Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

open curriculum

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:08:10 GMT

If I'm going to be teaching a class, and my institution doesn't have an Open Courseware instance, how should I put up the course materials? CC-licensed on my own site? Connexions? Something else?

book review (historical romance fiction: heterosexuality and perform activities) and blog rec

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:46:33 GMT

First the blog rec: New YA author Kristin Cashore, author of the forthcoming YA fantasy Graceling, has written a fabulous post on an author's perspective of trying to do right by body image issues while still being true to the characters and stories in her head. How can you go wrong with a blog post which climaxes "AARRGGHHH! AT THIS RATE I WILL NEVER SAVE THE WORLD!!!"? Answer: you can't.

Secondly, a (half-assed) book review: Lisa Fletcher's brand-new Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (Tasmania: Ashgate. 2008) First I want to give a major caveat, which is that I read this book in a hurry because it is an overdue ILL book, and even though I'm going to read it again I can't renew it right now. In fact, given that set of circumstances I feel so uncomfortable about writing any of my negative impressions I'm just going to hold off on them right now. When you read a book at this pace, I don't think initial discombobulation should count for anything.

The text's project is to show how performativity (through speech acts and the performance of gender) in historical romance novels, crossing the boundaries from "literary" to "popular" (a boundary Fletcher complicates by pointing out the high sales figures of so-called literary romances such as Possession), reinforces heterosexual norms. In a manner which I admit I didn't quite follow given my hyper-quick reading, she discusses the performance of gender through cross-dressed heroes and heroines and relates it to Judith Butler's performance of gender, paying special attention to Butler's insistence that gender performativity is not a choice that can be turned on or off at will.

One thing I found interesting in an initial misreading I gave to a passage in this text is a dichotomy I thought at first was being constructed: the essential statement of the heterosexual romance is the explicit statement of love, and the essential statement of the homosexual romance is coming out of the closet. That isn't actually what she was saying -- she was leaning towards the heterosexual declaration of love as a possible statement from the closet itself (it's complicated, and I'm going to point back to my quick reading as an excuse for not getting into it here) -- but I think I prefer my initial misreading. It's obviously incredibly flawed; for one thing, it rules out any homosexual romance that doesn't begin in the closet. But I feel like I have something there that I want to run with, and see where it goes.

I can't really say more about it it; with such a brief read I'm not sure if the book had a more overarching takeaway than what I've already stated. But there's definitely food for thought in there.

more on sustainable funding and grant funded digital projects

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:20:47 GMT

Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources is a new report by Ithaka "sets forth a systematic understanding of the mechanisms for pursuing sustainability in not-for-profit projects". They say some very smart things, including "Assuming that grant funding will always be available is not likely to lead to a successful sustainability plan." and "Project leaders need to adopt a more comprehensive definition of ‘sustainability’.... It is incorrect to assume that, once the initial digitisation effort is finished and content is up on the web, the costs of maintaining a resource will drop to zero or nearly zero." (Emphasis mine.) They say some other things which I don't exactly disagree with but I think need to be carefully defined, such as "The value of a project is quantified by the benefits it creates for users", which needs to be carefully defined in an archives world where the value it creates for users might be "long term preservation of rarely accessed materials to benefit the global scholarly community". (At Open Repositories 2008, I heard a lot of conversation and presentations where people assumed that digital resources which weren't being heavily used had no value. As an archivist, I say them nay -- much of what we are preserving we are preserving for the future.)

But in any case, I read the report thinking "that's just what I've been saying". I'm thrilled that major reports are coming out discussing these issues.

Techies in Libraries

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:53:19 GMT

Library Garden posted on The New IT Librarian Application.
Librarian in Black responded with How to Test Applicants' Tech Skills.
Caveat Lector responded with Testing Your Techies.

Full disclosure: Before I went to library school, I spent ten years as a systems administrator in large corporate environments, and I was damn good at it. I still run my own small ISP. So I'm speaking here as a librarian/archivist but also as a sysadmin.

Library Garden's post is misguided: "If the person's resume and cover letter meet your standards, TEXT their cell phone to set up an interview. Unorthodox? Perhaps, but part of the IT personality is embracing modern technology. Texting is one of the most popular means of communication with our younger population and, if we want to stay current with our patrons, then we need make sure our IT people are familiar with it as well."

This is maybe good advice if you are trying to hire a Library 2.0 guru, but is it good advice to hire IT personnel? No, no, and no. Your IT people need to be able to make sure your servers are backed up. They need to make sure you have fast reliable networks. The need to make sure you have all of the rights you need to administer your data, and all the right tools at your fingertips. They need to make sure that your data are secure. They need to be on top of improvements in file systems, aware of security alerts, knowledgeable about server-class hardware. They probably need to be capable database administrators in a pinch. And if the library staff believes the best way to communicate with users includes setting up text notifications, then your IT people need to be able to set up a good infrastructure for sending text notifications.

Does that mean they need to take in text messages themselves? Maybe you think so. Maybe you think that nobody can set up a good infrastructure of a tool they don't themselves use. But I will tell you, there are plenty of fantastic sysadmins who are complete Luddites about personal technology. Are you really going to hire a sysadmin because she uses twitter? Or are you going to hire her because she writes Debian Linux kernel patches in her spare time? I will give you a hint: there is only one right answer to this question.

