Etc.

Random stuff that I don't feel like posting in long form. Probably not work-related.

[micahvandegrift]

Um ... about that American Libraries article we wrote

Um … about that American Libraries article we wrote

Its a bummer to see this happening, but I am so pleased that Stewart and Patricia decided to share openly about it. I dont think I’ve ever reblogged someone elses work on my own blog, but this is important.

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[micahvandegrift]

*Disclaimer – all thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the views of FSU Libraries, FSU, or anyone I work with.

A year ago today FSU Libraries faced a tragedy. Someone came to our campus with the intent to do harm to others. I was not at the library at the time of the shooting, but it affected me way more than I thought it might have.

In the weeks following, I was working on a draft of an invited talk I was scheduled to give at a conference in New York. Free counseling was available to the FSU community, and for a long time I meant to go and show someone this draft. Of course, life/work got in the way and I never did. This past week, as we prepared to remember the event, I dug up this draft and decided to share it for my own healing. The version of the talk that I actually ended up giving turned out very different, and is available here.

Most importantly, we are all healing. These pictures, and more on my Twitter throughout the day, represent the FSU Libraries family as we are today. We wore FSU colors today as a symbol of our strength and endurance.

This is what real librarians look like!

These ladies keep FSU Libraires functioning.

#GoDigiNoles!

FSUnited

The boss (her, not me.)

  Draft one:

Two weeks ago, a man was shot and killed in front of my library. A young, black man was shot and killed on the steps I walk every morning at 8am. A kid is now paralyzed from the waist down after being shot, because he was hanging out in front of my library late one Wednesday night. A library staffer, who works the overnight shift and who I nod hello to every morning as he leaves was shot in the leg. I didn’t even know his name until I saw it in the news. This isn’t the talk I intended to give today. But it’s all that I have in my mind and heart, and I couldn’t pretend that open access matters when someone’s life was ended under a banner that says “A great university requires a great library.”

At 630am when a flood of texts came from concerned family and friends that were catching the morning news that day, my first thoughts were “I’m glad I wasn’t there” and “I knew this was going to happen sooner or later.” My Facebook status was a mix of shock, helplessness and confusion. “All my deadlines and projects seem to matter so much less now.” That sentiment has followed me these two weeks. I don’t care that SPARC hosted OpenCon and that a bunch of young people are excited about making real change in academic publishing. The Gates Foundation announced an Open Access Policy that I believe will be a significant turning point in research funders dictating how open access moves forward – but I could care less. The Friday after the shooting, I moved into a new position (Digital Scholarship Coordinator) and got a raise, something I’ve been working toward for months – bittersweet, and mostly bitter.

The talk I wanted to give today would have been a challenge, as I am wont to do in my professional life. A challenge to academic librarians to stop talking about open access and start doing it. To force our own field to change by taking collective action against Big Publishing and refuse to continue to perpetuate a system that continues to prove its blatant disdain for author’s rights, libraries budgets and the good/right of information access to the global knowledge ecosystem. That challenge is still in my heart, but as an echo. The talk that I have to give today is a feeble plea, in light of the sense of smallness that was inflicted on me two weeks ago. My simple response to the prompt “What is the role of the academic librarian in open access?” is this: access for all.

I titled my talk “Scholarly Communication is People” because I believe that is the number one thing that we have lost over the 8 years that Open Access Week has been observed in libraries internationally. In the beginning, we (libraries) made it about money; scholars have made it about their rights to their work; funders have made it about a return on investment; policy makers have made it about civic life. I believe all those things are true; but what we overlook too often is that the academic enterprise, and by extension all this goddammned writing we do, is about making better humans. I submitted a proposal to the Scholarly Communication Institute at Duke, held at the beginning of November. The proposal was rejected, but the core idea behind it has been driving me since early this year: The only real reason open access matters is because of the potential it offers. The possibility that a member of the public will discover academic research is the reason I wake up. And we have done a disservice to the public by making it all about us.

