I don’t recall precisely when my local library adopted Dynix.¹ I know I was old enough to remember when it happened and that we had a card catalog running alongside it for a while. Based on other life events, I can say I was 8 or younger—first few years of the 90s.

I was fortunate enough to have a family computer (OS/2 4eva) and my own library card, so my father taught me and my little sister how to use this new method of checking on library books which were due and renewing them. He set up an auto-dial program so that when we double-clicked the icon, it would open a Telnet session. We learned to navigate the menus and type in our card numbers and PINs.²

But then my father did something else. As the kind of software engineer who enjoyed a challenge, he wrote a library program.

Let me backpedal a moment to describe the library rituals which shaped our lives and this program. We went to the library every Tuesday night at 7pm. We were allowed to check out a fairly large number of books, and had to be ready to check out by 8:30, so we would get out of the library on time (sorry Miss Ruth, Miss Shirley, Miss Wanda, Adam, Beth, et. al. for all those nights we pushed 8:50 instead).

When we got home, my parents would collect all the date due cards from the back of the books. These went in a little drawer of the otherwise unused writing desk in the living room, along with our library cards. On Tuesday nights around 5pm or 6:30 (just after our 6pm dinner), we would grab the cards and begin the giant book hunt. We couldn’t leave until every due book was found. If finding something proved impossible, we’d take the card to the library and renew it, but this was seen as a failure.

So, when the library allowed us to check our accounts through Telnet, my father had an idea. The program he wrote seemed like magic at first. But as a curious child who used Telnet on her own to renew books, etc., I soon figured out the steps it was doing.

First, the program dialed into telnet. It would login to each person’s library account and acquire a list of books checked out to them. It saved this list in its memory and then login to the next card. After cycling through our family’s four cards, it pulled all the checkouts together sorted by date due, and then sent the whole thing to the printer.

We could execute the program and, in a minute or two, have a printed list of all the books we had checked out. We would run around the house with the list, finding books, crossing them off, and piling them by the front steps. Because the program separated everything due in the next 7 days, we could easily see what had to be found. We’d add anything else we were done with, of course, and then would present our parents with the proof that nobody would get overdue fines. We used that program up until the library shut down its Telnet access.³

As we prepared for my father’s funeral, I thought about how little things like this made me who I am today. I’ve been thinking of this again as I read through old newsletters about Penn State’s homegrown ILS, which it developed through the 80s and 90s.

What I learned from the little programs he built us⁴ wasn’t the logistics of how to build these—I’m still not sure about how the data grab worked and I am scared of sending things to printers—but that such things could be done. His early attempts to teach me programming were not successful, but he taught me so much by example.

As I said at his funeral, I am so much better about just trying to do things with computers because I learned at an early age that one could. I learned that every repetitive task is composed of steps. I learned that mistakes weren’t the end of the world. I learned that computer programming sometimes involves getting very angry at the computer (or yourself and taking it out on the computer), but that doesn’t mean you should give up. I learned that compatibilities break and you have to fix them. I even learned that sometimes people shut down really good services (like Telnet) and your stuff completely breaks.

While I learned the actual skills and techniques through self-teaching, tutorials, and workshops, the underlying principles that make me willing to try and fail and try again are something I learned much earlier. And I’m grateful for that.

Footenotes

1. But how cool is it that I know it was Dynix? There’s a spoiler here— I started working for the system when I was 16 and, as a weekly patron, I’m sure that we didn’t do any big migrations between first automation and when I started working.^back

2. At least, I think we had PINs at that point? I honestly don’t recall the timeline clearly enough on whether PINs were involved in Telnet, but the 2019 part of me says “surely?”^back

3. There were times when moving pieces broke, like changes to how our operating system and printer talked to each other. He would repair the program or make temporary fixes like saving it to a document we could view and print manually. This taught me about compatibility and the frustrations of maintaining a working program.^back

4. He also built a GUI program which allowed one to create a shopping list based on item type and then printed items aisle-by-aisle according to the local Pathmark’s layout.^back

Photograph of Dynix telnet screen by Skylarstrickland, downloaded from wikimedia commons.

