I shan’t bother trying to expound upon what I am thinking right now. Because “unprintable” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

(And if you can’t handle the post title, you are kindly invited to Just Go Away now.)

Well, so. Last night David and I had what for us serves as a screaming fight. (It wasn’t, because we don’t, but voices were raised and hair was metaphorically torn out. You know. These things are never pleasant, even when they’re necessary.) It’s settled now, and my head is moving toward the groove it needs to be in… but nonetheless, I’d be a happier person if academia worked differently from how it does.

Because the way this is going to work is that I call off the nationwide job-hunt and concentrate on finding something local that puts dinner on the table while David finishes his dissertation. At which point he goes on the job market, which (being what it is) will require us to move, and me to (yet again) scrabble up something local, no matter how unwelcoming the library job market wherever we end up.

This is, of course, deeply unfair to me, that after years of clawing my way back from academia-fostered self-destruction, academia now gets to rule my life by proxy. I am damned good at what I do. Organizations exist that need what I do, plenty of them. My chances of being able to find a job doing what I do locally, however, basically suck, for politico-economic reasons entirely outside my control. But because academia’s job-lottery places me at his whim rather than him at mine, I’m just SOL.

What sent me over the edge last night was that whenever I asked the “what will you do afterwards?” question (and I have asked it, repeatedly), David never once suggested entering the rat-race. I took that (largely justifiably, I think) as leave to let my own career come first. I didn’t appreciate having my plans violently derailed by five short words uttered with zero evidence that he’d actually thought about what they meant.

But, you know, now he’s thought, and now I’ve accepted. That’s what I do, I guess: be flexible and adapt, because David’s terrible at it and academia is worse. It’s still deeply unfair. I still hate it. Just this week I saw two beautiful jobs I could have landed and loved and now don’t even get to try for. And finding something locally is ever so not going to be a cakewalk, if it’s even possible.

I have options, though, limited though they are, and I’m going to exercise them. Plans will be planned this weekend, and executed forthwith. I’ll make this work, because making things work is what I do. And because I really haven’t much choice.

Academia, however? Sucks.

It may be quiet around here for a bit. I’m still thinking about this mess I’ve gone and landed in. It’s not the sort of thinking process that should be done in public. It’s one of those times when the pit of one’s gut is screaming very loudly (and very profanely, gut-pits not being the most superego-intensive parts of one’s body), and there’s just no silencing it.

So I’m trying to listen to it (because it’s profane and loud, but it’s also wise), and figure out what kind of compromise it and I and David can all come to.

So. I’m thinking. It may take a while. Give me a while. Thanks.

Okay, so after some really quite impressive fireworks, a new equilibrium has been reached which involves me being back on the job market. And, I hope, some better days for both of us, individually and as a pair.

Y’all don’t get juicy details, sorry. That would be bad and wrong of me. But I hope it’s enough to say that it’s good to get yourself and your spouse on the same page about the important stuff.

So The Powers What Is (previously known as Maybe-Client) want a brag-sheet from me tailored to the job they’re already giving me. I don’t even want to know the bureaucracy behind that one; headaches are bad.

I hate writing these things. I’m too sexy for my résumé, or something. But I admit I do like the “Fee schedule” part!

Okay, I know I set up a whole ’nother blog just for gaming stuff so I wouldn’t have to mix it in with serious librariana and whatnot… but, seriously, y’all, anybody who needs a good laugh just has to go read this post over on Dance of Roon.

A lot of RPG humor doesn’t translate out of the individual game; every long-running game develops in-jokes, and the humor slides toward context-dependency. But this scene? Is. Just. Funny.

And has some pretty readable slam-style poetry in it, too.

When I first mentioned checking out the Armaid massager gizmo, I got a skeptical email to the effect of “You don’t really think that thing will work, do you?”

Well, you know, maybe not, but…

The manufacturer doesn’t appear to be making them any more, so if you want one of these things, you’ll have to hit an auction site as I did.

I tell you what, though. I spent a lot of time on IRC tonight, and my wrist was giving me grief about it. I grabbed the Armaid, tooled about with it, found and excised a couple sore spots, and I feel better, wrist pain gone.

I’m not sure this is a tool for somebody who doesn’t understand the basics of the musculature and where the nerves run in the arm. But you can learn the basics of that from massage therapy; just pay attention to what the therapist is doing. I’m also pretty sure it’s not a replacement for a professional when you’re just getting started with treatment.