Could open access to publicly-funded scholarship about the historical and social constructs of race relations in America have saved Michael Brown? Might open access to research on mental health have prevented death and tragedy from visiting my library? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But, I do believe that it matters when my dad tells me he is tracing our family genealogy using some weird website called HathiTrust. Or when my sister, a single, working mother of two, is able to complete an MBA relying on Google Scholar as a resource because she doesn’t have time to learn about Ebsco’s Business Resource Complete database. I wont make the claim that open access will save the world, but I believe that it could make it a significantly better place to raise my son.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve thought a lot about what matters. Over the past three years, what has mattered a lot to me has been pushing buttons and asking questions no one seems to want to ask – like why the Journal of Academic Librarianship still exists in its present form? Or, why library schools indoctrinate students with ALA’s Code of Ethics, but those same faculty fail to exercise their rights to place their works in institutional repositories? Or, why we all walk on eggshells when vendors or publishers are around? Or, why librarianship acts to principled but has yet to live up to the edict under which every libraries’ heritage lies – access for all? What I’ve learned in three years as a librarian is that it’s a lot more complicated than a young, idealistic blogger can hope to change. And that, many of my questions are important more in the asking than in the answers. What I’ve been forced to reconcile these past weeks is that the strife and bickering and how ridiculous it is for librarians to sue one another and the conversations we have in and across our literature that seem so huge (PhD’s taking all our jobs! Library school doesn’t prepare you for the workforce! Numbers, metrics, assessment = funding!)– all of this doesn’t matter as much as we hope.

What does matter, and what I think is the most important thing about anything we do, is that you and I are here right now and that I really want to know what you’re excited about. What matters is that across the pond, my former Grad Assistant Chealsye is struggling through a Master’s degree in the History of Science and Technology, while at the same time working on the Open Access Button. What matters is that Erin McKiernan, an early career  neuroscientist, has pledged to only do open access with all her work, for the rest of her career. What matters is that lots of new librarians will be hired in the next 2-5 years never knowing a library-land before DPLA, Open Access Policies, Research Data Management or Digital Humanities. What matters is that the morning of the shooting I was comforted and honored to be part of a profession where emails flowed in all day long – from Molly Keener at Wake Forest, Ellen Duranceau at MIT, Kathryn Pope at CDRS, from Colin Lukens at Harvard, Claudia Holland at George Mason U, and countless others on Twitter.

I do strongly believe that every library needs a scholarly communication initiative, and that every librarian can and should participate in this work. I believe that scholarly communication (and everything connected to it, DH, Data management, GIS) is offering us the chance to exert our principles, “access for all” in the real, practical benefit of global change. I believe the academic librarians role in open access is to just do it, to embody the change we hope to see, to be a catalyst for shifting research patterns at our institutions. I believe the time for timidity and “service” has passed, and that our role now is active, collaborative participation in research, teaching and learning. I believe there is a good chance I am wrong about some of this because I am still a new librarian, and am just learning to be ok with making mistakes.

  That’s where the draft ended. Some of the threads here have changed the way I live since I wrote this. I started leaving my laptop at work when I went home at the end of the day. I pulled back from a lot of researching/writing and speaking to stay around Tallahassee. I have invested a lot more energy in connecting personally with people I work with (#tacotuesday has been amazing.) I won’t leave you with any grand takeaway, except that I love this library. It’s been a strange, interesting, and delightful year since Nov. 20th, 2014.

*Disclaimer – all thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the views of FSU Libraries, FSU, or anyone I work with.

One year later, we're healing at @fsulibrary. #FSUnited #GoNoles *Disclaimer - all thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the views of FSU Libraries, FSU, or anyone I work with.

[micahvandegrift]

HILT2015, iSchools+DH, and deconstructive/critical digital pedagogy.

I’m at HILT right now, and supposed to be involved in a discussion group on pedagogical methods and tools. Instead, I’m racking my brain over the current state of LIS education. Guess you really can’t teach a new dog old tricks. Or whatever.

A while back I heard about this great project, iSchools+DH, which aimed to “develop a robust and sustainable program for placing interns within digital…

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[micahvandegrift]

Modeling contributorship with TaDiRAH

Modeling contributorship with TaDiRAH

Very, very excited to be a participant in this year’s Scholarly Communication Institute. Read more about the project I’ll be involved in.

