T. Scott

Heaney At The Hirshhorn

Watched him chat politely.  They'd hand him a book.  He'd ask a question, then nod, sign, hand it back smiling.  Then he’d look out over the big crowd loosely lined up, inching toward the table. Cloud of curly hair, the thickets of sideburns framing his face, kind eyes, inquisitive, the rectangle glasses perched on the big nose.  So familiar.  It was a loud space, excited happy chatter bouncing off the polished surfaces outside the auditorium.  The reading had been a great success.  He was funny and self-deprecating, leaven for the deep seriousness of the poems.  He enjoyed performing.  He was good at it.  His voice rolled across the cadences, the troubled history of Ireland wound round his own humble beginnings, the precision of his Belfast accent on the d, the clackety-clack roll of the r.  He was still eight years from the Nobel, but he was the most famous poet alive.

When Sandy and I were half a dozen or so people back, a quizzical look crossed his face as he saw us.  Now, after each signing, he cast the same look toward us.  Bit of a smile.  Trying to remember.  Finally at the table, I handed him Station Island.  He said, apologetically, “I know we’ve met before…”  I was shy, tentative.  “Yes, I brought you to Oshkosh…”  “Oshkosh!” he leapt up, huge grin, laughing, grabbed my hand with both of his.  “Oshkosh!  That was the wildest night I’ve ever spent in America!”  He signed “for Scott & Sandy  Yippee for Oshkosh!  Seamus Heaney  1.2.87”  We pledged to write to each other. 

I’d no idea what I was doing five years earlier when I invited him.  I was the editor of The Wisconsin Review, the school’s lit mag.  I had some money for programming.  He’d recently started teaching at Harvard and signed with an agency to do a college tour.  I booked him. 

A year before that, fall of 1981, we’d been going to Fred’s every Wednesday night to listen to Fire & Ice, the jazz quartet.  Fred, taciturn Chippewa, had a little dive near the river, and there were plenty of nights when the number of people in the band exceeded the number of us sitting along the bar.  So we got to know the regulars.  Segnitz taught at UWO, the local outpost of the vast state university system.  He was the Review’s advisor and eventually he told me he could arrange for me to take over as editor when I started grad school in January.  If I was interested.  Willing.

When I was six and home with a fever, upstairs in the small bedroom on the east side of the house, I wrote my first poem.  It was about Superman.  I remember feeling giddy seeing how rhythm and rhyme bounced against meaning.  Mysterious and perplexing.  Thrilling.  It baffled and excited me.  From forever I needed to write.  But what?  But how?

By the time I was spending those Wednesday nights at Fred’s, talking with Segnitz about my literary aspirations, I’d been imagining myself a fiction writer, poems on the side.  There’d be novels and short stories, although I had only the vaguest notion of how to construct either.  I was immersed in science fiction and fantasy.  In the big enclosed front porch of the apartment Sandy and I rented on Washington Avenue I strung cords from window to window over the table and paper clipped character sketches and maps and mini-histories of a world and culture that I was trying to create, inspired by Fritz Lieber and the dozens of SF and fantasy books I’d read through my teen years. It was building worlds that fascinated me.  I had shades of characters, vague plot concepts.  But I didn’t know how to make it cohere.  I had a few stories that I was sending out to the magazines.  They kept sending them back. 

More than a decade before that, once I got my early teen hands on a guitar, I’d thought I’d be a songwriter.  I wrote dozens of ‘em.  Not that I knew anything about song structure or about chord progressions.  My lyrics were primitive angst.  “Twisted shadows in the rain…”  “Every time I think of you / I start to cry…”  That kind of thing.  But I learned.  My lyrics got a little better, my guitar chops and composing skills improved.  By the time I got to JFK Prep for my junior year of high school, I was a better singer and player than most of my contemporaries.  I played the standards of the time – the Bob Dylan songs, Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young, Crosby Stills & Nash, James Taylor – interspersed with a few of my own.  Fewer as years went by.

I was serious enough about music that after I fled high school in the wake of the cocaine scandal and spent an aimless half year at the plastics factory (finishing my courses by mail), when Kevin persuaded me to go on to college I decided to be a music major.  The structure fascinated me.  The puzzles of keys and progressions.  Tension and release.  Why did that sequence of sounds compel that series of emotions?  A tug beyond words.  I wanted to know how to make it happen.

At the community college, studying with Frank Doverspike, it seemed plausible.  My parents managed to rent a good upright piano.  I took lessons.  I wrote simple compositions, pored over Bach and Beethoven scores.  I could see myself as if I had a future as a composer.  Davey and I fantasized about writing a rock opera.  But then I got to UW-Milwaukee, which had a very serious music program with serious, distinguished music faculty and very serious and cutthroat music students.  It became quite clear quite quickly that success in this world required a single-minded devotion to the art and craft that I was unwilling to make.  I was too interested in too many things (and too intimidated by the other students).  By the middle of the next semester I was no longer a music major.  I loaded up on Philosophy and English classes.

I kept writing, looking for my beat.  Songs, poems, stories.  I took a class with James Liddy, the Irish poet.  The San Francisco Renaissance.  Read Spicer, Duncan, Snyder, Ferlinghetti.  Ginsberg.   Nights, after supper and getting stoned with my housemates, I’d make my way to Axel’s to carouse with Liddy and the poets.  Loud and profane and mad with the love of language.  Scandalous Penglase and his tales of student seductions. One night, to the great amusement of the assembled, Joe Henry, the IRA gunrunner, showed up with Miriam Ben-Shalom, the lesbian Zionist who was suing the US Army for kicking her out (for being a lesbian, not for being a Zionist).  Apparently the fires they recognized in each other were much stronger than the obvious differences and contradictions – for one passionate week, at least.  (And how did I end up one night in Miriam’s leather jacket?)  I read Ulysses for the first time.  I read it for pleasure because the poets talked about what a rollicking and wild fun read it was.  I loved it.

I wasn’t trying to make it as a poet.  I didn’t bring my drafts along, as some of the other youngsters did, hoping for encouraging words.  Whatever poems or stories I was dabbling with I kept mostly to myself.  I was still imagining the singer/songwriter.

Sunday evenings it was the Gasthaus open mike.  Wisconsin was eighteen for beer and the Gasthaus, in the basement of the student union, poured more than any other bar in that beer-drenched city.  We’d sign up for 30 minute sets.  I was popular.  I’d spent a semester’s lunch money on the Framus 12-string.  I could fingerpick on it, which dazzled the other guitar players.  I could do the long songs – the whole monologue from “Alice’s Restaurant.”  “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”  “Tangled Up In Blue.”  I still sprinkled in a few of my own.  On stage, behind the microphone, I was bold and comfortable.

