William Denton William Denton Miskatonic University Press RMS back at the FSF I became an associate member of the Free Software Foundation about six years ago and gave it a monthly donation to support its work. It was founded by Richard Stallman (known as RMS), who among other achievements created Emacs in the 1970s. I use it every day. In September 2019 RMS made offensive comments connected to Jeffrey Epstein and donations to MIT (see MIT scientist resigns over emails discussing academic linked to Epstein in the Guardian for some details). Like many others, I told the FSF I would stop my donations if RMS didn’t leave. I got a quick response—the same day the whole thing happened, I think—saying he was gone. Good. I continued my donations. I understood people were working to improve the environment at the FSF, but didn’t know any details. On Sunday at the Libre Planet 2021 conference there was a surprise announcement from RMS that he was back on the FSF board. (“No LibrePlanet organizers (staff or volunteer), speakers, award winners, exhibitors, or sponsors were made aware of Richard Stallman’s announcement until it was public,” tweeted @fsf.) I was amazed and appalled. It’s unbelievable the board did this and, once it was done, that the FSF handled it so badly. I emailed the FSF to cancel my monthly donation immediately. I haven’t heard back yet. I imagine the poor staff are overwhelmed. Even if RMS is kicked off yet again, the only way I might possibly one day support the FSF is if its governance is completely overhauled. Today I signed the open letter demanding the entire FSF board resign. I see some people I know on the list, and I hope others will join. Tomorrow I’ll start donating to the Software Freedom Conservancy. Vexation After Vexation STAPLR is running a new composition: “Vexation After Vexation,” an interpretation of Erik Satie’s mysterious solo piano work Vexations. You can listen to STAPLR on the site or right here: Your browser does not support embedded audio. Shame! I ran “Library Silences” for months and months—it seemed appropriate—but now it’s time for something different. (York University Libraries Ambiences are always available for home listening.) Photo from Wikipedia The score of Vexations fits on one page, but instructions say (translated from French), “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” The piece was ignored until John Cage took it, and the suggestion about 840 repetitions, seriously and organized a performance in 1963 where it was actually played 840 times. (This has been done many times since. In 2010 during Nuit Blanche I watched a performance downtown for quite a while. It was beautiful. If you want to hear it yourself by a real pianist, I recommend buying Stephane Ginsburgh’s 42 Vexations (1893) and making a playlist where the one track is played twenty times.) One of many Nuit Blanche pianists In this STAPLR composition, one one-minute iteration of Vexations is played for each minute of help given at any desk at York University Libraries that day. It keeps a running counter of how many more minutes it should play. Let’s say that at 0900 someone checks their email and answers a quick research question that takes them five minutes. They enter that into our reference statistics system, where STAPLR sees it and counts 5. It starts to play five iterations. One minute later, the counter is at 4. One minute later, the counter goes down to 3, but there’s another question in the system, this time a virtual chat that took 10 minutes to answer, so the counter goes up to 13. After one iteration it goes down to 12, then 11, then up again if there’s another question. If the counter reaches 0 it will wait and start back up when there’s another question answered. STAPLR screenshot This is how it began this morning: [2021-02-23 07:57:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (0 mins) [2021-02-23 07:58:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (0 mins) [2021-02-23 07:59:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {"AskUs"=>{"1"=>[3]}} (3 mins) [2021-02-23 08:00:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (2 mins) [2021-02-23 08:01:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {"AskUs"=>{"1"=>[3]}} (4 mins) [2021-02-23 08:02:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (3 mins) [2021-02-23 08:03:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (2 mins) [2021-02-23 08:04:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (1 mins) [2021-02-23 08:05:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {"AskUs"=>{"1"=>[3]}} (3 mins) [2021-02-23 08:06:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (2 mins) [2021-02-23 08:07:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (1 mins) [2021-02-23 08:08:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (0 mins) [2021-02-23 08:09:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {} (0 mins) Close to 1000 it really got going: [2021-02-23 09:53:40] Vexation After Vexation 1.0: {"Osgoode"=>{"4"=>[40]}} (40 mins) That ran down for 13 minutes then more activity came in and it’s been going ever since. I’m curious to see when it stops. (The server reboots around 0600, but it could run all night.) Vexations has a bass theme played in the left hand and two sections (the second a slight variation of the first) played by the right hand accompanied by the bass theme on the left. It’s usually played thus: bass theme alone, theme A, bass theme alone, theme B, repeat. There are 13 quarter-notes in each section, so setting the speed to 52 bpm makes it work out at exactly one minute per repetition. This is faster than it’s normally played, but it still works well. “Vexation After Vexation” doesn’t tell you how busy the desks at York University Libraries are right now, the way other STAPLR sonifications do, but I think it perfectly combines Satie and STAPLR. I’m looking forward to listening to it through to the end of April, at least. Press play, turn the volume low, and let it go in the background through your day as a piece of aural furniture. Spade and Archive The Mystery House: How a San Francisco Mason Solved a Real Estate Mystery—and a Literary Secret, from the noir issue of California Freemason (!) is about Bill Arney, who lived in apartment 401 at 891 Post Street in San Francisco: the apartment where Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon and the model for detective Sam Spade’s apartment in the book. I’ve been in that apartment! In February 2008 I went to a meeting hosted by the Internet Archive about planning the Open Library. I was out in San Francisco for two days. The first was the meeting, at the Presidio where the Archive then was. That was the day I saw Aaron Swartz, though I never talked to him. He committed suicide just under five years later. I did talk to Brewster Kahle, who happily is still with the Archive and still pushing the limits of access to knowledge. Here’s a blurry photo with Swartz on the left and Kahle on the right: Aaron Swartz and Brewster Kahle The room was full of leading library technologists of the time, generally from the Code4Lib world. I was out of my depth and don’t remember contributing anything, but I was damned glad to be there. It was a mind-blowing day (not just the ideas floating around, but seeing the IA’s servers, for example) and then a memorable evening after. The Dashiell Hammett Tour cover The next day Don Herron generously gave me a solo Dashiell Hammett tour. He knows Arney and when we got near he called to see if we could come up to see the apartment. We could. I went into Dashiell Hammett’s apartment! This was Sam Spade’s place! And that was just one part of the tour. Herron knows Hammett’s San Francisco like the back of his hand, and he showed me where various stories had been set, where Miles Archer was shot, and many other places, as well as covering a lot of city history. He does an incredible job, and if you’re ever in San Francisco, I highly recommend the tour. Read some Hammett beforehand if you haven’t, but even if you’re not a great fan, it’s a perfect combination of guide and subjects that makes a great introduction to the city. What a city. I packed in hours more walking that day, including City Lights and later drinks at the Top of the Mark. Those two days in San Francisco was the best short trip I’ve ever had. No more tracking Today I upgraded to the latest version of Matomo (moving up from an older version from when it was called Piwik): that’s the open, non-proprietary self-controlled more private equivalent of Google Analytics. The upgrade had been on my to do list for over a year. It didn’t take long, even with the renaming, which meant I needed to change some URLs in Javascript footers that put a tracker on every page. I got