Librarian in Black hits it: "And testing an IT person's skills is a lot tricker, but it can be done...assuming you have someone on the other end who can verify the accuracy of the responses. I advocate for essay questions and actual problem-solving questions that present a real problem and ask for code,or a project plan, or a network diagram."

There are two hugely important points here: testing and having someone in-house who can verify the accuracy.

I have no idea how people do real interviews without doing skills tests. My favorite sysadmin test is to hand people this snippet:

crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty       3, 175 2008-06-07 23:43 ttyzf
prw-r-----  1 root adm            0 2008-06-10 10:04 xconsole
brw-rw----  1 root disk    202,   2 2008-06-07 23:43 xvda2
drwxrwxrwt  7 root        root         5120 2008-06-10 15:56 tmp
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root      4 2008-04-24 15:48 lib64 -> /lib
-rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail  395107 2008-06-09 10:07 elm
-rwx--x--x  1 root staff  15340 2008-06-09 10:07 mmencode

I ask them to talk about it. It's a great piece, because if you have any UNIX admin experience at all, you should be able to at least give a four-word description of that whole class of text. And there are lines in there of some fairly intense levels of complexity, which in many cases only an experienced administrator would be able to describe. It's not a Pass/Fail test, it's a Show Me What You Know test, which is a far better kind. Alternately, I would ask problem-solving questions: "User calls up yelling about [situation]. Fix it." This gives you the opportunity to watch both problem-solving skills and at least the job applicant's stated user-communication skills.

But the vitally important issue here is what Librarian in Black says: assuming you have someone on the other end. It's very, very difficult -- almost impossible -- for an entirely non-technical hiring committee to select a good technical applicant. You can select someone nice, and you can select someone who will fit in with your corporate culture, and you can select somebody who talks a good game. But without finding somebody else with a similar set of job skills to sit on your hiring committee? It's all luck. Trust me, no matter how smoothly the person comes off, no matter how competent he or she seems, you can't do an accurate assessment of technical skills without having the knowledge yourself. Technical people often sound extremely confident in their skill, oftentimes with no good reason. If it is at all possible for you to get an IT person from somewhere else in your organization to sit in on the hiring committee? Do so.

digital preservation and long-term sustainability

Fri, 16 May 2008 18:21:05 GMT

I've made a conscious choice not to try to become a Big Name Blogger in librarianship and archives. I've got too many strings to my bow already -- I am not a Bagthorpe! Unless maybe I am Jack. -- and it would be too much work to maintain that constant level of intelligent back-and-forth. Of course, there are negative side effects to not pushing my blog out there in the world. Sometimes I say something which I think is really important about sustainable digital preservation and I wish other people would contribute to the conversation so we can have some back and forth and develop the idea, and it doesn't happen.

Luckily, I'm not the only person talking about long-term economic sustainability. Brian Lavoie's "The Fifth Blackbird: Some Thoughts on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation" is a good article I think everyone else in the field should read.

(Still, I'm going to be using my Operational Preservation Matrix for the next new project we start up here, and I'm going to keep track of how well it works to develop it further. Even if no one but me is interested, I think it's awesome.)

coffee cans, government documents, and technology

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:40:22 GMT

Clearing out old tabs, I find this great post by free_govt_info, "New Best. Title. Ever" really exemplifies two points which are so strange about copy-blocked PDFs. This post showcases a government publication for which the PDF was released so that the text could not be copied out or the images extracted. First of all, this copy protection was completely legally unnecessary; the PDF was of a public domain government document, so it was crippled for no reason whatsoever. And more humorously, as you can see if you look at the various ETAs in the post, the electronic limitations of the PDF don't even work! It's very easy for anyone with technical know-how to break the protections on any PDF that's readable by the user, and without violating any provisions of the DMCA, either. As long as you can view it, you can copy and print it -- but you have to know how. So this government document, public domain and owned by the citizenry, was ineffectively and unnecessarily crippled. What's up with that?

Of course, this post is only made better by the fact that the government document in question, now available as an open PDF on the FGI post, is entitled "Hills Bros. Coffee Can Chronology: Field Guide. Awesome.

reviewing books by teenagers

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:32:59 GMT

Sometimes I really hate reviewing books by teenagers, and it seems to be happening more and more often these days.

I see a lot of reviewers contextualizing these books as Books by Kids when they review them, either pro or con. Either "a powerful and surprisingly sophisticated work from such a young author" or "could the publishers stop embarrassing us with these juvenile efforts". I don't do that. To me, reviewing the text on anything other than its own merits does a disservice to the readers of my review. My reviews aren't human interest pieces about young authors, they are purchasing advisories for librarians, teachers, and others. Ultimately, the author's age has little to do with the appropriateness of the text-in-hand for a given collection.

Moreover, two different methods of reviewing books by teenagers both really get stuck in my craw. The first is excessive praise. Yes, Eragon was an impressive feat for a teenager. But outside of the human interest pieces, can we move past that? Can we judge the book on its own merits? Can we talk about its writing quality, its use of tropes, its popularity, its characterizations?