Offstage, not so much.  My comfort zone was very small, and, though I didn’t see it at the time, it was getting smaller.  My shyness, building since I was seven, was inching relentlessly toward the pathological.  My professors were amazed when I’d come to their offices for one on one.  I was articulate and insightful and fully engaged.  My papers were brilliant.  But I never said a word in class.  I was okay with people I knew.  I could manage groups of two or three.  But to spontaneously speak up in front of a classroom of faces?  Not happening.  I could get on stage and sing to a full room, because the guitar and the songs protected me.  Finish my set and go over to the table where the other guitar players were drinking and joking and sharing tips and teasing each other?  Not happening.  I couldn’t impose myself.

Still, I managed to arrange a couple of local auditions, was infuriated by the bar owner who said I was okay but needed to stop overdoing the Dylan stuff.  I was pissed because I’d only sung one Dylan song.  But of course everything I played or wrote was suffused with Dylan, even if I refused to own it.  I got one gig, playing and singing while people ate in a little café.  It went well, and the audience seemed to like it, but I wasn’t happy.  I didn’t want to be background music even though I knew that’s how you start.  But it was all terrifying and unsettling and after a bit I didn’t have any more auditions lined up and I didn’t make any more calls.  I was getting married and moving to Oshkosh.

The guitar playing and the singing, writing my own songs, everything I’d rested my character on in Milwaukee, drifted away.  I didn’t know how to hustle for it in Oshkosh.  Maybe, I thought, it turns out the guitar playing was just a phase after all.  A high school and college thing.  Just one more kid with a teenage dream.  I was wistful about leaving it behind, but okay!  Sandy and I could still be artists together.  Mutually supportive.  I’d start with a factory job and write late into the night.  She’d finish her art degree.  When she graduated, she’d get a job, I’d leave the factory and write more.  Poems, novels.  Maybe short stories (although how they worked perplexed me even more than poems some days).

In the candle factory I’d have a book of poems in one hip pocket, a little notebook in the other.  My job was “material handler” – to get the right packaging materials to the end of the line where the women gathered the wrapped candles skittering down the shoot and lined them up in their boxes and packed those boxes into larger boxes and stacked those boxes onto wooden skids that I’d scoop up with the forklift and bring out to the warehouse.  The supplies were kept in a mezzanine where I had my perch looking down across the factory floor, the six production lines, where I could see who needed new supplies or who had a skid about ready for the warehouse.  There was plenty of slack time.  I’d go into a back corner for a couple of hits off a joint, return to my perch to write in a pocket notebook, or to pull out Howl or Four Quartets.

My shift ended at 10:30.  The factory was a mile and a half from our apartment and when the weather was fine I’d run, just for the sheer physical joy of it.  The factory work kept me in the best physical shape of my life.  Sandy’d be in bed and I’d fix myself something to eat.  Sometimes I’d bake something – I made a fine chocolate soufflé – and I’d wake her up for a snack.  And I’d write.  I’d study Poets & Writers Magazine, pore over Len Fulton’s Directory.  Sent out my stories and poems.  Plotted my fantasy novel. 

The rejections mounted.  An occasional encouraging note, but no successes.  The factory work was mind-numbing, far, far worse than I’d romantically imagined.  The novel wasn’t coming together.  Editors weren’t interested in my stories and poems.  I wasn’t emotionally capable of the hustling that a freelance writing career requires.  I was 24 and trying to come to grips with the fact that, after giving up the notion of making it as a composer, or a singer songwriter, I wasn’t going to make it as a writer, either.

It brought a kind of weird relief.  Because if I no longer had to deal with the pressures of trying to make it as a writer, I could use my free time for whatever I wanted.  And what would that be?  Well, writing, of course.  But for myself, without worrying about publishing or selling.  That seemed pretty safe.

I was turning further and further inward.  I rarely saw my Kaukauna or Milwaukee friends anymore.  Emblematic was me at the post office.  To stand in line waiting to buy some stamps was torture.  I’d start to sweat, my face would get flushed.  When it was finally my turn, I’d stammer out what I wanted but it was painful.  I was so afraid of getting it wrong.  It was like that everywhere I went.

Social phobia.  Social anxiety disorder.  Selective mutism.  Plenty of diagnostic slots for it all now, but I knew none of that then.  I only knew the fear of being pointed out.  Of being noticed.  And disapproved of.  Embarrassed.

But I had to get out of the candle factory.  If I wasn’t going to be spending my stony nights being A Writer (as opposed to just writing poems), I was going to need to find a new way of making a living. Sandy was getting itchy about financial security.  My fantasy about mutually supportive struggling artists wasn’t quite as shared as I’d thought.

I’d been a science snob in high school and college.  I’d managed to avoid calculus (to my everlasting regret).  Everything I knew about physics and chemistry I’d gotten from Isaac Asimov’s columns in Fantasy & Science Fiction (which was quite a lot, actually).  But high school science classes?  College?  Unh-uh.  And I was stupidly proud of that.

Computers were interesting, though.  The science fiction I’d been inhaling all through the seventies and into the eighties featured computers.  And I’d come across articles occasionally about how a career in computers was a promising choice for somebody looking for a path in 1980.  My dad’d had a Sinclair ZX-81.  One kilobyte of memory, expandable to eight.  Membrane keyboard.  Hooked up to an old B&W tv.  Did just about nothing and was absolutely captivating.

But when I looked into computers as a trade it seemed as narrow and limiting as classical music had been.  I was too interested in too many things. 

I quit the candle factory.  Spent six months plotting my next move.  When had I ever had a job I liked?  At UWM I did work study in the reserves & periodicals section of the Golda Meir library.  I’d loved that.  I’d felt obviously at home.  And wouldn’t you know, the local campus of the University of Wisconsin had a library school!  Well, no, not a school – a program.  Started by a couple of women who’d been faculty at the very well regarded School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan.  Unaccredited (which meant nothing to me), half a dozen faculty, students mostly school librarians looking for a credential boost.  My ignorance about what I was doing was profound, but I figured it’d work out.

I started running a linotype machine at Miles Kimball, the mail order outfit, in order to raise money for school.  Made the lead slugs that were used to imprint personalized pencils and napkins and Christmas cards.  Felt connected to Gutenberg.  The guy who trained me was taciturn and focused on the work, which suited me just fine.  I liked the process.  I liked the machine.  I liked the order and the mechanicalness of it; the slight whiff of danger from working with molten lead.  The complexity of steps leading to the finished product.  The solitude. 

I’d come into work with the crowd and leave with them but I didn’t have to make eye contact, didn’t have to  talk with anybody.  The breakroom was too terrifying, so I never went.  On my lunch break I’d go out to walk, eating a granola bar I bought from the vending machine. 