it all working and looked at the fresh Matomo interface. It tells me: not many people look at my web site; the three most popular pages are an out of date post from 2012 (Counting and aggregating in R), Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang and this list of definitions and principles from Ranganathan’s Prolegomena to Library Classification; and Freedom of information request for York University eresource costs completed has had over 400 views since posted two weeks ago, which is very nice to see. Screenshot of Matomo report on this site I hadn’t looked at the stats in over a year. I don’t use them. I don’t need them. Why am I tracking users on my site anyway? There is no reason. Becky Yoose and other experts would ask me: Why are you recording personal information you’re not using? So I turned it off. I went even further: I disabled logging on the web server. I added a privacy statement to the sidebar: “Zero logging: As of 23 June 2020, no tracking is done on this web site and no logs are kept. I know absolutely nothing about how the site is used.” I also turned off logging on Listening to Art (which I didn’t even know I’d set up: I thought it was like GHG.EARTH and STAPLR, where there’s no tracking). Matomo is an excellent application! It’s under the GPL, the code is on GitHub, it’s easy to install and use … I like everything about it. I just don’t need it. (And now I don’t have to ever upgrade it again.) Zero logging is punk. Freedom of information request for York University eresource costs completed Abstract The data I requested in March 2018 through provincial freedom of information legislation was supplied last month, and the costs paid by York University Libraries for electronic resources in fiscal years 2017 and 2018 are now public: York University Libraries eresource costs (DOI: 10.5683/SP2/K1XCLU). There are three files: the data (extracted by me; available as CSV or in other formats; it is not complete, there are some redactions in what I was given), an R Markdown file with a basic R script to do some simple analysis, and the PDF released to me by York that is the responsive record. Librarian Bill prepared the data that was released to Civilian Bill, who turned it into a more usable form and gave it back to Librarian Bill to post in York University’s official data repository. Both of us are pleased that this can be added to the list of York University librarian and archivist research outputs, and that it stands as an example of York University Libraries’ commitment to open data. Background I first wrote about this on 22 August 2018, in Freedom of information request for York University eresource costs denied. I’m a librarian at York University Libraries in Toronto. Let’s call me Librarian Bill when I’m there. At home I’m Civilian Bill, and last month Civilian Bill put in a freedom of information request to York University for the amounts the Libraries spent on electronic resources in fiscal years 2017 and 2018. Civilian Bill knew the information exists because Librarian Bill prepared a spreadsheet with precisely those costs. York has refused to release the data. Their response is “withhold in full.” I made this request under Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) because I was inspired by Jane Schmidt’s talk Innovate this! Bullshit in Academic Libraries and What We Can Do About It. She said: My challenge to all of you here today is to go back to your libraries and start shining a light into the deep recesses of the databases you use…. Do you know how much your library spends on the products you use every day? Are you able to speak confidently on how those prices have fluctuated over time and why they have? If something doesn’t work the way that we think it should or as it is advertised, why is an increase in price—no matter how modest—a given? These are all questions that we need to start asking more consistently. Also, thank you, Simon Fraser University and University of Alberta, for taking the lead on sharing your expenditure data. In July Civilian Bill filed my request. It was denied. Civilian Bill appealed and eventually won. As reported on 14 March 2019 in Freedom of information appeal for York University eresource costs successful: Seven months later Civilian Bill and Librarian Bill am very happy to report the data will be released. York University said in their response: As a result of mediation with [the mediator] at the Information and Privacy Commission York University would like to suggest a possible resolution to Appeal PA-18-403. York University is committing the resources necessary to schedule the release of this information with a goal of April 30, 2020 for the completion of this project. It is hoped that this will resolve the appeal. I marked 30 April 2020 in my calendar. The deadline approaches Summer and fall of 2019 came and went … the days grew short … winter began … then the days began to lengthen. By February the change was really noticeable. My mood brightened. Spring would be here soon. Finally! And with spring would come the FIPPA response. I waited quietly. Would it happen? It? The final absurd irony? On 04 March 2020 I received an official email from Patti Ryan, director of Content Development and Analysis (my department, called CDA), working through channels. The email said in part: I am writing to request your help with doing a final check of the eResources cost data for F2017 and F2018 in order to prepare for their release to the privacy office. Recall that this has been requested from the DLO [Dean of Libraries’ Office] in connection with a freedom of information request, but is also part of CDA’s workplan. Yes! It happened! Librarian Bill was being asked to prepare the data for release to Civilian Bill! We was overjoyed. If you ever meet one of the Bills in person, let him tell you about this, because I love talking about it. I responded immediately to confirm that of course I would work on this. This is provincial legislation we’re talking about! And open data! I was pleased to see the work fitted with Goal 1 of the Libraries’ 2016–2020 strategic plan: “Advance the University Community’s Evolving Engagement with Open Scholarship.” It’s great when something you really believe in is part of your institution’s strategic plan. By early April Librarian Bill finished up a new spreadsheet containing all the data. I was directed to compare the data to the University of Alberta Libraries cost release to double check anything redacted there but not in what I had prepared. The eresources librarian, Aaron Lupton, checked any final missing non-disclosure details with vendors. With all that done, I handed it back through channels and waited. The deadline passes The end of April arrived. May began. May continued. I waited. Nothing. On 11 May Civilian Bill emailed York’s Information and Privacy Office to ask about the status of the release. That email never arrived, but Librarian Bill followed up on 19 May and got a quick response saying the release had been posted earlier in the month, but mail delivery is slow and we could have a PDF by email. I waited over the weekend to see if the envelope would arrive, but it didn’t. On 26 May the response was supplied as a PDF. The envelope has still not arrived in the post. The responsive record This is the PDF I got: Cost_release_data_F2017_F2018.pdf. Here is the first page. Page 1 of the PDF Civilian Bill was very pleased! To Librarian Bill this was nothing new, of course. Having this PDF made my work a lot easier, because it’s a live PDF with structured data in side it, not just a static image. Whoever got the spreadsheet I had prepared had turned it into a PDF, and all the columns and rows and cells were still in it. The printed version of this PDF on paper would have required a lot of tedious work scanning and OCRing and cleaning. Of course, you might ask, Why didn’t they send the spreadsheet? Well, they have their processes in the Information and Privacy Office, and if they deal with PDFs, fair enough. The real question is: Why didn’t York University Libraries release this data back in 2017? I had a PDF containing easily extracted data, which was going to save me a lot of time, and I would work with it. Starting to extract the data I thought that pdf2txt would be the easiest way to get the data out. I’d used it before (so I thought) and it had worked well (so I thought). It’s part of the PDFMiner project, but after a bunch of fiddling I couldn’t get beyond it dumping all the data out in one mixed-up column, which was no good. Doing it manually seemed to be the only way. I hoped I could copy and paste column by column from the PDF into a file, but that got messed up on most pages because there were some cells with line breaks that made the