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[americanguide]

THE HIGH LINE - NEW YORK, NEW YORK

The first time I visited the High Line, I had to jump a fence and squeeze through a hole to get in. Back then, the mile-and-a-half long railroad trestle was abandoned and ruled by a wilderness of plants. Today it’s a public park, with elevators that take visitors 30 feet above ground and into an expertly designed garden in the sky.

Sometime after 1847, when a new 10th Avenue railroad put freight trains on a collision course with pedestrians, Manhattan’s “Death Avenue” earned its nickname. Accidents declined when the High Line opened in 1934 as part of New York’s “West Side Improvement” program. Innovatively designed, the railroad weaved above and to the side of businesses between 10th and 11th Avenues.

In 1980, the city shut down the High Line. Nature took over, quietly, like a secret. Birds and wind dispersed seeds onto the forgotten landscape and feisty plants like evening primrose, goldenrod and sumac made it their home.

My first trip was in December of 2006. One minute my husband and I were on bustling 34th street, the next we were alone in a wilderness. We walked the U-shaped tracks above the west side rail yards and reached a corrugated metal wall. A savvy explorer had cut a hole in the bottom and we shimmied through, greeted on the other side by a four-foot pine treedecked in Christmas lights. Wild plants snaked around splintered wooden tracks. To the east stood the Empire State building. A nest full of eggs sat at the top of loading station. And UFO 907, the space alien graffiti found in some of the most obscure and ostentatious spots in NYC, stood 10-feet tall on a wall marked by previous explorers, but we had the railroad to ourselves.

I would return to the High Line again and again, hooked on walking those tracks in solitude above the city. I snuck up even as construction to transform the railroad into a public park went full gear. Friends of the High Line, a group of preservationists, had won their long battle against the city, which had planned to demolish the railroad.

Decades before Friends gave Death Avenue a public life, there was Peter Obletz, a train aficionado who began living by the High Line’s north end in the 1970s, back when the infamously rough neighborhood served as a backdrop to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Obletz dreamed of restoring service to the High Line and bought it for ten dollars from Conrail in 1984. Neighboring property owners and the Department of Transportation fought him in court for years. His struggle helped keep the High Line intact, even though he lost the case and most of his money.

Joel Sternfeld, who photographed the High Line from 2000-2001, also helped. His moody images gave New Yorkers a glimpse of a wild landscape most had never seen— and a hint of what could be.

The High Line opened to the public in April 2009. Foxtail lilies, prairie grasses, birch trees and hundreds of other plant species now surround visitors as they walk the 80-year-old trestle. The park also functions as a green roof, with pathways made of open-jointed planks that reduce storm runoff by up to 80%. What was once wild is now a carefully designed and well-tended garden. It is still beautiful.

Guide note: For further reading… 

High Line History, TheHighLine.org

“When a Monster Plied the West Side,” New York Times, Dec. 22, 2011.

“The Charming Gadfly Who Saved the High Line,” New York Times, May 13, 2007.

* * * 

Irene Tejaratchi Hess is a photographer, video editor and writer.  She was born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, where evenings brought the sweet song of the mourning dove and the low whistle of a mobster calling his kids home for dinner. Irene spent her early career producing natural history documentaries for the PBS series Nature. She now lives in Portland, Oregon and recently finished editing a documentary on the Marine National Monuments. Find more of her work on her website, www.IreneHess.com, and follow her on Tumblr at luxroxvox.tumblr.com.

[micahvandegrift]

Love the High Line. Can't wait to visit it next week. 

[micahvandegrift]

A moment I loved today: This morning, Durham and I let the dogs out. He wanted to walk in the grass. He babbled and pointed and I said, "it's tall, huh?" He walked back over to me, "up?", then kept pointing over to the corner of the yard past the firepit. "What? What do you see?" After continued pointing and urgent exclamations, I walked him across the yard and set him down. "Show me." He confidently walked to his play set, pulled out the kiddie mower that was parked underneath, walked past me and started 'mowing.' I choked down a happy lump in my throat and said, "great work buddy. Need help?"

[micahvandegrift]

I could listen to Floor every day.