Worse is those who get offended at the very notion of published books by teenagers. To those I can only say Exhibit A.: S. E. Hinton Tell me again that a teenager can never write an abiding classic, a fully-realized world with rich characters, gorgeous language, themes that pass the test of time.

So yes, I try my hardest to review these books entirely on their own merits. But it's hard, yo. All of these books are extremely impressive feats from young writers. They wouldn't be getting through the editorial process otherwise, no matter how much the publishing house hopes to use the author's youth in marketing campaigns. I review scads of B-list books which are no better than most of the books I review by teenagers, and for many of the same reasons. The books by teenagers that I've read tend to be heavy on intellectually well-developed symbolism layered inexpertly into the text, so much sheer joy shining through a recognition that hey, a dove can mean this, or this, or this or a color can symbolize this, or this, or even this!, that the integration between story and symbolism shows its seams. Moreover, the ones I've read tend to be fairly simplistic and essentialist in morality and characterization. But nothing here distinguishes them from, say, most B-list fantasy.

It's just... if a 13 year old is constructing novels that are already at the quality of most B-list fantasy, that it seems to me that with a little bit more pushing and development and seasoning he or she will soon be writing books which are fantastic and rich. And I worry, as a reviewer, in a way that I shouldn't. I worry that early publication will discourage the young authors from learning and growing in their craft. I end trying to teach the authors in my reviews, even when I only have 60 words (a task which is doomed to fail even if it were the right thing to do), trying to say you could fix this book by changing here, and here, and here. I try to do that with all of my reviews, more fool me, but I angst about it more when the books are by teenagers.

RFC: Operational Preservation Matrix

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:22:44 GMT

[Tagged as, among other things, otw, because even though I am dealing with these issues as a professional I think that The Organization for Transformative Works is very well-placed to be one of the few organizations prepared to confront operational preservation from the outset. After all, the OTW has to deal with one even more frightening aspect of operational preservation: it is an entirely volunteer-run organization which promises perpetual preservation. It takes a lot of planning and commitment to be prepared to follow through on a commitment like that. Luckily, the OTW has both.]

I'm going to give up on liveblogging Open Repositories. For one thing, since I can't do it actually live, I miss a lot of impressions. Besides, I admit that I don't tend to read other peoples liveblogging reports from conferences. Because there has been no time to parse, they are often no more than a set of notes for the blogger. Instead, I'm going to make a series of posts about thoughts which have been provoked by the conference sessions.

Not that long ago, I posted about what I called "real preservation", and I threatened jokingly to make a OSI model-style model of archival presentation. I think I'm going to rename this from "real preservation" to the more descriptive and less loaded "Operational Preservation", and I am actually going to carry through with my threat to make my layered model.

I would love to get comments from the community on this, because I truly believe that this could be a very useful model for organizations designing digitization projects. I know I'm going to prompt my institution to follow this matrix for all new digitization efforts.

Problem Statement: When an archivist deposits material in a digital archive, he or she often has assumptions that object is preserved in perpetuity, just as it would be worried a physical object. Depositors of digital material often have the same assumptions, as do institutional administrators. However, the assumptions of the software development and maintenance community do not assume permanence on the same scale in which archivists are accustomed to providing permanence. Moreover, administrators (and archivists) often have unrealistic assumptions about the labor and costs involved in daily operational maintenance to provide digital preservation, which are -- if not higher -- certainly different from the operational maintenance costs for providing physical preservation. Even worse, many digital preservation projects are funded by limited-duration soft money instead of out of an operational budget.

Or, in a nutshell, we need to remember that Digital preservation has an ongoing operational cost which cannot be provided within the archive.

Operational Preservation: To that end, I am proposing this matrix for new preservation and archival projects to see if they have thought of the requirements necessary for permanent preservation.

Anything calling itself a digital preservation project has to be prepared, in perpetuity, to provide all items down the left-hand column for all of the items in the top row. Funding is really a redundant item -- by "Labor", I mean funding for staff to provide all of the work involved, and "Physical facility" is really something which can be provided by funding -- but the fact that digital preservation requires ongoing operational money is too important to ignore. By "Bureaucratic support" I mean policies and procedures in place which support the operational business of preservation at an organizational level.

*Operational Preservation Matrix*
	Labor	Physical facility	Bureaucratic support	Funding
Existence of the datastream in a file system or database	.	.	.	.
Object access via handle/doi/uri	.	.	.	.
Maintenance, repair, and upgrade of hardware (server, disk, etc.)	.	.	.	.
Maintenance, patching, and upgrade operating system	.	.	.	.
(The following tasks are not as essential, but still very important)	.	.	.	.
Rolling forward file formats	.	.	.	.
Transferring data to more modern repository and software tools when appropriate	.	.	.	.
Modernizing user interface as appropriate	.	.	.	.

(Of course, traditional preservation of physical objects is also an ongoing operational cost. Physical objects require extensive physical facilities with narrow environmental limitations, they require re-housing and repair, they require maintenance and supervision. But these ongoing operational tasks can be performed by archivists with traditional skills. The technological operational tasks of a digital archive often can't be performed even by technologically-trained archivists, because the institution will have specific requirements about who is able to, say, maintain the network.)