selection veer over into the next column right. For example, here I’m selecting the F2017 column (second from right) from the bottom up. All fine so far. Selecting text in a column But when I get to the line where the title is on two lines inside its cell, the F2018 column (far right) starts getting picked up instead. Selection moves into the wrong column Every time this happened I had to treat the row specially. On some the pages this meant a fair bit of fiddly work. I got six pages done one day then put it aside. (I was doing all this in Emacs and Org, which made the work quick, but wait until you see what happened next.) The day after next I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, “I should use pdf2txt to pull the data out.” Then I remembered I’d tried it and it hadn’t worked. But something wasn’t right. I knew I’d extracted data from PDFs where the page structure was maintained. Aha! That was with pdftotext, an entirely different program, that is part of Poppler! Yes, it is confusing. I hope no one writes pdf2text or pdftotxt. pdftotext comes with a -layout option: Maintain (as best as possible) the original physical layout of the text. The default is to ´undo’ physical layout (columns, hyphenation, etc.) and output the text in reading order. Here’s what it looks like. Skip past the header and notice in the first attempt there’s just one column of output, while in the second there is structure. (I cleaned up spacing to make it more readable.) $ pdftotext Cost_release_data_F2017_F2018.pdf $ head Cost_release_data_F2017_F2018.txt These costs include all e-resources purchased by and licensed to York University Libraries (YUL) for the fiscal periods (May to April) for the years indicated. Costs indicated are in Canadian dollars paid at time invoice was processed by YUL. Costs are exclusive of taxes. Where cost information is indicated as “Redacted” for a product, this indicates that a non-disclosure clause prohibits release of cost information. Where cost information is indicated as “NA”, no costs were incurred for the fiscal year period. vendor (miscellaneous) ACM Adam Matthew Digital Adam Matthew Digital Adam Matthew Digital $ pdftotext -layout Cost_release_data_F2017_F2018.pdf $ head Cost_release_data_F2017_F2018.txt These costs include all e-resources purchased by and licensed to York University Libraries (YUL) for the fiscal periods (May to April) for the years indicated. Costs indicated are in Canadian dollars paid at time invoice was processed by YUL. Costs are exclusive of taxes. Where cost information is indicated as “Redacted” for a product, this indicates that a non-disclosure clause prohibits release of cost information. Where cost information is indicated as “NA”, no costs were incurred for the fiscal year period. vendor title 2016-2017 2017-2018 (miscellaneous) Open Access NA 43187 ACM ACM Digital Library 5780 6017 Adam Matthew Digital American Consumer Culture REDACTED REDACTED Now I had a text file with ragged but more or less even columns of data. Emacs and Org make it easy I’ve often written about how much I like the text editor Emacs and within it Org mode. (My Emacs configuration files are available if you want to see the details.) Whenever I’m dealing with text, I use Emacs. If that text (including numbers) is structured as a table, I use Org. Its table editor looks confusing in the documentation, but simple use is a lot easier than it looks, and it’s very powerful and really helpful. In this case, the best thing about the tables (think: spreadsheets) is that it marks the columns with the pipe symbol (“|”) and if you enter them ragged it will align them to fit. If you start with |col_one|col_two |101|202 |808|1000309 And then hit TAB or Ctrl-c, it’ll instantly make it look like this: | col_one | col_two | | 101 | 202 | | 808 | 1000309 | With the output from pdftotext, I had one text file with fourteen sections (one per original page) of somewhat ragged columns of data. I used the Emacs rectangle commands to add columns of pipe symbols into the raw text, then copy the block of ragged text into an Org table, where it would be nicely formatted automatically. Here’s what it looks like to start. Emacs screenshot 1: raw text Here I’ve added four columns of pipes (using C-x <SPC> to go into rectangle mark mode, which is super cool). They don’t all line up, but that’s OK. Emacs screenshot 1: raw text Here I paste all that into an Org file. There’s a blank line between this and the nice-looking table above. Emacs screenshot 1: raw text I remove the blank line, hit TAB, and it all aligns. Emacs screenshot 1: raw text Beautiful! Then I use M-x org-table-export to write all that to a CSV file. This is more Emacs information than most people need, but I want to show how powerful it is, and that a multipurpose tool like this can make life easier. Dataverse Now that the data was extracted, where should it go? Somewhere reliable … somewhere the data would be available forever, or close enough … somewhere not commercial … somewhere affiliated with York. The answer: the Scholars Portal Dataverse. Depositing your data explains how York researchers can use Dataverse. As it happens, the librarian in charge of York’s Dataverse has her office across from me in the library (back when we were in our offices). Minglu Wang asked a couple of questions and then set me up and sent me a long list of great resources about good data practices. She’s an expert on research data management and I strongly recommend anyone at York with data to preserve get in touch with her. Librarian Bill now have my own dataverse and within it is the “Eresource costs” dataverse at the nice URL https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/eres. Some analysis There’s an R Markdown file in the Dataverse that you can load into RStudio or the like, or you can just copy and paste the lines into an R session. (I do my R sessions inside Emacs with ESS and Org, which you probably predicted.) Here’s some of what it has. First, load in the tidyverse (install it if it’s not already there). ## install.packages("tidyverse") library(tidyverse) Now get the data right out of Dataverse (skipping the step where you have to click to agree to abide by the CC BY license, because I haven’t found out how to turn it off): ## Get the data from the CSV. raw_costs <- read_csv("https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/api/access/datafile/105969?format=original") ## Turn it into a better (longer) data structure. ## Replace all NAs with 0s while we're at it. costs <- raw_costs %>% pivot_longer(c("F2017", "F2018"), names_to = "year", values_to = "cost") %>% replace_na(list(cost = 0)) ## Pick out all the products where the cost is known. costs_known <- costs %>% filter(! cost == "REDACTED") %>% mutate(cost = as.numeric(cost)) This takes the “wide” format of the original data and makes it “long” and tidy. Notice how instead of “F2017” and “F2018” columns there’s one column with “year” that has the values of either 2017 or 2018. ℝ> costs # A tibble: 1,722 x 4 vendor title year cost <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> 1 (miscellaneous) Open Access F2017 0 2 (miscellaneous) Open Access F2018 43187 3 ACM ACM Digital Library F2017 5780 4 ACM ACM Digital Library F2018 6017 5 Adam Matthew Digital American Consumer Culture F2017 REDACTED 6 Adam Matthew Digital American Consumer Culture F2018 REDACTED 7 Adam Matthew Digital American History I F2017 114 8 Adam Matthew Digital American History I F2018 122 9 Adam Matthew Digital American Indian Histories and Cultures F2017 98 10 Adam Matthew Digital American Indian Histories and Cultures F2018 105 With this in hand, we can make a chart showing the vendors paid over $100,000 (Canadian). ## Short list of vendors where YUL spent the most. major_amount <- 100000 major_amount_pretty <- format(major_amount, big.mark = ",", scientific = FALSE) major_vendors <- total_vendor_costs %>% filter(total > major_amount) %>% pull(vendor) %>% unique() major_vendor_costs <- total_vendor_costs %>% filter(vendor %in% major_vendors) ## The reorder function sorts the vendor list by total costs, which ## makes the chart much more readable. ## coord_flip() helps make this kind of chart more readable. major_vendor_costs %>% ggplot(aes(x = reorder(vendor, total), y = total / 1000, fill = year)) + geom_col(position = "dodge") + geom_label(aes(label = round(total / 1000, -1)), position = position_dodge(0.9), show.legend = FALSE) + coord_flip() + labs(title = paste0("York University Libraries eresource costs: vendors paid over $", major_amount_pretty, " total"), subtitle = "Does not include all costs because some were redacted", x = "", y = "$000 (rounded)", fill = "", caption = "William Denton <wdenton@yorku.ca>, CC BY") + theme_minimal() Chart