[micahvandegrift]

Platforming Books craigmod.com

So we began to play with Art Space Tokyo as direct-from-InDesign PDFs for­mat­ted for por­trait and land­scape. They worked, sort of. The text was a lit­tle small, and they were a bit clunky, but you k …

This, for academic publishing too.

[americanguide]

TORREYA TAXIFOLA - NORTH FLORIDA

Left from Rock Bluff on a dirt road to TORREYA STATE PARK, 15.5 m. on the Apalachicola River. This 520-acre park was named for the evergreen Torreya taxifola, rarest species of the genus Torreya, found here and for 10 miles south along the eastern bank of the river. Because of the unpleasant odor when bruised, the tree is known as ‘stinking cedar.’ Two other varieties grow in Japan and California, but both differ in size, leaves and color of fruit from the Florida tree, which rises in pyramidal form to a height of 40 feet.

—Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (WPA, 1939) [Find it at a library near you.]

Torreya State Park is about an hour west of Tallahassee, the state’s capital in northwest Florida, where I currently live. The park opened in 1935, a project of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal, public work relief program. Its namesake, the Torreya taxifolia, or “gopher wood,” is a small coniferous tree that is currently listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN). The numbers are staggering: “Before the start of the decline in the early 1950s, the population was estimated to have been more than 600,000 […] The current population is estimated to be between 500 and 600 trees.” Efforts to preserve and maintain the tree range from academic studies from conservation biologists [PDF] to a citizen biodiversity protection group who are “rewilding” the tree in and around Asheville, NC and other select locations.

The Florida Torreya is one of the many native Florida plants that are indigenous to the Big Bend—one of the the nation’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Many of the indigenous flora and fauna are endangered due to overdevelopment.

Guide Note: This dispatch was inspired by a personal project: an experiential auditory piece meant to invoke the physical and aural sensation of observing the T. taxifolia in its native landscape, the limestone hills of the Apalachicola River Basin, while it slowly disintegrates as a species. The author is collaborating with Josh Mason (Jacksonville) and Michael Diaz (Tallahassee). Photographs by Michael Diaz, images courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory project.

***

Micah Vandegrift is a Floridian who has not once been to Miami. He fell into academic librarianship after finishing a degree in American and Florida Studies wherein he wrote a thesis on Gainesville’s post-punk music scene. His dream vacation is to take an airboat ride through the Everglades, stop off in Gibsonton, catch a show at Weeki Wachee Springs, camp in the Dry Tortugas National Park, hang out with the bison on Paynes Prairie, catch a flick at the Silver Moon Drive In,  walk the trees at the Myakka River Canopy, and finish the trip with an Dipped Cone at Del’s Freez in his hometown of Melbourne, FL. Micah can be discovered all around the web, mostly rousing rabble about librarianship in the digital age. Find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr.

[micahvandegrift]

So excited to see this posted on American Guide!!!

[micahvandegrift]

T. taxifolia

The best thing I've ever done for myself was make friends with artists. Surrounded by people who see things in such unique ways, I am provided numerous opportunities to express a creativity I don't often dig in to. This weekend was one such opportunity. Together with Michael Diaz and Josh Mason, I traveled to Torreya State Park, near Bristol, FL, to find, "record" and "preserve" one of the world's rarest and oldest known trees, the Florida Torreya. 

Torreya State Park is about an hour west of Tallahassee, where Michael and I currently live and are both connected to Florida State University. Torreya State Park opened in 1935, a project of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal, public work relief program. Its namesake, the Torreya taxifolia, or "gopher wood," is a small coniferous tree that is currently listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN). Having visited the park more than a few times to camp, I had never taken the time to notice and comprehend what it meant for a tree like this to be endangered. The numbers are staggering: "Before the start of the decline in the early 1950s, the population was estimated to have been more than 600,000 [...] The current population is estimated to be between 500 and 600 trees" (Spector, 2011).

Only as of late have I begun to develop a sense of "localness" that connects to landscape. I've understood the meaning of community through growing up in punk rock, but localness is more about heritage than history. Part of this progression for me has manifest itself as an interest in fauna, native plant landscaping, and food. The hunt for the Torreya tree perfectly intersected with this sense of place that I'm exploring and gave me the chance to get outside with some dear friends. 