Open Repositories 2008, part 1.

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:15:51 GMT

All these papers will eventually be available in the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository. I'm linking to all of the placeholders; papers should be up soon.

This will be very limited liveblogging, because I'm typing in the conference and dictating betwen sessions, so I can't say much. Hopefully I'll get some good fodder for my upcoming sustainability post.

Keynote:

"Repositories for Scientific Data", Peter Murray-Rust
This talk proved its point in perhaps unintentional ways. Peter Murray-Rust's argument was that scientists will not choose to change the ways in which they work, and they won't understand technology -- and he certainly didn't understand the technology. He discussed Active Directory and Samba as storage mechanisms, Subversion as a concept rather than as a specific tool, Word's XML as useful semantic metada. He didn't value preservation and data-interoperability, instead valuing tools to extract and manipulate data now. He saw no utility in PDF because to him, a tool which does not allow manipulation of raw data is useless.

He's quite right that we need to make our data more usable now, but he places too little value on preservation, standards, and interoperability. He also misunderstands the tools he currently uses and what they do. I also disagree with him that we need to accept that scientists will never cooperate with the preservation of data. At some level, we need to attain cooperation from the data producers. Yes, we should adjust to their workflows, but we can't take data without their help.

Sadly, he's probably right that we'll never get useful data from them unless we get inolved in data management at point of creation. Yuck. What a mess of legal, data management, and human spaghetti.

Session 1 – Web 2.0

"Adding Discovery to Scholarly Search: Enhancing Institutional Repositories with OpenID and Connotea", Ian Mulvany, David Kane
This talk didn't cover much I didn't know, but was clearly very interesting to me, because it discussed the strengths and weaknesses of OpenID. Essentially it asked, "how do you have interoperability among a variety of online identities?"

Requiring multiple logins is (1) a pain, and (2) might mean you're giving login information for one host to another host

OpenID is getting widely adopted and is a great way of sharing authentication keys, but provides a large risk of phishing; you need to trust the servers on both ends.

OAuth provides access to services one service without sharing authentication information.

"The margins of scholarship: repositories, Web 2.0 and scholarly practice", Richard Davis
Pretty straightforward stuff. The researchers added standard social networking integrations such as an image viewer, commenting, bookmarking to an eprints instance.

Rich Tags: Cross-Repository Browsing, Daniel Smith, Joe Lambert, mc schraefel
Hmm. I hurt way too much to keep liveblogging. So, nutshell: Scraping papers, available metadata, whois records, text mining, etc to generate non-human-generated metadata which can be discovered in their faceted browser. Cool.

Ow. I'm not doing this for the next session. I can blog at the breaks.

mostly links, a few thoughts. Lawrence Lessig, librarything, Major league baseball, Stephen Colbert

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:52:54 GMT

Some library, book, archives, records, baseball fandom, and government information musings and links just so I can clear the tabs out of my browser again:

1. On the Colbert Report couple of days ago, a video clip of George McGovern speechifying in his youth was credited to "youtube.com". Dear Colbert staff: I can fully expect that even with what must be the massive archives at your disposal, for something relatively obscure youtube is the fastest resource for you to find a video you need. However, you do not credit it to what is effectively the ISP which is hosting the data. You figure out who owns the stolen clip which you found on youtube, and you credit them. Thank you.

2. The National Archives and Records Administration warned the Bush administration that it e-mail archival method was at risk in 2004, and it has not yet been addressed. To be fair, this is a really hard problem. They will almost certainly be a decade or two of lost records around the world as we negotiate the period between everybody's communication going digital and archivists coming up with effective ways of managing that digital information.

3. The National Science Digital Library's funding as a research project is winding down. This is something I have been talking about for awhile. Digital libraries and digitization projects are being funded as research projects. The NSDL was funded by NSF grants. Once the NSDL had proven itself, it was no longer a research project per se -- and yet it is a very successful, very important project which (1) should continue to exist in perpetuity like most academic digital projects, and which (2) will never, ever, be self-supporting. This article talks about ways in which the NSDL can rebrand itself as still a research project, but that's only a stopgap solution. Ultimately, we need to come up with funding mechanisms for all of these digitization projects or they can continue to exist in perpetuity, as their implicit contracts with end users require.

4. Do prisoners have a right to read what they want? A disturbing article about the legal issues behind denying newspapers do prisoners.

5. Bipartisan worries about government spying on citizen Web traffic. Oh, Tor, you are worth the slowness.

6. Tim Spalding draws some interesting conclusions based on the locations of libraries and bookstores around metropolitan areas.

7. Major League Baseball wants to prohibit or limit blogging about games because it infringes on their exclusive right to describe the game. Some people have a lot to learn about fandom and how it makes them money.