I knew I was in a bad way, even if I didn’t know there were diagnostic categories for it.  The day after Segnitz brought up The Wisconsin Review I shuffled through the fallen leaves trying to figure it out.  It was sunny that afternoon, the fall air crisp, the familiar and welcome earthy scent of the crumbling leaves.  It was a little chilly but I was sweating under my light jacket, miserable.  I knew it was a turning point.  If I said no, then my fears would determine my choices for the rest of my life.  If I said yes, I had a chance to do something I desperately wanted to do, to engage with the world of literature outside of my room.  But I would be putting myself into the world in ways that I’d spent the last few years trying to avoid. 

I take it as given that most of the daily decisions that stress us out are actually completely inconsequential.  Whatever we decide to do about today’s crisis will end up having very little impact on the actual course of our lives or the lives of those rippled by those decisions.  (“Don’t sweat the small stuff.  It’s all small stuff.”)  But then there are those occasional days when the divergent paths are indeed momentous and irrevocable.  So there I am, all by myself, on a pretty, cool, sunny, brisk autumn afternoon in Oshkosh, nibbling my granola bar, on respite from turning molten lead into the names of young people whose grandparents will see that personalized pencils get into their Christmas stockings.  The branches of my life are before me.  It has never been so clear.  Never before and rarely since.  What does it mean to say that I made a choice?

Unpublished and unpublishable I might be, but now I’d decide who got into print and who didn’t.  Thirty-two pages an issue.  Three issues a year.  I said yes.

I sat with each of the editorial staff, the half dozen students who helped select and organize the content.  What did they want?  What did they bring?  This one was pretty and blond and oh so sure of herself.  She was one of the Flaherty groupies, Flaherty being the English department’s resident boho poet.  He’d been the Review’s faculty advisor before being ousted by Segnitz in a typical bit of academic skullduggery about which I knew nothing.  Selecting the poems was easy, she said.  You looked at them and picked out the good ones.  I sighed, inwardly.  “And what makes the good ones, good?” I asked.  She didn’t stay long.  I wasn’t much fun.  I added editorial advisors of my own.  John Harmon, composer, pianist, and spirit guide from Fire & Ice; Davey & Doc, reliable friends from my hometown.

The Review was organized as an independent student activity group so we had a budget of a few thousand a year for programming.  Segnitz had seen the flyer from whoever was repping Heaney and said we should get him.  He’d just started teaching half years at Harvard and every article about him included the Lowell quote calling him “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.”  He told me later that he'd been expecting some greybeard professor from the English department to pick him up at the airport, not this 26 year old kid with a scraggly beard and skinny tie.  Have I mentioned that I didn’t know what I was doing?

Segnitz had a fishing shack on the shores of Lake Winnebago, which is where we ended up after Heaney’s reading.   I’d never been to a reading by a famous author.  The Review wasn’t connected to the English department.  (We heard later through the grapevine that few of the English faculty bothered to come to the reading, figuring this Heaney guy was some Irish ne’er do well friend of Flaherty’s).  I didn’t know that the standard routine would’ve been a wine and cheese reception at the faculty club afterwards.  We got a bottle of Jameson and some six packs of Guinness and eight or ten of us headed to the shack.  We had a great time.  Echoes of Axel’s with beer and an Irish poet and conversation rolling over and on top of each other.  Davey had the wickedest wit of us all and was in particularly fine form, needling our distinguished guest about the Yeats quote.  Heaney cringed at that, but once he got over the shock of realizing how different this evening was unfolding from what was typical, he gave as good as he got.

The hotel I’d booked Heaney into was a fleabag near campus that had hourly rates.  I did manage to get him back to it safely, but had to rouse him only a few hours later.  Sandy was doing feature articles for the local paper in those days and she’d arranged for him to do a press conference / reception at mid-morning the day after the reading.   We dragged our hangovers back to campus, to the Pollock House, the fancy Spanish Revival building from 1920, gifted to the University by the president of Oshkosh B’Gosh (when it was the Oshkosh Overall Company).   The press consisted of Sandy and an over-eager kid from the student newspaper.  The reading had been a great success, despite the non-interest of the local English faculty (the liberal arts school down the road – Lawrence University – sent a busload of students), and the place was mobbed.  Sandy and the kid talked over each other asking questions, while students pushed books and slips of paper his way to sign.  He smiled and answered and signed, patient and affable, seeming only a little bewildered.  I sat next to him, trying to orchestrate the madness until I could see his veneer thinning and figured it was time to get a drink into him before heading to the airport.  I knew which joint on Main opened the taps at 11:30, so we piled in, me and Heaney and bits of my crew and hangers-on from campus.  Boilermakers standing at the bar and then back to the airport and then he was off to whatever college town was next on the list.

Heaney went on to his next gig, but then he cancelled the rest of the tour.  I felt responsible for that, in a good way.  Perversely proud of it in fact.  I never knew if he cancelled the trips because he was afraid there’d be more nights like that in other little college towns or he was afraid that there wouldn’t be.  We traded post cards, but the correspondence never took off.  My fault.  I could carouse with him, drink with him, tell stories with him, but in the quiet of my apartment I was too shy to write to him.  I couldn’t quite feature that he’d actually want to hear from me.  I dreaded being a nuisance; or, even worse, a bore.

Such a hodgepodge of anxiety and arrogance I was.  Timid, sure.  Terrified, often.  But sure of myself?  Yeah. Very sure of myself.  I knew people would follow me – they had since kindergarten.  I knew my brain was quick.  I knew I could write.  I knew I had talent.  I knew I was lucky.  I just didn’t know what it was all for.  You’d think I must’ve been insufferable.  And yet, on the evidence of those who’ve loved me, apparently not.  At least not entirely.  I don’t understand it.  I wasn’t humble, but I was kind.  If my arrogance was overpronounced, so was my empathy.  I ignored what I didn’t know and forced myself to go on. 

In my teens, when I was still living mostly at home, I’d sometimes have a couple of beers late at night with my Dad.  He’d’ve had several by then and I was probably stoned, having been out with friends but getting home more or less in time for my curfew.  He’d tell me things about his life and his hopes and the things he wrestled with on his quest to be the good man.  He told me two very important things.  That it was okay to be scared.  Because life was, after all, very scary.  This was astounding coming from that guy, who I would’ve thought scared of nothing.  Not just that it was okay to be scared, it was sensible!  It was the appropriate response to dealing with the world.  Later on I would quote this as “If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention,” although I don’t think he ever actually put it like that.  And he told me about a conversation he’d had with my cousin Michael, who was getting ready to usher a wedding (or maybe a funeral).  Michael was very nervous, afraid of doing it wrong.  Dad told him in most settings most people are unsure about what to do, but they’re afraid to let on, so they hide it.  They’re scared, and they think they’re the only one.  They’re looking around for somebody who looks like they know what they’re doing so they can follow.  Just act like you’re the guy who knows.  That was the secret power.  You’re not the only one who’s scared.