But—for me—it seems to be a good maintenance tool. Take this anecdote for what you think it’s worth.

The session logs for David’s chat yesterday evening have gone up on TheOneRing.net.

I lurked through the two-and-a-half-hour marathon. (Normally, apparently, these chats are free-for-all, but last night at its peak the channel had over 70 people, which would have been total pandemonium. So it was moderated, with the mods asking the questions and David answering.)

I was very impressed with the quality of questions. (Wish the media interviewers Back in the Day had been so clued!) Really quite astute. David enjoyed himself answering them, and I had fun watching.

A couple of things, though, that I think deserve some additional clarification. One, book promotion. No, there are not going to be book tours or signings or like that. This is not a trade or mass-market publication, folks. It’s university press (read: these people have a minuscule budget), and its market, whatever that market likes to think of itself, is very small in book-publishing terms. (Sindarin for Dummies probably has a big market. This book, however, is not Sindarin for Dummies.) Moreover, tours and signings and like that are unlikely to increase that market much, so funding them makes no sense for the publisher.

As always, we’re not averse to cons and talks at libraries and that sort of thing. But a concentrated travel effort? Not gonna happen. And speaking for myself only, I’m just as glad of that—with my job search and my only semi-steady employment this coming semester, a book tour would be a stress nightmare.

Second, David’s dissertation. It ain’t been written yet, though this second Ph.D preliminary paper he’s been slogging through (and is about to defend finally, yay!) will form part of its core. And it ain’t got nothin’ whatever to do with Sindarin, Quenya, or any other of Tolkien’s languages. It’s about ablaut. And syllable structure. In early Indo-European. If Sanskrit is your thing, you’ll love it. Otherwise, I have no idea why you’d be interested. Truly.

There’s a nice interview with David up at a French fansite.

Which happens to include an incredibly sweet and thoughtful nod in my direction, for which I am most humbly grateful.

David and I took the Ghoul’s list of fave games to our local gaming emporium (support yours!) and spent what was probably entirely too much money acquiring a few.

We quite liked “Lost Cities” after the first truly embarrassing negative-number round. (The rules ought to make it clearer up-front that 20 is the magic number—if you can’t get an expedition to 20, starting it makes very little sense.) Coming up with mottoes for the expeditions definitely adds to the fun.

I also bought a copy of “Puerto Rico” as my project-ending gift for my boss (who doesn’t read CavLec, so it’s safe to mention). I’ve learned a lot from her and had a lovely time working for her; she deserves something halfway memorable.

Moral of story: There’s so, so many good games besides the old standards you’ll find in Tar-Mart. Check ’em out.

I dropped into SLIS’s social event for December graduates last week (I’m not one, but some of my cohort are, and I wanted to say hi and goodbye). While mingling, someone asked me, “So how’s the blog doing?”

And I was all nonplussed. It was as though someone had asked after the health of my kitchen knife. It wasn’t a question that made any immediate sense to me.

I don’t have performance expectations relative to Caveat Lector. Nor do I have performance expectations of Caveat Lector relative to me. Well, perhaps I should say I don’t have positive performance expectations; there are certainly things I expect myself to avoid, and there are certain people and situations (yes, even job situations) I expect to avoid me because CavLec is advance warning of incompatibility.

But I don’t have must-write schedules for myself, except in the very loose sense that if I’m going to be gone for a while I’ll say so, just so that a few people in my inner circle who would otherwise worry, won’t. Nor do I consider CavLec somehow a failure if my reader counts don’t rise or I don’t drum up sufficient (however much that is) business with it.

CavLec is a scribblefest. I like to scribble, always have. But scribbling isn’t something I feel the need to pin to a bulletin board with a goal marked and a red-markered line snaking about. Maybe I’m strange that way, or maybe the non-blogging public has strange expectations of blogs. I dunno.

Just felt weird, that’s all.

Having lived through the ebook boomlet and the evil that was Versaware and pre-OCLC NetLibrary, my first question on hearing that Google’s going to digitize a bunch of library books was “Who retains the files and rights to use them?”

Points for Google, however; I guess at least sometimes they mean it when they say their motto is “Don’t be evil.” Per the abovelinked article, “The university will also be given a copy of each file to use as they see fit.” Bravo. I wholeheartedly approve of that.

(Of course, Google may have intended to be evil until the librarians talked them out of it. Thank heaven librarians are smarter about these things than publishers.)