8. Interesting post by Lessig discussing wisdom of crowds talks about using the wisdom of crowds instead of empiricism to resolve otherwise verifiable questions of fact. In my mind, this is related to the myth of the fair and balanced, in which one believes that if you represent both sides the truth necessarily lies somewhere in between.

new blogger

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:12:08 GMT

I am thrilled that my frequent co-conspirator/co-author Rebecca Rabinowitz has started blogging over at diceytillerman (RSS). I'm sure that blog will be a great place to get more of Rebecca's insights about children's literature, especially focused through the lenses of queer theory and fat politics.

different markets, different audiences, and recreational reading

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:40:27 GMT

After having been fairly publicly snippy in Roger Sutton's blog, I feel a need to explain myself. For one thing, Roger Sutton is a big macha in children's literature and I... well, I'm not. To a certain extent, you could even call him my boss; at least, the book I just put down to write this post was sent to me courtesy of Horn Book Guide, who will pay me to read and review it. Moreover, Roger is a very intelligent man for whom I have a lot of respect, and it feels weird to have people sending me e-mail saying "thank you for what you said to Roger!" And finally, I don't want to come off, as Elissa said, as a Trekkie angry at SNL Shatner's "get a life". I think Roger raised a lot of points, some good and some less so, and I do want to address them.

Roger makes an important and subtle point when he talks about the different audience for reviews of children's books and adult books. Reviews of adult books are sometimes intended for the readers themselves, the end-users, as it were. Reviews of children's books almost never are. Sure, publishers will selectively quote sections of children's book reviews which will be seen by the final consumer of the book, but reviews of children's books are essentially intended for teachers, librarians, and others who will mediate the book between purchase and reader. I would give a minor amendment to Roger's point: many reviews of adult books are also not intended for the final reader. There's a big difference between reviews published in Kirkus and reviews published in Entertainment Weekly in terms of the intended audience of the review and that audience's assumed relationship with the book and the marketplace. Yes, the individual reading the issue of Horn Book Magazine, Kirkus, or Publisher's Weekly probably loves books, and may be disappointed if a review spoils a major plot twist. But ultimately that individual is likely to be reading the reviews in order to make purchasing decisions, not recreational reading decisions, and that changes how those reviews are going to be written.

Roger makes another important point when he says "children's books tend to be easier and thus potentially "fun" for adults in a way they tend not to be for children, an incongruence librarians need to remember, not dissolve". He's quite right. There are exceptions, of course, but it's very important for those of us who mediate books for children (and I include reviewers in that chain) to remember that a book which seems trite to me might well be the first introduction of an idea to its implied readers, and a book which seems pleasurably simple to me might be less so to readers who are 10 years old, or who haven't read Milton, or who won't recognize the book's similarities to 1984.

I start to differ from Roger when he makes a blanket statement about people who claim the children's literature is better, claiming that saying so is "just sentimental ignorance".

"I also feel my jaw clench when a fellow adult tells me that he or she prefers children's books to adult books because they have better writing or values or stories."

There's one point in there where I can absolutely agree with Roger. Some of the people who make these claims are romanticizing childhood, claiming that children have some kind of true understanding of their elegant styles of fiction that we easily adults have forgotten about. Those people, the ones who have an essentialized and romantic view of child readers, those I agree can be extremely aggravating. But me, I happen to actually prefer the writing in books which are, in the 21st century, marketed to young adults in the United States. Notice my emphasis on marketing. It has nothing to do with who the readers are, nothing to do with any kind of pure ability of adolescents to understand concepts adults are too small minded to comprehend. For whatever reasons, though, the current trend right now is that books which are produced for and marketed towards adults are written in styles which I find less appealing than those books which are produced for and marketed towards young adults. I like my books to be character driven, plot-heavy, low on philosophical meanderings, fast-paced, ultimately optimistic, and to have high-quality prose. In general, I find it difficult to find all of these traits combined in individual books written for adults; they aren't fashionable. So by my standards of literary quality, books written for children and young adults are "better". This isn't sentimental, this is my judgment based on my tastes.

The one point that I am confident that I and others did successfully address in Roger's blog post (although I do wish I had proofread more carefully before I posted!), is the idea that readers who primarily read books marketed towards children and young adults are missing something in the world. As I said in that thread, there is a vast supply of recreational materials available for us. Every day I decide how I am going to spend my recreational time: reading, sleeping, watching television, watching movies, gardening, going for a walk, visiting friends? And if I pick recreational reading, what shall I read? An old favorite, a bestseller, a recent recommend, a children's book, a science fiction book, some political nonfiction, a blog post, romantic fanfiction, plotty fanfiction, my e-mail, some online news, popular nonfiction, scholarly nonfiction, a friend's academic paper? Regardless of what the NEA may think, I do believe all of those are valid forms of reading which will enrich my recreation time (if I even need to defend my choices of how I spend my recreational time, which I don't believe I do). There are far more possible ways for me to spend my time than I could even if I were independently wealthy and had five clones. Even if all I do in my free time is read, I can't read everything fabulous there is to read. I'm a human being, with limited time, and yes, I mostly specialize. Most of what I read for pleasure is fiction for children and young adults. Not everything -- I also read romances, science fiction and fantasy, fanfiction, popular and scholarly nonfiction, blogs -- but even if it were everything, what of it? I know I don't have time to read all the great books by Barbara Kingsolver and Jonathan Gash, and if I made time for them, what would I have to give up? I missed out on majoring in history as an undergraduate because I majored in English instead; I missed out in minoring in gender studies because I minored in computer science. I missed out on traveling the country in a camper because I settled down instead. No matter what choices we make there is always something else we could be doing with our time. The world is a rich and wonderful place, and I can't possibly experience everything there is. And you know what? I'm okay with that.

many links

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:41:00 GMT

The only way to get all these tabs out of my browser is to actually post some links.