By the time I saw Heaney at the Hirshhorn, we’d been living in DC for three and a half years.  I was getting better at pretending to be that guy. The Wisconsin Review had been a huge step.  Then, with my library degree I got a fellowship at the National Library of Medicine.  I got training in public speaking, worked on group projects.  I had a career now.  I was meeting my responsibilities.  Sandy was getting to be an artist but I was still writing every day, mostly poems.

I bought each of Heaney’s books as soon as they came out, relishing my special connection.  I loved the poems and the translations.  The way his language fills the mouth, reading him aloud was a physical, muscular exercise.  The centuries of sadness and struggle springing from the ground on rhythm and rhyme.  I was never much caught up by his prose, though.  I’ve almost never read anything about poetry that helped me understand how to read it. 

What is it about?  What does it mean?  People want to know.  I want to get away from that need to know.  When Rothko’s kids gifted 1,000 of their dad’s pictures to the National Gallery of Art in the early 80s (just after we arrived in DC) he was not nearly as popular as he is now.  NGA mounted a blockbuster show and after the opening weekend where many in the crowd were actively hostile (“my little girl could do that”), the galleries were frequently deserted on the many days that I went back.  Occasionally there’d be a couple of other people there and I’d hear them whisper, “But what do they mean?”

It seems I’ve been trying all my life to short circuit that pedestrian part of my brain that insists on shellacking meaning on to ordered prose.  Get out of my way, brain!  Psychedelics in my teens helped me see what prose couldn’t touch, that my excessively verbal, excessively rational mind couldn’t get me to.  By the time the psychedelics had begun to bore me (junior year of college) I’d learned that the arts could get me there.  “There” was what was called the ineffable.  That which cannot be described in words.  Sitting in a room full of Rothko’s pictures (Rothko was very precise in his use of language and he always referred to his work as “pictures,” never “paintings,” which tells you inscrutably much about what he was trying to do) I could open my self and shut down the endless internal chatter and experience them.  The translation of the ineffable I called it.  Abstract art.  Symphonies and string quartets.  Coltrane.  Poems.  Poems could do it, too.  How weird is that?

There’ve been years when I worked on my poems every day; there were years when songs or fiction took precedence, but the itch to write the poems were always there.  I was most serious about it in those years around my Heaney encounters.  Not long after the Hirshhorn reading my career took Sandy and me to St. Louis.  But the poems kept tugging at me.  I took some workshops, even applied for an MFA program.  Spent hours with a (female) friend discussing Rilke and Neruda, poems of our own.  The marriage imploded.  Turns out the two mutually supportive artists thing was only my own fantasy.  I moved out, did readings at local open mikes, finally got a couple of poems published in a local magazine.  I joined a band, fantasized about quitting my job, spent my off hours with painters and musicians.  Negotiated mid-30s singlehood.

And stopped writing poems.  No more poems.  WTF?  It happened without much thought and without regret.  I still thought of myself as a poet long after the desire to actually write poems had passed.  It took me a long time to realize it was gone.  Apparently writing this essay has been an attempt to understand why.  Turns out it was the letters.

Frisse said, “That woman has whole cities inside her.”

She was a professional colleague whose job was to build relationships with library directors.  Like me.  After politely avoiding her invitations to dinner for eighteen months, I said yes.  To my surprise I had a wonderful time.  So a month later, yes again.  And then emails.  I could tell her everything.  That had never happened.  I could hardly keep up with myself.

Her boss scolded her because her excitement when my emails arrived was disrupting the flow of things in her office.  (But we were still “just friends”).  So I started writing her a letter every day.  Physical good Crane stationery fountain pen four and five and six pages letters stamped and delivered by mail.  We were colleagues, then friends, confidants, lovers.  It happened fast.

Different cities, busy travel schedules, so for nearly two years I wrote at least one letter every day, many days two, occasionally three.  Who had time to struggle with poems?  The letters became little essays.  I’d found my form. 

We married, I moved.  New town, new job, new level of confidence (although still reliant on my Dad’s secret power).  I still wrote letters to her when we travelled apart, which was often.  My library career blossomed.  I was a success.  An in demand speaker.  And there were the editorials and blog posts and professional articles that I always approached as if they were personal essays.  Every memo I wrote was an exploration of creative writing.  Every multiply revised email an exercise in creative nonfiction.  Rhythm, sound, image.  Looking for the poetry in even the most mundane of bureaucratic tasks.

Very occasionally I’d get the urge to try a line or two of verse, or maybe a lyric for a song.  But then those scribbles sat untouched.  From the age of six I thought I was supposed to be writing poems.  I was wrong.  Why did it take so long?  I’ve no answer. 

I never stopped reading poems, and these days I’m getting better at it, getting good at giving myself over to the experience, getting in on the side, past that linear, analytic rut.  What, after all, did I learn from multiple readings of Ulysses? Of Pound's Cantos?  To let myself float along on sound and emotion without worrying too much about the sense of every line.  To note with delight how each re-reading of a poem is different from all the readings before and after.  To trust the transformation of experience even when I don’t entirely know what’s going on.  I’ve read poetry for insight, instruction, inspiration, enlightenment; while I’ve often been surprised and delighted, I’ve rarely read poems just for pleasure.  I seem to be learning how to do that now.

I recently came to accept the fact that I’m not going to live long enough to read every unread book we have in the house.  (Tsundoku – Meiji slang for letting them pile up.)  That takes a lot of the pressure off.  It doesn’t matter anymore how long it takes me to get to a book’s last page.  Some evenings I'll come across a poem that sits just right and I'll spend the next half hour reading and rereading; listening and watching as it tumbles and unfolds.  A poem is its own object in the world, unlike any other piece of text.  Of course it has meaning – but not a meaning.  To ask what the poem is about is a terrible place to start.  Just as with humans and dogs and spiders and rocks and rivers, the poem is its meaning. 

I found that verse was not my form, but I've never stopped pursuing poetry, looking for it in every line.  What else so well reflects our beautiful human foolishness?  We turn to the arts to try to cut through all the scrims of arrogance and envy and wickedness and loneliness and fear and embarrassment and hope and ecstasy and love and madness to touch the ineffable, to reach that pulsing heart of existence which, by definition, cannot be expressed in words.  We’re desperate for it.  We paint, dance, pound on drums, carve stone.  The translation of the ineffable.  But for our purest, most naked attempts to reach beyond our limits, what tool will we use, we brilliant, perplexing, confused, limited and limitless humans?  Words.  Against all reason, we’ll use words.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Touchstone.  Seamus Heaney, roaring with laughter in a fishing shack on the shores of Lake Winnebago, bottle of Guinness in hand.  We’re all throwing our best words at each other, down for the joy of it. 

I'm On An Anthropological Expedition

"Of the dozen cases of possible research misconduct I've looked into in the last ten years, I was able to retrieve the original data in exactly two." This from a colleague (I won't say with which university) bemoaning the state of current data management practices. When I quote this to some of the Data Wranglers here they're not at all surprised.

