Free Range Librarian

First of all, thanks!

Next… so much of this is cultural. I didn’t want to beat this particular horse in my post, but one of these days in my copious spare time I’m going to download the entire dspace-tech archive, separate out questions, divide them by the asker’s gender, and sort out who gets answered and who doesn’t. I have a hypothesis about what I’d find, yes I do.

(dspace-tech is actually a bad example, because it’s set to respond to the poster, not the list. It’s quite possible questions are being answered list-invisibly — but somehow I doubt it.)

More than that, though, I see in a lot of OSS projects and conclaves an attitude of “I don’t have to care whom I offend.” It’s not surprising that that’s there, because OSS still has the “hobby” mystique to it no matter how important it’s become in the work world… but it’s not a useful attitude, not at all.

Eh, well. I answered a question on dspace-tech this morning. Great journeys and little steps.

Timely post! We are looking at the potential of D-Space for a few things public-library-ish (local history collections etc.).

One of the first things we notice is its academic-ness. For example, D-Space uses “Supervisors” as a navigation item which means something very obvious to academic types (ie. Thesis supervisors) and very silly to non-academic types (ie. Supervisors refers to admin options, right?).

I guess my opinion is that you ought to think “architecture first, then solution.” If you have an architecture, then you can make the open source solution fit that rather than the other way around.

Of course, Dorothea hints that with open source tools, making the product fit the architecture can be harder than it at first appears. Hacking is pretty dangerous stuff, even for expert coders.

I like your analogy about “Free as in puppies” though. A very good way to explain the problems with open source. But the understated advantage of free puppies is that, amidst the urine-damaged rugs, you can learn a lot of important lessons from puppies. Heck, you may be able to train it to find you free beer! 🙂

But the key thing about open source is that if developers go too far off on a tangent, users can take the code to new developers and take the project in the direction they want.

Joshua, as an RPGer myself… I refuse to play with people like that. 😉 I do notice that some of the more “modern” games have player communities that can get really rabid about game theory. Hello? Not interested in the theory, want to play a fun game, please!

Mita, I heard some interesting things at Open Repositories 2007 about IR uptake. Several people said that they’ve got enough word-of-mouth on their campuses now that they’re not having to drum up business any longer — business is coming to them. As a repo-rat myself, I find that a hopeful development. Maybe we’ll start to hit a tipping point soon.

I was also impressed with Georgia Tech’s well-thought-out scheme to incorporate the IR into a suite of campus publishing and archiving services. They demonstrated pretty compellingly that the problem isn’t IRs — it’s IRs in isolation from everything else that faculty do. Give ’em a value proposition (as GTech did) and they’ll happily hop on board.

I took notes at that talk, yep yep, I surely did.

Dorothea, thanks for the heads up on Georgia Tech’s take on IR. Will check it out. I should say the tone of my comment doesn’t really convey the fact that, misgivings aside, I do want IR to succeed.

And I would suggest to play a game of Mornington Crescent in front of anyone so rude enough not to explain the rules of a game to you.

So far I have kept mum. but this tempts me too much: “… I heard some interesting things at Open Repositories 2007 about IR uptake. Several people said that they’ve got enough word-of-mouth on their campuses now that they’re not having to drum up business any longer — business is coming to them.”

I think this is far, far too optimistic a take on IRs. Susan Gibbons remarked in her LTR on IRs, after iterating the common issues–resources, countervailing forces, etc.: “These words of caution are not intended to dissuade you from establishing an institutional repository, but to warn you that success is not guaranteed by simply running the IR technology.”

It’s not that IRs cannot be good or that the concept doesn’t have potential, but they require a lot more elbow grease than many realize. I think a thorough, clear-eyed inspection of many IRs would be like looking at blogs: many begin, few continue, at least by any reasonable measure of robustness. We are not yet good in LibraryLand about assessing and committing to sustainability.

Two thoughts, or thunks, or whatever (last night I dreamed our systems person and I were discussing server coverage–except I was wearing a jester’s hat with bells on it… so I’m a little disoriented this morning).

First, sending someone to a conference is a commitment, indeed. All for it. But when the person gets back to base camp, the work is just beginning (or resuming).

Second, I have yet to hear of many blogs shutting down, either… they just sit there in a state of suspended animation. I suspect that some IRs are in this predicament–and that’s because they’re considered to be equipment and software, not tools that people need to be taught to use and that require conditioning, marketing, and reorienting to make “happen.”