showing total amount spent on major vendors In F2018 we know the Libraries paid Elsevier about $1.57 million. And that’s not including the sixteen products where the prices were redacted! The most expensive product was ScienceDirect—no surprise—at about $1.4 million. The Elsevier F2018 annual report says it had an “adjusted operating profit margin” of 31.3% that year—yes, 31.3%—so of that $1.57 million that we know, $491,000 was pure profit for the company. The Libraries’ collections budget is (in this fiscal year) on the order of $13 million. That means close to 4% of the collections budget goes straight to Elsevier profit. This is an example of a major issue in scholarly publishing. See SPARC’s Big Deal Cancellation Tracking for more about all this. Here’s a chart counting redactions by vendor: costs_redacted <- costs %>% filter(cost == "REDACTED") costs_redacted %>% count(vendor, year) %>% ggplot(aes(x = reorder(vendor, n), y = n, fill = year)) + geom_col(position = "dodge") + coord_flip() + labs(title = "York University Libraries eresource costs: vendors with redacted costs", subtitle = "Count of products where costs were redacted because of vendor license restrictions", x = "", y = "$000", fill = "", caption = "William Denton <wdenton@yorku.ca>, CC BY") + theme_minimal() Chart counting redactions per vendor Why the redactions? Because I thought it would make things go faster to ask for costs where there was no non-disclosure agreement. It didn’t. Along the way I learned that FIPPA doesn’t care about non-disclosure agreements in contracts. But my original request was for costs that didn’t have an NDA, and I let it ride. What next? I’m going to file for the eresource costs for F2019 and F2020, of course. With no redactions. LibGuides There’s that great old quote from Jamie Zawinski (though there’s more behind it): Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. I paraphase: Some librarians, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll make a LibGuide.” Now they have two problems. Associate dean job open at York University York University Libraries, where I work, is hiring an associate dean of the Research and Open Scholarship division. YUL moved into a new organizational structure in the summer of 2018. There are three divisions, each overseen by an associate dean (AD). The Restructuring Progress Update – Sep 26 explains a bit about Research and Open Scholarship, which is where this AD is needed. (The person who had held that role for a long time left to become a chief librarian at another university; someone internal filled the role for two or three years but then stepped down and the role is now vacant.) God is an Astronaut in performance. (Now, I should say we began to move into a new structure in 2018, because it’s not all done yet. The librarians and archivists have moved and by and large are settled into new roles, though there are a number of unresolved issues. The restructuring is still an item on the agenda of the regular meetings between YUFA (our union) and the Employer. For more about library reorgs, see my post Navigating the Reorganization about an October conference on the subject.) This division contains Content Development and Analysis (where I am; this department manages the $13 million collections budget), Open Scholarship, Archives and Special Collections and Content Development and Acquisitions (the acquisitions department, which has about a dozen people, but no web presence). Warning sign on compact shelving: Crushing hazard The ad says: York University Libraries (YUL) is seeking an experienced leader for the Associate Dean, Research & Open Scholarship position. The position will be attractive to individuals who understand the evolving role of the research library, have a strong understanding of research culture, scholarly communications, content and unique collections, and are adept at championing the Libraries. Qualifications include: A successful record of leadership, planning, developing and managing library programs and services and leading staff through change gained through at least five years of experience in library management positions. There’s no closing date in the ad because the search will be open until it’s filled, but it looks like they’ll start reviewing applications in the second week of January. No associate dean job is easy. Whoever takes this job will face many of the same problems as at other academic libraries. On the other hand, York University is (aside from the strikes) a fine place to work. I really like being there: the students are smart and engaged, the faculty are doing interesting research, the salary and benefits are good, and it’s coming up on two years since we got a subway station. On the third hand, there are (as you’d expect) some things about the job that are unique to York University Libraries. I’m not on the search committee. If anyone is considering applying, or gets asked for an interview, I’m happy to take a phone call and answer questions. See also Interviewing at York University Libraries for a general idea of how the day will probably go; however, this is not a regular position so various things during the day will be different. We need an associate dean, and I hope we get a really good one. Spread the word. Whip Radio I’ve been listening to more streaming radio recently, thanks to Resonance FM and Radio Aporee combined with a wish just to hear some good old radio even though my tuner died years ago and CBC Radio isn’t good any more. It’s a bit of a pain to bookmark stations in a browser, though, and I use NoScript so the players never work without a bit of fiddling anyway. So I started to make a list of the URLs of the actual music streams, which are hidden in the web pages. If you know what to do you can use that URL to play the station without running a browser. Once I had a few of them I realized I should make a list, and the list turned into a script: Whip Radio. If you’re comfortable with a command line, you might like it. Screenshot of Whip Radio The source code is on GitHub: Whip Radio. It suits me, because I know what the stations are, but there are some improvements to be made, and I’ll do what I can. If it’s useful to anyone else, have at it. If you’ve never heard Radio Aporee, do try it. It’s “a responsive stream of sound, a topographic radio that listens, that may (or may not…) recognise and react to events, e.g. new sound uploads, listeners tuning in, mobile app activity, live sessions, phone calls etc. it’s an ongoing experiment and exploration of affective geographies and new practices related to sound/art and radio.” A few minutes after you start listening you’ll probably hear a robot say someone in your area has started listening, and it’ll play a recording made near you. Mapping the Indian Residential School Locations Dataset My colleague Rosa Orlandini’s Residential School Locations Project was used in a workshop today as an example of best practices in making data openly available. It is one result of her sabbatical work last year, which I couldn’t hope to summarize properly, but the metadata explains more about it, the Wikipedia article Canadian Indian residential school system gives background, and you can email her for more. When I looked at the data and saw Indian Residential School Locations Dataset (CSV Format) I loaded it up into R and made a quick map. (If you try to get the data by hand it makes you agree to terms and conditions even though it’s CC-BY, which I’ll report, but I found that if you link directly to the CSV there’s no problem.) library(tidyverse) library(maps) ca_map <- map_data(map = "world") %>% filter(region == "Canada") read_csv("https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/api/access/datafile/75625?format=original&gbrecs=true") %>% ggplot() + geom_polygon(data = ca_map, aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group), fill = NA, colour = "black") + coord_map(projection = "gilbert") + geom_point(data = irs_locations, aes(x = Longitude, y = Latitude)) + labs(title = "Indian Residential Schools Location Dataset", subtitle = "Data provided by Rosa Orlandini (https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/RIYEMU) (CC-BY)", caption = "William Denton (CC-BY)", x = "", y = "") Map of Indian Residential Schools It’s hard to see some of the dots, and there are factors in the data that would be useful to show, like religious affiliations of the schools, but as a first look it’s a decent start. Library eresource vendor policies Where I work, at York University Libraries, we’ve got a new web page up: vendor policies. It’s a big long list of everyone electronic resource that we subscribe to, with links (where known) to the vendor’s privacy policy and terms and conditions of