On the other hand, when I mentioned it to another colleague, a historian, she was rather shocked. In her field, keeping meticulous records and clear documentation of every statement of fact that goes into an article or book is standard practice.  That there's a research world that has such an apparently casual attitude towards the data is foreign to her.

But in the biomedical research world, as the hapless teddy bear researcher in the brilliant NYU Library video says, all the data you need is in the article.  You do your experiment, you extract the data you need for your article, you move on, leaving your data behind.  ("So many boxes!")  Changing that mindset is just one of the fundamental hurdles.

Each investigator looks at the world through the lens of their own practices, as if all of science and scholarship behaves the same way. I move through it like an anthropologist, trying not to let my own biases about the world color my perceptions of what the natives are doing and why.

When I embarked on this full-time gig fourteen months ago as the mysteriously titled Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies I believed I had a very good high-level understanding of the issues involved. I'd been dabbling in this space for many years, through the Open Access wars, my involvement with the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable and an increasing understanding that open access to data held far more potential for revolutionizing science than open access to journal articles. I knew that addressing the challenges at the institutional level would require bringing people together from all across the institution, that it wasn't a library problem amenable to a library solution. Indeed, it wasn't a problem localized in any unit of the university.  Given the way our research institutions are organized, there isn't a unit within the typical university that obviously has primary responsibility for figuring this out.  Most often, it's librarians who have taken the lead, but they can only touch a portion of the problem.

I still believe that I was correct. I did have a very good high-level understanding. But I did not imagine how delightfully complex it would be once I started to dig in.

I'm starting to get to know some of the #datalibs and a fascinating, brilliant and passionate tribe they certainly are.  I'm learning a lot and enjoying that tremendously.  

My perspective is a little different, though.  I remain the quasi-outsider, observing through my anthropological lens.  Since I'm no longer in the library, I'm not preoccupied with building a library service and marketing it to my research community.  In Charleston, one of the panelists in the "Making Institutional Repositories Work" session was explicit that once you have developed a solid institutional repository service, the next step is to engage with the faculty to see what problems the IR can solve.

At the monthly Data Wranglers sessions, and in the numerous conversations I have with individuals throughout the campus, I'm mostly trying to listen.  I want to understand what the problems are first.  What do investigators need in terms of services & infrastructure to comply with the data management requirements of funders and publishers?  How do we develop institutional policies that assist researchers rather than creating more administrative headaches?  How do the needs of the social scientists and historians differ from the epidemiologists and brain mappers?

If we can map that out, then we can start to identify roles.  What can the Office of Sponsored Programs take on?  How do the libraries contribute?  What do we need in terms of IT infrastructure?  How do we incorporate effective data management practices into the various graduate and post-doc training programs?  We'll probably identify the need for an institutional data repository of some sort at some point.  But we haven't gotten there yet.  I have much more field work to do.

 

 

What We Share

I was in Frankfurt in 2006, having been invited to speak at the annual meeting of the STM association. It was a heady experience. I don't remember what I talked about (I hope it was useful) but I certainly learned a lot. I came away with the understanding that the commercial publishers were already knee-deep into the reinvention of scholarly publishing and they were eager to partner with librarians in that great adventure. But they weren't going to wait for the librarians to show up.

Sadly, the librarians never did. It was still the early days of Open Access publishing. But Mabe was at great pains to point out that STM was officially agnostic on the subject. I met Hindawi, who had recently joined. I had a long conversation with Velterop, full as always with his enthusiasm for what might be achieved with some goodwill and creativity and daring. Even Erik Engstrom, then CEO of Elsevier, told me in conversation that he was not at all opposed to Open Access. He just needed to figure out how to make it work as a business.

But in the years that followed, the librarians didn't show up. Led by ARL/SPARC they manned the barricades, determined to make this a holy war between good and evil. Fueled by anger over the affordability problem, stoked with rhetoric that characterized Elsevier's profit margins as typical of the entire industry, and willfully oblivious to the economic realities of publishing, the librarians found emotional satisfaction in castigating the evil publishers, writing letters to congress and investing portions of their scant resources in institutional repositories that their faculties have little interest in supporting.

Where are we now, nearly ten years later? The commercial publishers have turned OA into the business model they were beginning to envision back in Frankfurt. Springer claims to be the largest source of OA articles in the world. Elsevier launches a new OA journal practically every week. Every major STM publisher has a PLoS One clone.  The OA partisans conspicuously have nothing to say about PLoS's revenues.   It's become a huge publisher by adopting the strategies and utilizing the talents of some of the best in the publishing industry. It's now running a surplus that bests that of most of the commercial small fry and the OA partisans can't figure out if PLoS is still one of the good guys.

The partisans retrench into the incoherence of green OA. Since they can't stomach making payments of any kind to the commercial publishers (Harnad's painful pun of "Fool's Gold") they fly the flag for green, continuing to manage a splendid feat of cognitive dissonance by ignoring the fact that green is entirely dependent on the existence of a vibrant, healthy, subscription-based publishing infrastructure -- the very system they want to eradicate.

The partisans lob their attacks on liblicense-l. The latest comes after Robert Glushko posts a message asking if we can't all recognize that despite our differences we are all still in this together. "I'm hopeful that we can work to find common areas of interest, and that we can all work together to promote those areas. At our best, we do so much good."

The critics are quick to disparage such foolish idealism.  Prosser says,  "Gosh, I wish this was true. I wish that we were all just one big happy family striving to promote scholarship. But I don’t think we are. We all have different priorities and drivers and sometimes those drivers and priorities clash."  Guédon quickly chimes in:  "Hear, hear, David! The notion that publishers/libraries/scholarly are close relatives is completely fanciful."  Later, in his long post, he seems to temper this somewhat, "Let us concentrate our fire on the few, multinational, baddies and the rogue scientific associations, and let us see how we can repatriate publishing capacity within academe."  So not all publishers are evil -- it is the multinational baddies that we must go to war with.  I'm sure this is comforting to the struggling commercial and society publishers trying to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

At UKSG 2013 I gave the closing plenary, arguing that publishers and librarians share the same overarching  commitment to advancing scholarship through the distribution of new knowledge.  It's our view of the role of the market that puts us at odds.  Librarians see market forces as the impediment to distributing knowledge.  Commercial publishers see market forces as the mechanism for distributing knowledge.  This fundamental disconnect will continue to make our business relationships more difficult than they need be. And librarians are at a particular disadvantage because of our unwillingness to learn to deal realistically with the economics of publishing. 

But surely there can be more to the relationship than that.  The publishers themselves are fiercely competitive with each other, but still managed to get together to create CrossRef, which has done more to facilitate efficient movement through the scholarly literature than anything that librarians have put together.