Alane of OCLC opines:

My guess is there will be decidedly mixed reviews in libraryland. Didn’t we collectively think we’d be leading the way into our rightful future as the guardians and disseminators of digital text?

Well, I think we’re looking at the future, and I am not sure it is us.

Few different things about that. One, who the hell cares who does it as long as it’s done right? I so don’t hold with dog-in-the-manger. We don’t have the money to do this kind of thing. Google does. QED.

Of course, a valuable question nobody seems to be asking is what Google is going to do with digitization expertise once they have it. Since they’re not glomming onto the files or the IP rights thereto as did Versaware the Unutterably Evil, they must be hoping to learn something from it. If there’s a plausible argument that they’re going to be evil in future with what they learn, then we might indeed do well to tell them to go soak their corporate head. But for once, I don’t have a conspiracy theory to offer. Anybody else got any?

Two, who honestly thinks Google is going to keep this up in perpetuity? Anyone? Anyone? I didn’t think so. Google’s going for the big scores. They’ll leave plenty for us. Guaranteed.

Three, it strikes me as possible Google’s bitten off more than it can chew; text digitization has this horrible habit of sounding easier than it is. Wait a year and see. Before we lament the demise of our digitization expertise and experience, let’s check its pulse, hm?

In the meantime—I’m cautiously optimistic about this. We’ll see how it goes.

Our Actiontec 1520 DSL modem/router has been acting nasty lately; it’s possible that scrambled firmware is the culprit. The immediate result is that connectivity at home is sporadic at best. Which is annoying.

On the plus side, though, I downloaded a bunch of tips and potential fixes (including firmware recovery) onto my leetle USB drive, which is a gizmo I honestly don’t know how I’ve lived without so long. It is a gizmo of great excellence indeed, and I am exceedingly fond of it.

Got feedback on my brag sheet finally. I have to put down in writing that I’m actually going to do the things they listed on the statement of work.

Silly me. I would have thought that getting, reading, and being prepared to sign said statement was notice sufficient that I intended to do the work, but no. “Rephrase the bullet points,” they said.

So, yeah, okay, will do, whatever. But sheesh, how stupid is all this? For a job they’ve basically already given me?

Courtesy is not something they teach (or model, for that matter) in graduate school. Not the professional kind, and not the ordinary kind, either. Explicit teaching is probably too much to ask, although it would fit usefully into a professional-ethics course.

But, sheesh. When the people who have done all the actual WORK on a three-year project that you swan around with your name on are polite enough to invite you to their project-ending celebration, the first thing you do is not hijack the restaurant choice.

For the clueless: You may, if you like, accept the invitation, suck it up, and deal. If the restaurant choice is just too awful (e.g. you are vegetarian and the venue is the Nothin’-But-Steakhouse), you may decline politely; extra points if you make up a plausible excuse.

But you do not utter so much as a peep in criticism of a restaurant choice already made, nor do you imply that the choice of restaurant is your reason for not attending the celebration. You just don’t do these things. They are rude, obnoxious, and overbearing.

I was looking forward to this, until I heard this little story and also found out that the perpetrators are in fact planning to attend tomorrow. I will leave my opinion of the perps to the informed imagination of the CavLec reader.

My DSL modem/router is horked, hosed, paws-up, whatever you want to call it. It is an ex-modem.

And I do not want another from Actiontec, as checking around, they have a rep for flaky hardware. Which leads to the joyful-fun task of finding another modem that TDS Metrocom will cope with. Electronics stores do not sell the gizmos I want. Nor do local computer stores, by the look of things.

Gah, what an utter annoyance. Connectivity spotty probably through early next week. (We can rig dialup, and we will. But I’ve gone and been spoiled by the whole DSL thing.)

They hijack the restaurant recommendation, and then they don’t come. With no notice or apology, of course.

So, yeah. Rude, obnoxious, overbearing, and disrespectful.

You’d think the profession would kick their nasty asses out just because it doesn’t need the bad press. Honestly, you would think that.

Haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but for my non-librarian readers who are syndication enthusiasts, DLib has an article on RSS that (judging from what I have gotten through) is well worth your perusal.