This is one I've been saying for awhile "somebody has got to be working on this". Omeka is creating a free platform to help people create curated digital exhibits. The next thing that needs to happen is a hosted service -- not CONTENTdm style hosted service, but a real hosted curation service including preservation planning.

Republicans utterly refuse to compromise on telecom immunity, while the president insists that anyone who doesn't grant immunity to the telecommunications companies want the terrorists to win.

Why students want simplicity and why it fails them when it comes to research is a good introduction to the idea that the skills learned in googling for facts are not actually going to serve a student who needs to learn how to do complex research. Sometimes we need to adapt to user-perceived needs, but sometimes, as academic or school librarians, our job is to teach our patrons. The trick lies in choosing the right balance.

It doesn't do us much good to have an independent, bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board if the President can make it vanish simply by not appointing any members.

The MPAA's numbers about the effect of campus music piracy were vastly overblown. Only about 15% of their losses were due to campus downloading, and only about 3% probably came from on campus networks, but the record companies and Congress are bullying the universities to police anyway.

These pictures are very beautiful and very, very sad. "It will rise from ashes" is a blog post and accompanying Flickr set of images from an abandoned Detroit school system book depository. Trees growing from the soil created by burned then rained upon books; it's a kind of renewal, but renewal not from the typical post-apocalyptic vision of a rich industrial culture, but renewal from... well, I don't want to be too horribly melodramatic and say shattered potentials, so I don't know how to finish the sentence.

real preservation

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:07:52 GMT

I've been getting increasingly concerned about what I see as a too-shallow view of sustainability in digital preservation. There's been a lot of lip service paid over the last few years to preservation, and I have certainly heard talks by grant-funding agencies in which they explained that they are now only funding grants which have sustainability written into the grant structure. Yet time and time again, I see soft money being awarded to projects for which the project administrators clearly have only the vaguest idea of what sustainability really means in a software environment.

I don't see this as anyone's fault, mind you. Software developers and IT folks aren't used to thinking of software projects in terms of Permanence. In the traditional software world, the only way something is going to be around forever is if it's going to be used all that time -- for example, a financial application which is in constant use needs to be constantly up. But archival digital preservation has a very different sense of permanence. For us, permanence might mean that you build a digital archival collection once, don't touch its content again for 10 years, but can still discover all of its preserved content at the end of those 10 years.

Meanwhile, in Internet time, a project which has been around for two years is clearly well past its prime and ready to be retired.

Repository managers are putting all of this great work into the repository layer^* of preservation: handles and DOIs, PRESERV and PRONOM, JHOVE and audit trails and the RLG checklist. But meanwhile, all of these collections of digital objects -- many of them funded by limited-duration soft money -- are running on operating systems which will need to be upgraded and patched as time passes, on hardware which will need to be upgraded and repaired as time passes, on networks which require maintenance. Software requires sustenance and maintenance, and no project which doesn't take into account that such maintenance requires skilled technical people in perpetuity can succeed as perpetual preservation. Real sustainability means commitment from and communication with the programmers and sysadmins. It requires the techies understand an archivist's notion of "permanence", and the librarians and archivists (and grant agencies) understand how that a computer needs more than electricity to keep running -- it needs regular care and feeding.

(This, by the way, is one of the reasons I'm so excited by the OTW Archive of One's Own and the Transformative Works and Cultures journal. The individuals responsible for the archive and the journal *do* have a real understanding of and commitment to permanence down to the hardware and network provider level. Admittedly, it's a volunteer-run, donation supported organization, so its sustainability is an open question. But it's a question the OTW Board is wholeheartedly investigating, because they understand its importance.)

*I'm somewhat tempted to make an archival model of preservation that follows the layered structue of the OSI model of network communication. Collection policy layer, Accession layer, Content layer, Descriptive Metadata layer, Preservation Metadata layer, Application Layer, Operating System layer, Hardware layer. Then you could make sure any new preservation project has all of those checkboxes ticked. Sort of an uber-simplification of the RLG Checklist, in a nice, nerd-friendly format.

libraries 2.0 and 1.0 play awfully nice together

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:14:34 GMT

This wonderful. The Nebraska Library commission has been making archived copies of Creative Commons published works and cataloging them into their OPAC. They aren't doing this indiscriminately; they are only grabbing works which are in line with their collection development policy. They are also making spiral-bound printed copies of those works for which the license allows it, and shelving them in the physical collection.

What a fabulous, fabulous mashup of old and new.

(And does it say something about my reading habits that I got this link from lisnews and not from boingboing?)

Fannish courtesies and real-life transparencies

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:47:46 GMT

There's a debate in fan studies about whether the authors of unlocked, freely-available online posts (fic, meta, or other) should be asked for permission before citing. Acafen tend to say yes, while fan scholars from outside of the community are less prone to ask. I'm an acafan, but I fall firmly in the "don't ask" camp, unless I'm citing a personal friend or colleague.