I still believe that the best way forward is for librarians, publishers of all stripes, researchers, academics and members of the public to engage and argue and work together to build a scholarly ecosystem that works for the public good. Something that I believe we all want. The people who work in those companies that the partisans castigate as "the baddies" (and worse) are, by and large, good people who are committed to doing a good job and advancing scholarship.  They also want their organizations to be successful.  A sentiment that I believe is shared by every librarian I know.

There are some positive signs. While I'm still not seeing as much positive energy from the library community as I would like, the Library Publishing Coalition is doing very good work.   I'm still optimistic that SHARE can achieve some useful things, particularly as it works more closely with CHORUS. The deal that CHORUS just signed with ORCID is very positive and should give librarians something to get behind.

Most promising of all perhaps, is the energy I saw at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting in Arlington in May. SSP, more than any other association, has made a major commitment to bringing publishers and librarians together. They have just elected a librarian as president. Rick Anderson generates a lot of skepticism among librarians but he is librarian through and through.

The way forward will continue to be difficult.  But if librarians are going to influence that future they're going to have to show up and find ways to work with the people in publishing.  Writing them off with the kind of demeaning and insulting rhetoric that characterizes so much of what the partisans write doesn't advance anything but the would-be revolutionaries' sense of self-satisfaction.  A dose of humility and a willingness to listen would serve the cause much better.

 

We Are Librarians

He's in the family room, half dozing over his evening scotch.  He's feeling pleasantly sluggish from the football game and the beer.  His team won.  Now the kids are watching their latest favorite show.  He's not paying attention, hears the voices drift in and out.  Some silly sci-fi something.  Some group of quirky, not quite normal eccentrics, out to save the world.  Snatches of dialog drift in. 

"Who are you people?"

"We're librarians."

He snaps awake.  The memory comes back.  The one that has mystified him all these years.  Oh my god!  They're real!  I met them!

****

It was 2000.  I'd gotten one of those Marriott timeshare offers -- 5 nights in a deluxe villa near Disneyworld for some ridiculously cheap price.  The only catch was that before you left you had to sit through the hour-long sales pitch.  Why not?  We like Disneyworld.  We'd bring Marian along.  We'd be polite during the pitch.  Hell, maybe we'd even buy in after all (this was just before we found Lynn's dreamhouse).

The villas were quite nice and the vacation was lovely.  By the time we entered the sales office on the morning of our departure we were in a mellow mood.  We weren't inclined to buy, but we were willing to have them try.  It was all relaxed and low-key.  First a video, then we sat down with the very nice, professional agent.  He asked us questions about our likes and dislikes, trying to sort out which of his categories to slot us into.  No, we didn't golf or ski.  No watersports.  More interested in cities than mountains or beaches.  He flipped through the album of pictures of the various properties.

He started to talk about financing options, but Lynn stopped him.  "If we do this, we'll probably just pay cash." An eyebrow went up.  We could see him mentally recalibrating.

So do you travel much?  Quite a bit, actually.  And is that for business or pleasure?  A pretty even mix of both.

And what do you like to do when you're traveling?

"Have lunch," said Lynn.  He looked confused.  I elaborated, "If it's a day when neither of us is working, we'll sleep late and then try to find a nice place for a leisurely lunch.  Then maybe a bit of sightseeing or a museum.  Find an interesting restaurant for dinner and then maybe a local dive bar for drinks and some live music.  That'd be kind of a perfect day."

I could see that we weren't making this easier for him.  "So where have you been in the last year?"

"Oh, let me think...  Chicago, Cairo, New Orleans..." (It had been a particularly busy year). "London & Paris, Vancouver... DC, Charleston, Bucharest..."

He looked back and forth at the two of us as we sat quietly smiling at his perplexity.  "I'm sorry," he said.  "But I have to ask, what do you do?"

Without missing a beat, and in perfect unison, we said, "We're Librarians."

We didn't buy, but we left content with the knowledge that we had rearranged his impressions of librarians forever after.  I do hope that he sees the show and thinks of us.

****

I know the members of my tribe are split on the merits of the show but Lynn and I rather love it.  Some of my favorite lines:

"Dad? Who are those people?"

"They're librarians, honey."

"Librarians? Wow."

 

"Librarians win with knowledge.  Librarians win with science."

 

"What is a librarian?! [Sighs] They're the ones who protect the rest of us from the magic and the weird and the things that go bump in the night."

 

Story of my life.

 

Conversation in Charleston: Public Access and Data

"Promote ORCID."

That was Greg's "if you take just one thing from this session" recommendation.  Howard agreed, but added, "...equally promote having your researchers submit their funder information when submitting manuscripts for journal publication.  Having the Researcher ID and Funder ID together married up to the article DOI is a powerful combination."

On the other hand, just having Howard & Greg chatting together on the same stage was a pretty powerful combination.   When SHARE & CHORUS were first launched, just a few months after the Holdren memo was released, many observers saw them as competitive.  In this corner, the publishing lobby making a policy end run to try to maintain their market dominance; and in this corner the combined might of the research libraries and universities seeking to leverage their investments in institutional repositories into some greater relevance.  Which of these mutually exclusive solutions would the federal funding agencies settle on? (Or would PMC simply vacuum everything up into an expansive PubScience Central)?

Fortunately, it didn't take too long for the developers to see where the projects overlapped and where there were advantages to be gained for both projects by sharing expertise and perspectives.  By the time I had lunch with several of my Roundtable colleagues at the AAAS meeting last February those conversations had gotten to the point where a joint appearance at Charleston was starting to look like a real possibility.  I immediately thought of Greg as a potential participant.  He's a Charleston regular and has been working with SHARE as a consultant.  Turns out that he had been having discussions with Judy Ruttenberg about a similar panel proposal and when the Charleston directors got wind of all this, they put us together.

Bringing Howard in was a natural given his role with CHOR., and I wanted to include John Vaughn, whose experiences with handling scholarly commnications issues for the AAU go back many years, and whose roles in chairing the Roundtable and in helping to develop the SHARE concept have amply demonstrated his commitment to including the views of all stakeholders in working through these very complicated issues.

The concept that Greg & Judy were developing was broader than just SHARE & CHORUS, however, and when the three of us spoke by phone over the summer we agreed on the necessity of bringing in a data person.  We were very fortunate that Laurie Goodman, editor-in-chief of Gigascience, was able to join us.

I've done several sessions like this over the years -- "facilitated conversation".  No presentations.  Some informal agreement among the participants about the likely themes.  I prepare half a dozen or so questions ahead of time, but once we get to the event, I rarely use more than two.  With the right people, the conversation flows naturally and takes its own course.  My job is just to keep it moving.

With this group, my task was extremely easy and the 45 minutes went by in a flash.  Of course we could have gone on much longer, but I'm happy with the range of topics that we were at least able to touch on.  (The session was recorded, so there will be a link on the Charleston website at some point). 

One of the most striking moments was when Greg asked how many in the audience were involved in managing institutional repositories.  Half the people raised a hand.  Then he said, "Keep your hands up. Now how many of you are successful in getting your authors to submit directly to your IR?" Only 2 hands were left up and one of the two was wavering in uncertainty.