use, and a note about whether account creation is optional or mandatory. The data was collected by Stephanie Power and is available on GitHub under a CC-0 license. Screenshot of web page There’s also a little script that generates the long HTML list, suitable for pasting into a content management system. The list isn’t pretty, but our goal was first to build a complete list so that all of these policies that affect our users are in one place. That’s done. Our second goal is to tell other libraries about it. Perhaps this list is useful elsewhere, particularly in Ontario, where the academic libraries share a lot of online resources? Right now it’s a list of what York has, and for other libraries to use it we’d need to figure out a way of listing who has access to what, but maybe that’s just a matter of adding a column to the CSV. If anyone’s interested in using the data or has ideas about improving it, please email me at wdenton@yorku.ca. Freedom of information appeal for York University eresource costs successful Last August I wrote Freedom of information request for York University eresource costs denied: I’m a librarian at York University Libraries in Toronto. Let’s call me Librarian Bill when I’m there. At home I’m Civilian Bill, and last month Civilian Bill put in a freedom of information request to York University for the amounts the Libraries spent on electronic resources in fiscal years 2017 and 2018. Civilian Bill knew the information exists because Librarian Bill prepared a spreadsheet with precisely those costs. York has refused to release the data. Their response is “withhold in full.” Civilian Bill appealed. Seven months later Civilian Bill and Librarian Bill am very happy to report the data will be released. My appeal was handled the by same mediator who had my request for communications between the chairs of York’s Senate and Board of Governors, which made me happy. She was excellent: helpful, informative, quick to act, expert on all aspects of the legislation and a fine example of the civil service at its best. If you’re in Ontario and have an idea for a freedom of information request but are worried things are stacked against you, don’t be. My mediator—I assume they’re all equally good—was everything I’d hoped for. Last fall I had a number of phone conversations with the mediator, and she in turn talked to York quite a bit. The mediator said (I paraphrase—any misunderstandings are mine) that the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) didn’t recognize non-disclosure agreements, so that part of its argument didn’t hold up. The adjudicator might look favourably on my request … but it would take two or three years to get to adjudication because there’s a big backlog. It emerged that the problem, from York’s point of view, was that the information about NDAs in the big list of eresources I’d help create was unverified. My impression was that York thought it needed to be reviewed and double-checked. At least that was a potentially justifiable reason, unlike the unexplained blanket “denied in full” that was the initial response. We were at an impasse. Mediation was unsuccessful. York wasn’t going to release the data. I informed the mediator I wanted to go to adjudication. Soon after that I got a call from the mediator saying I should expect a letter from York. This is what it said: York's first response As a result of mediation with [the mediator] at the Information and Privacy Commission York University would like to suggest as a possible resolution to Appeal PA-18-403 a schedule for the release of the costs you have requested. York University would be able to commit the resources necessary to schedule the release of this information by, or in advance of, April 30, 2020. That was a surprise! But “would be able to commit the resources necessary” was too vague. I “would be able to commit” to bringing my lunch to work every day for a month but that doesn’t mean I’m actually going to do it. The mediator followed up with York, and last week I got this: York's second response As a result of mediation with [the mediator] at the Information and Privacy Commission York University would like to suggest a possible resolution to Appeal PA-18-403. York University is committing the resources necessary to schedule the release of this information with a goal of April 30, 2020 for the completion of this project. It is hoped that this will resolve the appeal. Is committing the resources necessary. That satisfied me. I talked to the mediator one last time and said I was now willing to drop the appeal. She immediately did her report, which says in part: Mediator's report DECISION: The university issued a decision denying access to the responsive records pursuant to sections 17 and 18 of the Act. APPEAL: The requester, now appellant, appealed the university’s decision. RESULTS OF MEDIATION: During mediation, the mediator had discussions with the appellant and the university. The mediator provided the appellant with information about the exemptions applied to the records at issue. The appellant clarified that he is not seeking access to the costs of resources that have been protected under a non disclosure agreement with the university. In regards to the remainder of the resources, the appellant further narrowed the request to include only the name of each publication and total cost per year for 2017 and 2018. The appellant also advised that he is aware of one document in the possession of the university that he believed contained the information that he is seeking relating to this narrowed request. The university located the document that the appellant was seeking access to and stated that it is not prepared to release it due to economic and other interests. The university then answered some of the appellant’s questions and sent him a letter confirming its commitment to schedule the release of the information at issue in this appeal with a goal of April 2020 for the completion of the project. The appellant advised that he is satisfied with the university’s response and wishes to withdraw his appeal. Accordingly, this appeal has been closed. What made York change its mind? I don’t know. There were two bodies involved: the Information and Privacy Officer and the Libraries. I assume the two were able to work together to arrive at this result. I have no idea. No one in the Libraries has told me anything about my appeal—not brought it up in conversation, not so much as alluded to it. Now, this data is going to be released to me personally. Whatever I get, I’ll make it public, but of course my goal is for York to release this information itself, in a good data set, like other universities do. If York can give me the information, it seems to me there’s nothing preventing it from doing a proper full release. And I hope that with F2017 and F2018 done there will be nothing to prevent York from releasing F2019 and onwards, because each year we only add a few handfuls of new eresources and their license agreements will be easy to check. This all began “early in 2017 [when] Librarian Bill was part of a group at York University Libraries that resolved to make public the costs YUL spent on electronic resources.” That didn’t happen, so in 2018 Civilian Bill filed a FIPPA request, was denied, and appealed. In 2019 a satisfactory plan was proposed for releasing the data; as a result the appeal was dropped. Civilian Bill should have the data in early 2020. When he does, both Civilian Bill and Librarian Bill will be happy. I’ll finish with Article 10.01 from the York University Faculty Association collective agreement, where academic freedom is defined: The parties agree to continue their practice of upholding, protecting, and promoting academic freedom as essential to the pursuit of truth and the fulfilment of the University’s objectives. Academic freedom includes the freedom of an employee to examine, question, teach, and learn; to disseminate his/her opinion(s) on any questions related to his/her teaching, professional activities, and research both inside and outside the classroom; to pursue without interference or reprisal, and consistent with the time constraints imposed by his/her other University duties, his/her research, creative or professional activities, and to freely publish and make public the results thereof; to criticize the University or society at large; and to be free from institutional censorship. Academic freedom does not require neutrality on the part of the individual, nor does it preclude commitment on the part of the individual. Rather, academic freedom makes such commitment possible. I’m privileged to have academic freedom and I’m happy to use it. Phasers on Satie I’m running “Phasers on Satie (Long Phase)” on STAPLR for a while. It uses