The project concept is simple: find, "record" and "preserve" the trees. However, that idea, when coming from an artist's point of view, takes on very different meanings than a conservation biologist [PDF] or a citizen biodiversity protection group. We are collaborating on an experiential auditory piece meant to invoke the physical and aural sensation of observing the T. taxifolia in its native landscape, the limestone hills of the Appalachicola River Basin, while it slowly disintegrates as a species. This first trip to the park was to collect some data, discuss the scope of what we might do, and investigate the space. 

Needless to say, my role is as facilitator (Josh and Michael met for the first time on this trip) and documentarian. And, as one might expect from an academic librarian, I conducted a bit of research, some of which is cited below in a working bibliography. Watch this space for more details as we move the project forward. 

http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/torreyatree.html

http://www.usbg.gov/plants/stinking-cedar

Index of Species Information, US Forest Service. 

Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) profile. 

Species Profile, US Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Population Persistence in Florida Torreya: Comparing Modeled Projections of a Declining Coniferous Tree. Mark W. Schwartz, Sharon M. Herrmann, Phillip J. Van Mantgem. PDF available here.

Spector, T., Determann, R. & Gardner, M. 2011. Torreya taxifolia. In: IUCN 2013. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.2. <www.iucnredlist.org>. Downloaded on 24 March 2014.

The woods of the United States : with an account of their structure, qualities and uses ; with geographical and other notes upon the trees which produce them. Sargent, Charles Sprague, 1841-1927, American Museum of Natural History. Jesup Collection. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.28215

The American woods : exhibited by actual specimens and with copious explanatory text. Hough, Romeyn Beck, 1857-1924. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.35982

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility: GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, 2013-07-01.  Accessed via http://www.gbif.org/species/5284481 on 2014-03-24

[micahvandegrift]

Who wants to join my team?

My proposal is here - bit.ly/TriSCIproposal

[micahvandegrift]

Are we seeing a renainssance in guitar music? This, Total Slacker, Thee Silver Mt. Zion. Me likey. #dhmusic

[micahvandegrift]

"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."

Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, the film that pushed me to make the decision to go to college, ostensibly to "write about music." Such a loss.  

[micahvandegrift]

The Falsities and/or Truthiness of Subscriptions...

"What library will continue to subscribe if a growing proportion of articles is available for free elsewhere?"

More than once in the past week, this has been the argument by Major Label Publishers to justify their ill-timed actions, sending take down notices to academic authors for posting research articles on public websites and social networks. I don't dispute their claim that researchers are violating the terms of the publication contracts that both parties willingly agree to, but this argument... is just... untrue.

The most appalling part of this false claim is that currently, right now, Major Label Publishers are working with libraries to create a new model of academic publishing, where costs are paid up front and all content is open access, for an ENTIRE academic field (High-Energy Physics). 

So, what library will continue to subscribe if articles are available for free? Here's a list. 

Maybe its time we stop talking about "subscriptions" and start talking about "access," open or otherwise. It's clear that libraries are committed to supporting the research ecosystem, if it turns out to be a fair and beneficial system for researchers - the content providers/users, libraries - the curators and organizers, and publishers - the disseminators. 

[micahvandegrift]

Huh. Glad they did this... but... huh... Bad Religion playing "O Come, O Come Emmanual"?

[micahvandegrift]

#alt-LIS

Want a preview of the crux of my webinar tomorrow? I propose that we blend R. David Lankes' "New Librarianship" definition with Bethany Nowviskie's #alt-ac (alternative academic) to define our New Roles for these New Times. 

I give you - #alt-LIS (v0.1):

a broad set of information-oriented professions, in which there are new opportunities to improve our communities through knowledge creation and application of principles of information access, [re]use and a DIY ethic.

[micahvandegrift]

"The core problem here is the donation of copyright in academic works to publishers who then exploit them to earn every possible penny of profit. Scholarship suffers due to the greed of these publishers."

Kevin Smith, Duke's Scholarly Communication Officer, on the GA State case.