Within fandom (or at least within that segment of media fandom which is heavily hosted on the LiveJournal-code-based blogging sites) , the default courtesy is actually not "ask" -- meta posts refer to one another all the time -- but the newsletters do usually accept opt-out requests. Many acafen have taken that courtesy into their scholarship, and default to asking fans before citing publically posted fic or blog posts in their published scholarship. They point out their are community standards which allow much of fandom to be, as it were, closeted in plain sight. While fanworks may be publically posted, handing an NC-17 Lex Luthor story to Michael Rosenbaum or a Merry/Pippin manip to Dominic Monaghan is just Not Done. There is a belief that outsiders, while they can see fanworks, don't. Therefore, the theory goes, we should as scholars respect that community standard of advertising only to the expected community.

I believe this encourages dangerously false feelings of safety. They non-fannish world is by no means ignorant of the Net. The American Bar Association reports on defendants and prosecutors introducing evidence from their opponents' MySpace pages. The cochair of the Section of Litigation’s Technology for the Litigator Committee, says she regularly checks these sites when conducting due diligence: "I’m primarily looking for information that may affect credibility" One insurance company is using Facebook and Myspace pages to avoid paying claims for eating disorders. And in a series of cases which are far more parallel to the fannish, college students get increasingly agitated at campus police using Facebook to crack down on illegal activity, claiming that Facebook is for students only and non-students don't have a right to look at unlocked posts. In fact, 32% of students polled in 2006 by the Christian science Monitor actually claimed that it is illegal for prospective employers to look at unlocked Facebook posts. (This has quieted down as Facebook has become less student-centric in the last year.)

It's important to me that people understand just because the public square in which they are talking is in the geeky, fannish end of town doesn't mean it's not the public square. Anyone can be there: journalists, academics, hecklers, your mother, the CIA, your prospective employer, your ex-girlfriend. And to me, asking permission to make scholarly use of text which has been published, which has been spoken in the public square, which has been made available to the world is just reinforcing the myth that fandom's corner of the Internet is somehow hidden from the rest of the world.

Journal Announcement and Call for Papers

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:33:11 GMT

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000–8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory’s broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000–7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500–2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item’s content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500–2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for US Letter or European A4. Please feel free to link, download, print, distribute, or post.

Additionally, much thanks to Peter Suber, for blogging us so promptly. Heck, much thanks to Peter Suber regardless, just for his tireless efforts on behalf of Open Access.

Happiness in the New Year

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:33:21 GMT

There's a lot of been meaning to post about in my far-too-busy life:

There's my new position as review editor for the newly forming, Gold Open Access, peer reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures. And by the way, yay!

There is the research I have been doing into romance fiction and the wonderfully supportive blogging and mailing list community of other academics doing that research.

There's the sequel I recently reviewed where I realized that the sentiments of my negative review of book one had been given to a minor villain of book two, in a dubious but solidly entertaining form of fame.

But what I find I am primarily focused on right now is being happy at work. People keep offered me all these fabulous opportunities which I am turning down -- inviting me to present at conference panels, asking me to write papers, encouraging me to join committees. I know I'm turning down opportunities to make a bigger deal of myself in my career or my various academic avocations. Yet I find I don't care. I really like my manager, and I like my coworkers, and I like my commute. I'm not married to my day-to-day job tasks but that's really not a problem for me. I know what I'm doing is somewhat important, and if the actual tasks aren't overwhelmingly fulfilling, the environment I'm doing them in is so comfortable that I'm perfectly happy.

This is odd for me. I spent a long time wanting to Be Somebody. I read a lot of other librarian, archivist, and Library 2.0 blogs which are (quite reasonably) concerned with conferences and presentations and career building and networking at all of those things that I know are really important. And if I ever had any aspirations as a career academic, than all of the academic connections that I'm making would absolutely matter more than they do to me right now.

For right now I have a low-intensity job with people I like and respect in an interesting academic environment, and that's enough for me. Well, that and my thoroughly overloaded plate of extracurriculars.

the Library of Congress doesn't like changing classifications?

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:40:48 GMT

In the "good news" category, a federal judge denied a motion from the Library of Congress to dismiss a transgender discrimination lawsuit.

United States District Court Judge James Robertson ruled that former U.S. Army Special Forces Officer Diane Schroer has legal grounds to file a sex discrimination claim against the library under Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.... Schroer, a 25-year Army veteran, accepted an offer by the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service for a position as a senior terrorism research analyst ... Schroer applied for the position under her former male name and appeared for her interview in male clothing. ... [F]ollowing the division’s decision to hire her, Schroer revealed that she was transitioning into a woman and would begin her job using her new name and as a woman dressed in traditional female attire. ... [L]ibrary officials decided Schroer would not be a "good fit" for the job, based on the information revealing her change of gender.

Thanks, United States District Court Judge James Robertson. And fooey on the LOC.

further thoughts on Henry Jenkins' acafan debate

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:04:56 GMT

After Henry Jenkins' male/female scholar acafan debate, he asked for feedback from the participants. I didn't contribute any, mostly because real life intervened, but I was so intrigued by the responses of those who did that I found I did need to say a little something, after all.