the left-hand riff from Vexations by Erik Satie, normalized so all the notes are the same length. There are eighteen notes, and it’s running at 54 beats per minute, so it plays three times a minute. Every time there’s an interaction at one of the York University Libraries desks, the piece begins to play for as many minutes as the interaction was long, but after the first time the riff is played it starts to go out of phase, and gets a little more behind every repetition. The phase length is such that the first note is just about to run into the second note by the time the repetitions are done, but it stops one repetition before that happens. Because the interactions at the desks start at different times and last for different durations, many different types of patterns can crop up. The title is a tribute to the Canadian prog band FM and the late, great Nash the Slash. FM did “Phasors on Stun” on their first album, Black Noise. .bt-video-container iframe,.bt-video-container object,.bt-video-container embed{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;margin-top:0} Wanted: Media archivist at York We’re hiring four new people this spring at York University Libraries, where I work, and the first posting is up: media archivist. York University Libraries (YUL) seeks a dynamic and innovative individual with strong leadership potential to advance York University Libraries’ archival and special collections portfolio in support of the research community across campus and beyond in the area of media (film, sound recordings, audiovisual recordings and photography; in both digital and analogue form). This position is for an early or mid-career professional with some applied experience and/or expertise in the area of film and AV preservation. Everything I know about interviewing at York University Libraries I put on a web page: the informatively titled Interviewing at York University Libraries. Any archivists who might apply for the job should read that, and if they have any questions after, I’m glad to chat or to put them on to someone else. Hollinger boxes are important in archives A few things to note about the job ad. This position is for an early or mid-career professional … We used to advertise for people with “up to four years post-MLIS experience” or some such. Many people found this confusing and even thought it was age discrimination (which it isn’t). It was done because librarian and archivist salaries are calculated based on years-since-MLIS, and the most recent the graduate, the lower the salary (see my interviewing page for more). Budgets are always tight. Nevertheless, lately we’ve stopped being so restrictive and now specify a general level of experience. We hope this will mean a better pool of applicants. York University is an Affirmative Action (AA) employer and strongly values diversity, including gender and sexual diversity, within its community. We take this seriously. Our newly revised AA plan says, “The affirmative action target groups for the Libraries for the year and for the near future are: visible minorities, members of Aboriginal or Indigenous persons; and persons with disabilities. The Libraries actively seek to recruit and hire members of these groups to enrich the full-time staffing complement.” We mean it. If you’re an archivist who falls into one of those groups and think you might want to work at York, please apply and self-identify. If you know such a person, please tell them about this. Consideration will be given to those who have followed non-traditional career paths or had career interruptions. This was introduced into our ads a couple of years ago, and I’m happy to say I helped. If someone applying took some time out of their career to raise a child, look after someone, deal with an illness, or anything else causing a gap in their resume, they should mention it briefly, alluding to the line in the ad. Interviews will take place between 10-16 April 2019. This is good to know not only for anyone applying but also for us already working at YUL. Now I know when the job talks will be, so I marked that in my calendar so I can keep my mornings clear. The Wobblies on STAPLR I’m running “The Wobblies” on STAPLR this month. STAPLR (Sounds in Time Actively Performing Library Reference) is my sonification of activity at the reference and help desks at York University Libraries. Here’s a one-hour sample, heard starting at 1211 on Friday 01 February 2019. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio. Download the MP3 audio file if you like. STAPLR cover STAPLR uses Sonic Pi to make its sounds. The composition is named after The Wobblies because it randomly chooses between two Sonic Pi synths, :mod_dsaw and :mod_pulse, both of which sound wobbly. For the mapping of data to sound I ignore everything about the desk interaction except how long it took, which determines how long the sound is. Where it happened and what type of question it was are ignored. Right now it’s version 1.5 of “The Wobblies,” and I may change it through the month, but it’ll sound much the same. Bargaining Parity for Librarians and Archivists Last month the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), an association of academic faculty associations and unions, released Bargaining Parity for Librarians and Archivists, an eight-page bargaining advisory that covers all the major issues for academic librarians and archivists in collective agreements, with examples of good language from different contracts across the country. Here’s the announcement: One of the greatest barriers to librarians and archivists accessing their academic rights is their definitional separation from the rest of the academic staff. This bargaining advisory, also available on-line in the members’ only section of the CAUT website, reviews current collective agreement language related to librarian and archivist terms and conditions of employment, including language that promotes parity with faculty and reflects the needs of librarians and archivists. It will be of interest to any librarian or archivist involved in bargaining or revising collective agreements, and will be helpful to others who want to know more about these issues and how they affect us (especially professors on bargaining teams). Snippet from the start of the advisory. I am on the Librarians’ and Archivists’ Committee right now and helped write the advisory. It was a complex project and took a while, and I’m delighted it’s now out. Thanks to all the other committee members and the CAUT people involved. It’s a good committee, and CAUT does great work. CAUT doesn’t make its bargaining advisories publicly available because it doesn’t want employers to have access to the expertise it provides to unions. I understand that point, and I’m never going to out of my way to help management in labour negotiations, but I don’t think this advisory should be restricted this way. It’s the only thing I’ve written in my professional career that isn’t freely available online somewhere. Perhaps we’ll be able to change CAUT policy one day! Nevertheless the advisory is available to those who need it. Anyone in Canada who’s in an association or union that’s a CAUT member can get it on the web site (your union will have a username and password; just ask) and in the US I presume there’s a way to go through the AAUP to get it. Or just ask one of us on the committee. (Aussi disponsible en français.) Freedom of information request for York University eresource costs denied I’m a librarian at York University Libraries in Toronto. Let’s call me Librarian Bill when I’m there. At home I’m Civilian Bill, and last month Civilian Bill put in a freedom of information request to York University for the amounts the Libraries spent on electronic resources in fiscal years 2017 and 2018. Civilian Bill knew the information exists because Librarian Bill prepared a spreadsheet with precisely those costs. York has refused to release the data. Their response is “withhold in full.” Background: other eresource cost data releases Librarians generally believe that the costs their libraries pay for resources should be made public. Aside from people having the right to know where their money is going (in F2018 50% of York’s revenue came from students and 35% from the province), this is part of the move to making all publicly-funded research freely available online: one tactic is to show the exorbitant and increasing costs of closed subscriptions to journals and the like when it would actually be cheaper to make everything free and open. It’s always been normal for the total amount spent on collections to be public, but now more detailed information should be available: how much it costs to subscribe to JSTOR, PsycINFO, Nature, SciFinder and all the