Free Range Librarian reproduces a rip-roarin’ anti-Google rant:

The “deal” that research libraries have struck, behind closed doors (in good corporate style) with Google threatens to erase the lines between commerce and the remaining public sphere of human thought and creativity as embodied in the collected and organized products of print culture and this arrangement makes their immense collections both a global prop for the colonization of some of the last nooks and crannys of human endeavor by the quest for profit and a monument to the inescapability of and seamless domination by the profit motive. In the end, which one can already see around the corner approaching with the ever-escalating speed of the circulation of capital, it will create a situation in which culture is entirely held hostage by commercial interests whose life-cycles are driven by motives and influences which have nothing to do with the past and present aims of libraries (aims which will be twisted to suit the omni-commercialization of digitized information access a la Google).

I looked really hard for actual content in this rant, something solid that would give me pause. I didn’t find anything. I really did look.

For one thing, he obviously missed the bit where Google is giving the resulting electronic files back to the libraries for whatever uses they see fit. Google isn’t locking up jack squat, isn’t holding anything hostage. Believe me, I’m sensitive to this, because of experience. I don’t call Versaware evil for nothing; I was there. They were evil. This deal with Google? Not evil that I can see.

For another, apocalyptic much, dude? If we let the moneyed philistines in the library temple, all of human culture will be destroyed, I tell you, destroyed!

I’m sorry, I think there are many worse threats right now to the fabric of culture than a digitization deal with Google that leaves the resulting data in the hands of librarians who presumably know what to do with it. (Has Rosenzweig met any of the Michigan folks? I have. They’re dead smart. I’m quite willing to make the assumption they looked at this deal from every angle I have and a few I haven’t thought of, and still liked it. If Rosenzweig has a reason to think otherwise, I’d be happy to hear.)

Reality check? Digitization costs money. Google has it. We don’t. This can not get done at all, or can get done by Google. Google can spend its money on something evil, or they can spend it doing digitization. We object to the latter choices why exactly? Because Google dirties whatever it touches? Come on, grow up. Because, seriously, who else is going to do this? Publishers? Publishers are so freaking clueless they can’t even digitize their frontlists. Libraries? I say again, we have no money.

Reality check two? We leave digitization to the moneyed interests one way or another. Database aggregators (who all too often do a truly craptastic job of it). Publishers (ditto). Grants. If Google had handed the money over to the universities, would that solve Rosenzweig’s angst? (I bet it would, even though it’s the same damn money. My guess is that his real problem is feeling useless because somebody’s doing text digitization who isn’t a librarian. To which I say, I didn’t learn to do it as a librarian. Join the real world where lots of people are doing it, a few as effectively or more so than librarians.)

Reality check three? Speaking from a labor perspective, if we did take something like this on? We’d outsource the bulk of the work to the Philippines and India. You know that, I know that, we all know that. I dunno what Google’s up to, but my guess is that a lot more of the work will be done domestically, given that it involves new processes and procedures. Doesn’t that matter? (Does to me.)

Reality check four? We, cultural institutions such as libraries and museums, have been locking up and discarding as much culture as any commercial institution you care to name. Or hasn’t Rosenzweig been watching the museums charging out the nose for reproduction of images? Or hasn’t he noticed academic libraries shutting out the public? Or academic librarians arguing, $DEITY help us all, against open-access scholarly publishing on weird quasi-moral (and certainly moralistic) grounds?

I don’t object to the process of looking gift horses in the mouth. In fact, I have a few questions of my own. Is Google going to share any of its development and process innovations with the libraries? If not, then the libraries may well be getting a raw-ish sort of deal. Is Google going to add links to library bibliographic records for items it digitizes? It had better. (I mean, how not? But I don’t know.) Is Google going to pony up some endowment cash for the long-term maintenance of the libraries’ electronic collections? Google certainly should, because maintenance and preservation cost a good deal more than initial digitization.

But, see, these strike me as real questions. Rosenzweig’s? Sound like empty posturing. We can do better than that, I think. And we should.

It is good that there are different games in the world.

I have the soul of a beancounter, apparently, because I have yet to lose a round (never mind a game) of “Lost Cities.” I took David out in one game last night with a score after three rounds of a hundred ninety-something to fifty-odd. Ouch.

Then we tried “Kahuna” out, and David utterly wiped the board with me. He came close during the third round to wiping me off the board outright. This is a fiendish game, a little bit reminiscent of Othello in the rapid way events can reverse themselves to forestall a seemingly unstoppable onslaught.

I have learned, however, and next time I should be able to make more of a game of it. We’ll see if David is ever able to do the same with “Lost Cities.”