Reshaping the scholarly communication eco-system is a massive job.  As John said, developing achievable policy will require adult deliberations and negotiations among all the key players – universities, libraries, publishers, and government.  It is also clear that a focused effort in data access and interpretation, management, and preservation will become increasingly important, and is one of the areas that currently is both most volatile and most challenging.

So in addition to promoting ORCID, noting funding sources, sharing best practices for effective IR management, and a whole host of other things that came up during the session, John suggests getting one of the nifty yellow Data t-shirts like the one Laurie wore.  Cafe Press has some nice options.

 

The New Job

"Effective September 8, I'll be Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies reporting to the office of the Provost."  I've started sending this announcement around to the discussion lists, alerting the far-flung professional network to my change in circumstance.

There's been a nice assortment of congratulations and well-wishes.  But what has surprised me have been the comments from people who assume that this means they won't see me at the usual library conferences anymore.  What?  I'm still a medical librarian.  I'm still a member of MLA & SCMLA & MCMLA & ALHeLA.  I won't be representing UAB at the AAHSL meetings anymore, it's true, but I'll continue to go to the other conferences.  And given the increasing importance of data curation at research institutions I expect to be more involved with the work of some of my librarian colleagues rather than less.

Lynn reminds me that she went through a similar thing 25 years ago when she left UAB to work for EBSCO.  She had to work very hard to get people to understand that she was no less of a librarian just because she was no longer working in a traditional library job.  I guess I'll have to do the same thing.

John Meador, most recently Dean of Libraries at SUNY-Binghamton, picked up the reins as UAB Dean of Libraries August 5.  The challenge he has accepted is to merge the two existing library organizations -- Lister Hill and Mervyn H. Sterne -- into a single organization serving the entire university community.  Unlike some recent reorganizations (UNC & Florida come to mind), UAB's roots as a primarily biomedical research institution offers some unique opportunities.  The two libraries are similar in size of staff and budget, are located just a few blocks from each other on a compact urban campus, and serve an increasingly multidisciplinary institution.  So while services will continue to be delivered from both buildings, we anticipate that, over time, a single, seamless organization will be formed to provide those services.

It's a bit of a conceptual leap because even though most of the important work that librarians do now takes place outside of the building, we still think of the library organization and the library building as occupying the same space.  As I was trying to explain the goals of the merger to a faculty member he said, "But the biomedical literature will still be based at Lister Hill, won't it?"  I had to tell him, gently, "Actually, since we spend less than 1% of our content budget on print, that hasn't been the case for five years now."  The reference librarians do far more of their work by chat, email, phone, webinar, office hours in classroom buildings, or meetings & workshops around campus than they do in person in the building.  The building is still very important, of course, but basing the organization on the physical limitations of the building is an anachronism.

One consequence of the merger is that the two Director positions go away.  The Director, Lister Hill and Director, Mervyn Sterne functioned as deans, although we didn't have that title.  But we met as part of the Deans Council and had the same level of budgetary and personnel authority as the deans.  Now that there is a single individual with the title, as well as the authority, of Dean, those two director positions are superfluous.

So what has opened up for me turns out to be quite marvelous.  Every research institution in the country is trying to figure out how to effectively manage research data.  What services should the institution provide?  How do you effectively manage security?  How do you establish policies and monitor compliance with the full range of increasingly complex federal requirements?  How do you make data available for reuse in clean and well-structured contextualized environments?

A number of institutions have made some headway in sorting this out, but part of the challenge is that there isn't really a single entity within the modern research university that is the logical home for the full range of issues that need to be addressed and coordinated.  It requires true collaboration among the libraries, IT, the research office and the various pockets of excellence and expertise that exist across the campus -- often unknown to each other.

My task, for the next several months, will be to map what exists at UAB, to figure out who is doing what, to identify where there are significant gaps, and then to work with all of the various players to help develop strategies for pulling all of the pieces together into a coordinated whole.  From this vantage point it looks ridiculously complex.  

I plan to have a lot of fun with it.

 

 

What are librarians' views of Open Access issues?

I've cooked up a little survey that you can get to here.

Later this month I’ll be speaking at the AAAS meeting on this topic.  Although I know what the positions of our library organizations are, and what some individual librarians might think, I’ve never felt that I had a good grasp of what librarians in general think.  I suspect the range of opinion is pretty wide.  So I’ve come up with a list 15 statements that people can indicate their level of agreement with.  They're the sort of statements one reads and hears in presentations, blogs and discussion lists.  In some cases they may be too broad or simplistic for simple agreement or disagreement so I’ve included a comment block that people can use to amplify their answers or explain why they can’t agree or disagree with the statement as written.

I don’t expect to draw any general conclusions from this, but I hope that it will be useful in illustrating some of the breadth of opinion that exists in the library community.  I'll post a summary of the results here.

The survey shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete – although you can certainly take longer, depending on how much you choose to comment.

And, of course, if there are other things you think I should be telling the AAAS audience about what librarians think, I'd love to hear about it.

Sometimes you just need to talk....

It seemed as if the unstated subtext of most of the conferences & meetings I went to this spring was that the boundaries between publishers and librarians is getting increasingly porous.  Geoff Bilder made it explicit in his plenary session at the MLA meeting when he referred to a presentation that John Unsworth gave at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting several years ago titled, "Pubrarians and Liblishers: New Roles for Old Foes."   Increasingly, librarians are starting to move into the publishing space and publishers are worrying about things that used to be the exclusive domain of librarians.

Despite this, we're still too often talking past each other, or not talking at all.  We need more conversation.  Which is why one of the most enjoyable things I did was the SSP "Chat With A Librarian" roundtables.  Jean's done a good writeup of the event for the SSP website.  The room was packed and ninety minutes flew by.  We could easily have gone on longer.

Jean and I, along with Norm Frankel, will be using some of the feedback from that session to develop the Chicago Collaborative's "Libraries 101" modules, designed to present the broad array of library issues to people in publishing.  The evidence of the SSP session is that many people in publishing are very hungry for more information about how libraries really operate and what librarians really want.

Anything that can foster more conversation will help.  As those boundaries continue to become even more porous we're going to need the expertise of everybody involved in the scholarly communication chain more than ever.

 

 

Busy Telling Stories

Every piece of writing should tell a story.   This is as true for a report for my boss (like the update on our investigations into the impact of journal cancellations that I need to get done this week), as it is for an essay that I may be preparing for print, or a tale about Josie that I post here.    Same thing for any kind of a presentation that I might do for a conference:  What's the plot?  Who are the characters?  Where's the dynamic tension?  How do I want the audience to feel when they've come to the end?

