Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

5/9/08 02:40 pm - coffee cans, government documents, and technology

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.

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4/29/08 10:32 am - reviewing books by teenagers

Sometimes I really hate reviewing books by teenagers, and it seems to be happening more and more often these days. ( Not because they're bad, but because it's hard, and I am crazy. )

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4/2/08 10:22 am - RFC: Operational Preservation Matrix

[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.]

( Introductory thoughts on Operational Preservation )

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.)

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4/1/08 12:15 pm - Open Repositories 2008, part 1.

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 )

Session 1 – Web 2.0

( Adding Discovery to Scholarly Search: Enhancing Institutional Repositories with OpenID and Connotea, Ian Mulvany, David Kane )

( The margins of scholarship: repositories, Web 2.0 and scholarly practice, Richard Davis )

( Rich Tags: Cross-Repository Browsing, Daniel Smith, Joe Lambert, mc schraefel )

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

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3/12/08 03:52 pm - mostly links, a few thoughts. Lawrence Lessig, librarything, Major league baseball, Stephen Colbert

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: ( Cut to save your screen real estate )

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3/7/08 04:12 pm - new blogger

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.

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3/5/08 06:40 pm - different markets, different audiences, and recreational reading

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.

( Audiences for reviews )

( Remembering the implied audience )

( Because children's books are better: sentimental blathering or trufax? )

( Am I missing something in the world? )

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2/22/08 02:40 pm - many links

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.

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2/22/08 02:07 pm - real preservation

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.

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2/21/08 09:14 am - libraries 2.0 and 1.0 play awfully nice together

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?)

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2/12/08 12:47 pm - Fannish courtesies and real-life transparencies

( Unpopular acafannish opinions: why I don't ask for permission before citing fanworks )

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2/1/08 09:33 am - Journal Announcement and Call for Papers

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.

( CFP behind link for length )

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.

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1/2/08 10:33 am - Happiness in the New Year

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.

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12/3/07 04:40 pm - the Library of Congress doesn't like changing classifications?

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.

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11/26/07 10:04 am - further thoughts on Henry Jenkins' acafan debate

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.

( Here is what I sent to Henry, which will probably be added as comments to the above-linked post )

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10/3/07 11:57 am - chilling effects

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.

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9/21/07 06:03 pm - Gender And Fan Culture (round sixteen): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee

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

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9/20/07 08:39 am - gender and fan culture

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.

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9/18/07 10:47 am - social networks and scholarship

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.

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6/28/07 10:52 am - *breathes*

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*

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