other hundreds of things that libraries pay for annually. In Canada a few libraries have been doing this for years: University of Alberta subscription expenditures, F2014–F2017. Simon Fraser University Library serials costs, F1991–F2017 (has more than just serials). Recently the big consortium of academic libraries, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), published Expenditures of CARL member libraries for scholarly resource subscriptions licensed through CRKN for 2016–2017. (CARL is the Canadian Association of Research Libraries.) It includes these costs paid by York: Product Cost (CAD) Cambridge Journals Online 93,173.17 MathSciNet and Consortium Database Fees 12,865.73 NRC Research Press Journals 14,862.00 Oxford Journals Online 126,483.41 RSC Electronic Journals 31,164.85 Sage Premier All-Access 228,521.38 ScienceDirect Freedom Collection 1,406,367.81 Scopus 156,766.50 Taylor & Francis Journals (SSH/S&T/Medical) 691,874.95 Web of Knowledge 19,671.56 Web of Science 134,903.21 Wiley Online Library 590,217.56 Releasing cost data is complicated by the way vendors sometimes put non-disclosure agreements in their contracts. Many don’t—often pricing is up on the vendor’s web site, especially, for example, for institutional subscriptions to things like The Journal of Something Defined Very Particularly where it’s $250 instead of $60 for an individual. Where vendors do prevent disclosure of costs, it’s so they can play libraries off against each other and not reveal that they gave a special deal to another place. This is one part of what helps major scholarly publishers have profit margins of 35% or more. York University subway station under construction York University Libraries plans to release cost data Early in 2017 Librarian Bill was part of a group at York University Libraries that resolved to make public the costs YUL spent on electronic resources. There was institutional support for this. The eresources librarian went through scores and scores of license agreements to figure out which had NDAs and which didn’t—this was pretty tedious work—and Librarian Bill matched those up with products and costs and made a spreadsheet that looked like this: t vendor consor publisher title nda F2017 i Elsevier CRKN   ScienceDirect NO 1406368 It had about 800 rows. The “t” column is the type, an internal code so we can distinguish between journals, data sources, etc. Publisher here is blank but sometimes we buy access to a title not from the (small) publisher but from a (larger) vendor and in such cases that’s recorded. The NO in the “nda” column means that there isn’t an NDA preventing us from releasing the costs. (Note: the cost given there is the CRKN cost rounded; this is already public.) This data was not released. In April of this year the fiscal year ended and in May Librarian Bill added the F2018 costs to the spreadsheet after the eresources librarian checked new licenses for NDAs. There was no progress on releasing this updated data. In fact there was no sign the data would ever be released. Bullshit Right around then Jane Schmidt (a librarian at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto) posted the text of Innovate this! Bullshit in Academic Libraries and What We Can Do About It, the talk she gave in May at the conference of the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians. In section 6, “We are terrible at business but spend a lot of money,” she says: In 2016/2017, the University of Alberta spent $7,289,007.31 on services and products from ProCLC and Ebquest. Sure, UofA is a heavy hitter when it comes to collections expenditure, but I am willing to bet that every single university library in Canada does business with these companies and pays a minimum of triple figures and upwards of millions in most cases. We tend to focus a lot of our outrage on the money spent with the big five publishers—which, don’t get me wrong—are a major problem, but in terms of the amount of contact our staff, students and researchers have with the tools, content and services provided by these aggregators, we really need to pay very close attention to how these products are actually working. We’ve been told by more than one of our vendor reps during these circuitous exchanges that they are surprised they don’t get more detailed questions from libraries. My challenge to all of you here today is to go back to your libraries and start shining a light into the deep recesses of the databases you use…. Do you know how much your library spends on the products you use every day? Are you able to speak confidently on how those prices have fluctuated over time and why they have? If something doesn’t work the way that we think it should or as it is advertised, why is an increase in price—no matter how modest—a given? These are all questions that we need to start asking more consistently. Also, thank you, Simon Fraser University and University of Alberta, for taking the lead on sharing your expenditure data. “She’s right,” Civilian Bill and Librarian Bill said to myselves. “Let’s make use of our rights under provincial legislation and try to get the data released through a FIPPA request.” My FIPPA request On 10 July 2018 Civilian Bill used the form on York’s Making an Access to Information Request page: I request the costs paid by York University Libraries for subscribed eresources in fiscal years 2017 and 2018. “Eresources” means electronic resources, which includes but is not limited to online journals, proprietary data sets, article indexes and databases, and multimedia streaming services (but not ebooks). I request not an aggregate sum but the individual costs paid for each product: JSTOR, PsycINFO, Books 24x7, Metal Music Studies, etc. Some costs will be protected under a nondisclosure agreement. For those I request that the product be listed but I understand it may not be possible to also include the price. As examples of what this data looks like, here are two Canadian university libraries that have released theirs: Alberta: https://doi.org/10.7939/DVN/10844 Simon Fraser: https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/overview/collections/serials-costs The Canadian Association of Research Libraries released costs paid by CRKN members, which includes York: http://dx.doi.org/10.20383/101.033 . This is where York gets access to large packages such as Elsevier’s ScienceDirect. This is just a small fraction of the total number of eresources York has, however. Preferred method of access is a spreadsheet (a printout will suffice). Civilian Bill had the advantage here of knowing this information was available and would take under an hour to pull because Librarian Bill had prepared the data and left instructions on how to generate a list of all eresource costs where there was no NDA. Civilian Bill was really hoping that Librarian Bill would be the one asked to look for the requested information, but he wasn’t. Lichen. York’s response On 24 July York sent a letter saying they had received Civilian Bill’s request on 17 July and that they had 30 days to respond. On 13 August they sent a letter (postmarked 17 August) which Civilian Bill received on 21 August. It said: A search for responsive records was conducted and four documents located. Access to these records is being denied under sections 17 and 18 of the Act. This is the index of the four responsive records: Withhold in full. It is correct: those four documents all contain the data. The last one, raw-cost-disclosure-f2017-f018, is the updated one Librarian Bill prepared with all the data prepped and ready to go. But for each of the four, the “decision to release” is “withhold in full.” Withhold in full! Two exemptions are cited from the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. F.31 as reasons not to supply the information. First, S. 17, Third party information, which says in part: 17 (1) A head shall refuse to disclose a record that reveals a trade secret or scientific, technical, commercial, financial or labour relations information, supplied in confidence implicitly or explicitly, where the disclosure could reasonably be expected to, (a) prejudice significantly the competitive position or interfere significantly with the contractual or other negotiations of a person, group of persons, or organization; (b) result in similar information no longer being supplied to the institution where it is in the public interest that similar information continue to be so supplied; (c) result in undue loss or gain to any person, group, committee or financial institution or agency. Second, S 18, Economic and other interests of Ontario, which says in part: 18 (1) A head may refuse to disclose a record that contains, (a) trade secrets or financial, commercial, scientific or technical information