I have lots of stories to work on in the next few months:

In two weeks I'm doing a presentation on open access for the annual meeting of the NCRR/SEPA program directors.   My assignment is to take 10-12 minutes to discuss what open access journals are, why SEPA PIs should be interested in publishing in them, and any other advice I have about "publishing in open access journals or publishing in general."  To do this adequately in the time allotted is practically impossible.  Approaching it as a story helps to keep the presentation concise and on track, rather than just a scattering of semi-related facts.

The editor of the JMLA asked me to write a guest editorial for the January 2011 October 200910 issue.  I'm quite thrilled about this since the editorials that I wrote while I was running the thing include some of the best writing that I've ever done, and I've missed having that challenge.  I'm going to use the opportunity to write about the experience of participating in the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable.  The report stands on its own and we've been pleased with the reception that it's gotten, but what I'm interested in relating in the editorial is what it was like on the inside -- as far as I'm aware, the Roundtable was the only occasion during all of the smoke and thunder surrounding the open access discussions of the past decade or so that a group of stakeholders covering the range of views that we did was brought together to have the kinds of intense discussions that we did.  There ought to be more of that.

I promised Flannery that I'd work with BtheA on an article about medical humanities for the theme issue of the JMLA that he's putting together.  I'm far, far behind on the original schedule that I'd set for that, although I do have a pretty good sense of how I want to approach it.  The tension between the need to educate physicians for the science and to try to help them become fully rounded human beings at the same time remains unresolved, and I'd like to dig a bit into the issues surrounding that tension.

In June I'll be in San Francisco as part of a panel presenting at the annual SSP meeting.  My brief for this is to talk about budgets in libraries -- the things that publishers don't necessarily know or think about.  The panel comes out of the efforts of the Chicago Collaborative, part of our range of education activities designed to bring librarians and publishers to a greater understanding of the challenges and issues that each other faces.  In this case, the story that I want to tell has to do with the varied ways in which libraries get funded, the multiplicity of priorities that are always jostling for resources, the gradual shifting in how library directors are thinking about allocating those resources -- and what that might mean for publishers.

July takes me to the annual CESSE meeting in Pittsburgh to talk about open access, public access, and the various issues that the Roundtable occupied itself with.  Until I got the invitation, I didn't know that CESSE existed, but it's no surprise since there is an association for everything.  It's possible that I'll have crossed paths with some of these folks at other meetings, but I do particularly like going to meetings that are outside of my usual orbit.  Librarians spend too much time talking amongst themselves.  They need to get out more.

And then there's the Doe Lecture.  I don't actually give that until May of next year, and don't need to have it ready to send to the JMLA editor for a month or two after that, but I've started to think about the story arc for it.   As I've remarked to a number of people, while I've had the opportunity to do many interesting and valuable things with the Medical Library Association, the only two things I ever really wanted to do were to edit the Bulletin (back when it was the Bulletin rather than the Journal) and to someday give the Doe Lecture.  It means a great deal to me that I'm going to have that chance.

All of these stories, of course, are variations on the same themes -- the radical changes occurring in the realm of scholarly communication and the tremendous opportunities that they present for librarians.  The tale unfolds in the telling.  As always, when I'm looking ahead to a presentation or a piece of writing, I'm eager to find out what I'm going to say.

Incentives

Charlie points to the list of publishers who've agreed to hold prices at 2009 levels and appears to speculate that we may be seeing an end to the historical trend of significant annual price increases for STM journals.    But it remains to be seen what the impact of those pricing pledges actually turns out to be -- much of that depends on the choices that librarians make.  Will those publishers be rewarded with a disproportionately smaller number of cancellations from those libraries struggling to deal with reduced acquisitions budgets?  Or as librarians scramble to find the funds to maintain the big packages from the publishers that they love to hate, will it be the "good guys" who end up getting screwed?

For many years, Library Journal has published, each April, an eagerly anticipated article by Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born analyzing pricing trends in the scholarly journal market.   Kathleen retired last year, and the article has been taken over by a new team.  As it happens, I had dinner with them a couple of weeks ago.  They were just beginning to crunch the data, so our conversation was entirely speculative, but we spent quite a bit of time talking about where the cancellations were likely to fall and what the impact on the overall market would be. 

Based on the informal conversations I have with my colleagues, I suspect that Elsevier is going to come through this year just fine, despite that fact that they continue to be aggressive in their pricing.  "We can't cancel ScienceDirect," is the refrain that I hear constantly.  I remember a conversation that I had with an ARL director who said that if she threatened to cancel, the sales rep would start calling her faculty and getting them to put pressure on her.  She wasn't going to risk that.  (When our sales rep suggested to the woman who does content management for us that he was going to start contacting our faculty about our proposed cuts she offered to send him a copy of our phone directory.  I think she confuses him.)

If the titles in the big packages are the ones that you generally believe are more important for your community than those put out by the publishers on the "good guy" list, then you should by all means keep those titles.  And if that means that the small publishers who are hanging in by the skin of their teeth and holding prices in response to the pleas of librarians are the ones who get whacked, that's just the way it goes.  You've got to do what's best for your faculty, right?

But I don't think I've ever heard a librarian make that argument.  What I do hear is the fear that the faculty will rise up and...  and....  Well, that part's never quite clear, but I think some library directors have visions of wild-eyed faculty members surrounding the library with pitchforks and torches.

We stepped away from the big packages last year.  And yes, we had many faculty (57) who contacted us expressing concern about the loss of access to some titles.  Most of those we reinstated.   The conversations in almost all cases were respectful, thoughtful and extremely beneficial to us in getting a better handle on what was being used and why (we did have one rather agitated faculty member who I had to talk down from the ledge). 

We're going through a similar process this year, although since we've already gotten out of the package deals, the potential loss of access is much smaller, although the titles are certainly more valuable to the community.  And again, the engagement with the community has been excellent.  Not a pitchfork in sight.

I don't know how this is going to unfold in the long run, but I'm certainly more eager than in any previous year to see what trends show up in the LJ article.  I worry about the impact of these cuts on the teaching & research missions of my university (we're going to be holding a series of focus groups later this spring to try to get more detail on that), but I'm also enjoying the conversations with faculty that this crisis is giving rise to.   And although I fear that we're not spending enough money to really meet the demonstrated needs, I know that the money we are spending is being spent better than ever before. 

We've been meeting with each of the health sciences deans to be sure they've got all of the details about our budget situation, what we're doing and why, so they can handle any questions they get from their faculty and so they can alert us to concerns that they have.  The discussions have been great -- these are smart people, who care deeply about the importance of library resources, but also understand the practical difficulties of managing large organizations with greatly diminished resources.  They've got our back.

At the end of each meeting, as we're standing up to go, I've said, "Y'know, when I can step away from my anxiety about the potential negative impacts that our decisions are having, we're actually having a lot of fun.  It's pushing us to be more creative and connected to what the community is doing.  This really is the greatest time to be a librarian in 500 years."

I really believe that.