My experience in reading and writing during this debate has been so mixed. On the one hand, I think the most progress on the gender debate per se was made in those conversations which got most hairy and uncomfortable (either directly in [Henry's] blog, or in the ensuing livejournal/blogosphere conversations). Real underlying thorny issues were revealed, real disagreements came for us, and people got a chance to learn from each other.

But on the other hand, those uncomfortable conversations were, well, uncomfortable. Women feeling like the contributions of female academics or fans are marginalized; men feeling like they were attacked as sexist -- these left some pretty raw wounds. Whereas my conversation with Alan was pleasurable throughout.

There were places I didn't poke in my exchange with Alan. Not that I thought it would have turned into an uncomfortable, hairy situation. No part of that conversation was anything other than pleasant, enjoyable, and educational. But I'm an independent scholar -- and a woman, socialized to avoid public disagreement -- and I was having a very public conversation with a male credentialed associate professor in my field. I was far too wary to prod at any statements I disagreed with. Not that I think Alan would have responded negatively. On the contrary, I think further questioning on my part would have only enriched our conversation and added to our pleasure in the exchange. I went through drafts of e-mails I didn't send to Alan in which I did raise questions about assertions he made. But I rejected those drafts out of nervous suspicions that I was out of line.

This isn't the fault of Alan or Henry or any of the participants in the conversation giving me this irrational sense of risk. I think it comes back to the professional/amateur divide which Kristina reiterated, and which is part of a larger question: why does the balance of faculty to independent scholar in our field (and academia in general) appear tied to gender, and what can we do about it? (Whether what we do about it is address that gender balance, or instead address the lack of support for independent scholarship is yet another question.)

That being said, I had so much fun in my conversations with Alan -- they were interesting, compelling, and entertaining. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't accuse him of being a patriarchal oppressor, no matter what he claims!

Thank you so much for setting this up. I had a fabulous time.

chilling effects

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:57:10 GMT

Seen via rivkat, and I thought there might be plenty of librarians with stories to share.

The Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic at American University is working with the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) on a FTC complaint against major content providers including the NFL, the MLB, Universal, DreamWorks, Harcourt Inc., and Penguin Group. The CCIA alleges that these corporations have engaged in a nationwide pattern of unfair and deceptive trade practices by misrepresenting consumer rights under copyright law by posting misleading and overreaching copyright warnings.

The Clinic is looking for anyone who has been injured or affected by these overreaching copyright warnings. That is people who chose not to use a particular work or modified their use of that work after reading the attached overreaching copyright warning. For example, a teacher who chose not to use a television, movie, or music clip in the classroom out of fear that his or her actions violated copyright law.

If you have a story or any helpful information regarding this issue, please email Marlee Miller or Khalil Malouf at copyrightmisuse@gmail.com.

Gender And Fan Culture (round sixteen): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:05:03 GMT

Gender and Fan Culture, Round 16, Part Two: Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee, and the discussion mirror at fandebate.

gender and fan culture

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:39:27 GMT

It's odd to pull up your blogs in the morning and see your own name, you introducing yourself, at the top of the list.

Gender and Fan Culture, Round 16, Part One: Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee, over at Henry Jenkins' place.

The generosity of Henry for making these conversations possible, the drive of Kristina Busse for rounding us all up and making this happen, and Alan McKee's all-around wonderfully funny smarts have made this entire experience a thoroughgoing pleasure. As an independent scholar, I get far too little opportunity to interact with others in media and fan studies outside of the sometimes stultifying atmosphere of conferences; this has been really a great experience for me.

social networks and scholarship

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:58:39 GMT

I've been far too overwhelmed to post here recently, or even to read my blogs, and for that I feel immensely guilty. I've been doing so much: getting settled in my new job at Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, working on my research on romance fiction, working (far too little) on the project I'm doing with Rebecca Rabinowitz on subversive children's literature.

I've also been talking with Alan McKee in preparation for our installation of Henry Jenkins' fangirl/fanboy detente. That has been an absolute joy. It's so wonderful whenever you find another scholar who delights in examining the same kinds of questions that you do. Both of us have found such pleasure in talking about media fandom, and I confess it has been from both a scholarly perspective and a fan perspective. This, of course, is the most wonderful part about being an acafan; the shameless delight in the subjects of our study.

I wonder how much further I would have gotten in children's literature scholarship if the academic blogging community had existed 10 years ago. Would I have made further inroads there? I've made such friends in media and fan scholarship, real genuine friends, people I love and care for -- and I suspect I will be making similar friends in romance scholarship, based on what I've seen of that community. As an independent scholar, it is so discouraging to have no infrastructure for my fields of study. And it's not like I'm not busy, it's not like I'm not doing this scholarship in my spare time after work and dinner and gardening and feeding the cats. If it weren't for the social network of wonderful people who share my interests, I don't know if I would be able to keep it up.

breathes

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:52:09 GMT

The Benjamin A. and Julia M. Trustman Collection of Honore Daumier Lithographs at Brandeis University.

There are bugs. There are bugs I already know about and I launched 30 seconds ago. There are user interface problems that need to be fixed and will be fixed by someone after me who will get the glory. But as the founder of my high school used to say, "I don't want it perfect; I want it Thursday". And it has been 15 months of Thursdays.

This? This is awesome.

*dances with glee*