that belongs to the Government of Ontario or an institution and has monetary value or potential monetary value; (c) information where the disclosure could reasonably be expected to prejudice the economic interests of an institution or the competitive position of an institution; (d) information where the disclosure could reasonably be expected to be injurious to the financial interests of the Government of Ontario or the ability of the Government of Ontario to manage the economy of Ontario; (e) positions, plans, procedures, criteria or instructions to be applied to any negotiations carried on or to be carried on by or on behalf of an institution or the Government of Ontario. Civilian Bill and Librarian Bill leave it to the reader to think about whether those claimed exemptions are valid. Neither of us thinks they are. YUL’s support for democratizing scholarship Neither Civilian Bill nor Librarian Bill were expecting this. We figured we’d be told the responsive records could be released in part, with redactions where NDAs prevented the costs becoming public. There would be a small access fee, which Civilian Bill would pay, and then he would publish the data. Because it was now public, York University Libraries would release it properly, with Librarian Bill helping. The roadblock to open release, whatever it was, would have been overcome. But that didn’t happen. Part I of York University Library’s 2016–2020 strategic plan, the section titled “Transformative Knowledge Infrastructure and Scholarly Content,” says the Libraries will: Support the academic priorities of the University at the Glendon, Keele and Markham campuses through an intentional commitment to sustaining open access, democratizing scholarship, and developing a robust and responsive knowledge infrastructure that anticipates the evolving scholarly record. One of YUL’s values is “We believe in advancing the democratization of knowledge.” The actions do not match the words. Interviewing at York University Libraries Something new: Interviewing at York University Libraries is, as it says at the top, “everything I can think of about the hiring process for librarians and archivists at York University Libraries (YUL) that might be useful to someone interviewing for a job.” A couple of months ago an old friend got in touch because he knew someone who was up for a job at YUL and asked if I could give them the inside scoop on what happens at interviews. I was happy to do it, and told everything I could. Then I got to thinking about the other candidates (their names had been posted internally) and thought to be fair I should see if they wanted any tips. However, I wasn’t going to email them at their current workplace. Two had no personal web presence; the other requested everyone be in touch through Twitter. I gave up. To stop this from happening again, I decided to write down everything here so everyone has equal access. It may also be of interest to other academic library workers who want to compare hiring processes. Sorting LCC call numbers in R Here’s the easiest way to sort Library of Congress Classification call numbers in R: call_numbers <- c("QA 7 H3 1992", "QA 76.73 R3 W53 2015", "QA 90 H33 2016", "QA 276.45 R3 A35 2010") library(gtools) mixedsort(call_numbers) ## [1] "QA 7 H3 1992" "QA 76.73 R3 W53 2015" "QA 90 H33 2016" "QA 276.45 R3 A35 2010" gtools is part of standard R. The docs says about mixedsort and mixedorder: These functions sort or order character strings containing embedded numbers so that the numbers are numerically sorted rather than sorted by character value. I.e. “Asprin 50mg” will come before “Asprin 100mg”. In addition, case of character strings is ignored so that “a”, will come before “B” and “C”. (I don’t know why “Aspirin” is misspelled.) If you have a data frame (df) with column call_number then you would use mixedorder to sort the whole thing by call number thusly: df[mixedorder(df$call_number), ] I asked about this on Stack Overflow and on the Code4Lib mailing list last July, then I went on vacation and sort of forgot about it. Nine months later, I thanked Li Kai, who pointed me to a Stack Overflow that solved my problem and let me then answer my own question. Unrelated library sign. Research data management librarian job posting at York University Research data management librarian wanted at York University Libraries in Toronto, where I work. York University Libraries (YUL) seeks a dynamic and innovative individual with strong leadership potential to advance York University Libraries’ research data management portfolio in support of the research community across campus. The successful candidate will be a member of the new Research and Open Scholarship division and will report to the Director for Open Scholarship. The incumbent will lead the development of a research data management program on campus and will coordinate ongoing support in this area within a team-based environment. The incumbent will work collegially with departmental members to advance the wider responsibilities of the Open Scholarship Department. I’m not on the search committee and am happy to answer any questions I can from anyone interested in applying, by email or even by phone. They’re looking for someone who knows RDM and also can handle chemistry and other physical sciences. Pay at York is good. I’d guess someone five years out of library school would get over $90,000 CAD. We have good benefits, time for (and expectations about) research, and of course the subway comes right on campus now. After six years the person will be up for continuing appointment (what we call tenure) and then get a sabbatical year. On the bad side, of course, CUPE 3903 is on strike right now. YUL is going through a restructuring and this position will be in a new department. Anyone taking the job should ask serious questions about how the department will work and what support they will have in the role, but all in all I think the new structure will work pretty well and there is a lot of promise ahead. Non-Canadians are welcome to apply. The way it works, any qualified Canadian trumps any non-Canadian, even if the non-Canadian is actually better, but don’t let that stop you from applying. The bigger the pool the better for us, of course, but with specialized knowledge like this, you never know what will happen or how many Canadians will apply. Anyone whose career has taken unusual turns or had to take some time out (for parental or caregiver leave or something else) should mention that in the cover letter, and the search committee will consider it. Yesterday's Slow Scholarship Reading Group article Yesterday the Slow Scholarship Reading Group at York University Libraries met and we discussed Baharak Yousefi’s recent book chapter On the Disparity Between What We Say and What We Do in Libraries. It’s from Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership (2017), which Yousefi edited with Shirley Lew. (Disclosure: That was published by Library Juice Press, and a chapter I co-wrote will be coming out very soon in a new book from them. Details when it’s out.) Abstract: Uses Keller Easterling’s concept of infrastructure space to probe the discrepancies between what we state to be our core purpose and values and what we do in libraries. Cat. Here’s one of the many bits that grabbed me: Since the beginning of my work as a practitioner in Canadian libraries almost a decade ago, I have been interested in the details of how the culture and disposition of the profession is set, communicated, sometimes obscured, and policed in our everyday practice. More recently, after I became a middle manager with a significant amount of decision- making power, this interest became more pronounced as I struggled to reconcile the belief that our decisions are made in accordance with our values, policies, and resources with the reality that there are significant disparities between what we say and what we do. For example, at the 2015 Association of College and Research Libraries Conference in Portland, Oregon, a ballroom full of librarians sat listening to Lawrence Lessig talk about the tragic death of American computer programmer, activist, and open access advocate Aaron Swartz at a conference sponsored by library vendors who actively oppose Lessig’s call for equality and equal access to knowledge. There is something disconcerting about our ability to dissociate ourselves personally from our collective actions and responsibilities. The article led to some great discussion. I recommend it, and if you like it, try getting some other people to read it and then get together to talk about it. If you work in a library, I bet you, like me, will see a lot of examples at your own institution of how what you say does not equal what you do.