The post How My Father Taught Me the Power of Automation appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

This post provides details on the exercise I devised for the workshop. I could not include it in the handouts because it was very specific and we’d already done the work. Instead, I’ll walk through the process I used to create the exercises so you can replicate it too.

The Wikidata Exercise in Brief

The short form:

• I used our university’s websites to identify a number of faculty who have published books and who have LC identifiers but do not have a Wikidata record.
• I documented major facts about each person, along with URLs for citation.
• I put together a QuickStatements batch job which would create basic records for each person.
• I created handouts with additional statements to add for each person’s record.
• Just before the workshop, I verified nobody’d been added in the meantime. I then ran the QuickStatements batch add. During the workshop, each person took a handout of 3 records and added additional statements. We walked through the first as a group, then each person did their own.

Finding and Preparing the Data

I used Penn State’s faculty pages to locate promising faculty members (based on field, position held, etc.). For example, an associate professor of linguistics is more likely to have published a book (and thus have an LC identifier) than one in mathematics. A woman still seems to be less likely to have a Wikidata record.

I made lists and checked each against Library of Congress and Wikidata. If the person existed in LC but didn’t exist in Wikidata (or had a very stub record), I would add them to the working list. I then gathered as much as I could find of the following information for each person:

• preferred form of name
• other forms of name used
• a short description of their work
• sex or gender (based on their sites)
• occupation and/or field of work

I put this information into a QuickStatments-formatted batch file which I could use to create all the records at once. I also gathered the following information, which I put into a Word document:

• Library of Congress Authority ID (P244)
• VIAF ID (P214)
• Goodreads ID (P2963)
• Employer (Penn State University)
• Position Held
• reference URL for citation

Sample Data

The example below uses a fake person, although the Wikidata properties and entites are all real. First, I put together a QuickStatements import record for the person. This person is a professor of sociology and gender studies. She appears to publish with her middle initial but does not use it in other documents. I tended to use field of work here because it often presented more variety than “ist” occupations.

CREATE
LAST|Len|"Mabel J. Fakeworthy"
LAST|Aen|"Mabel Fakeworthy"
LAST|Den|"professor of sociology and gender studies"
LAST|P31|Q5
LAST|P21|Q6581072
LAST|P101|Q21201
LAST|P101|Q1662673

Next, I put together about her identifiers and employment. I gave the class this data as both a physical handout they could use to track what they were doing but also as a digital document so they could copy-paste where appropriate (esp for identifiers):

Mabel J. Fakeworthy (Q999999999)
Library of Congress Authority ID (P244): n201099999
VIAF ID (P214): 170999999
Goodreads ID (P2963): 999999
Employer: Pennsylvania State University
  Position Held: associate professor (Q9344260)
  Source: https://altoona.psu.edu/person/mabel-fakeworthy

One issue which came up during the class was that Goodreads ID expects people who have one to have a statement of “occupation”. In a case like Dr. Fakeworthy’s I recommended using something like “sociologist.” In other cases, only “professor” seemed to fit (e.g. “professor of women’s studies” or “professor of French”).

Adding the Data

About an hour before the workshop, I double-checked Wikidata to ensure no records had been created for the people I was about to add. I then used QuickStatements to do a batch ingest and checked the outcome.

The workshop presentation (see PowerPoint in download package) introduced Wikidata, related it to work already done in cataloging, showed examples of how to add information, explained constraints, and demonstrated in which data could be queried. We then moved on to the hands-on portion.

We held the workshop in a computer lab, so everyone could participate in hands-on exercises. Each person had created a Wikidata account before the workshop.² I handed out the worksheets and shared a bitly with the digital copy, which could be used for copy-paste.

Each person got three Wikidata records to update. We worked through the first person together. I demonstrated how to add a property and check the result. We added identifiers to the record, then checked to be sure that the link it generated took us to the correct page.

Next, I demonstrated how to add a statement (employer) with a qualifier (position held) and a Reference URL. One issue which came up a few times was the inclination to paste the url into the wrong field when creating a reference. The issue made sense. One clicks “add reference,” a box appears, and one pastes in the URL. The correct process is to type “Reference URL,” select the field, and then paste the URL into the next box which appears. Otherwise, the web interface seemed fairly intuitive.

After folks had finished doing the other record updates on their own, I demonstrated a Wikidata query for people employed at Penn State and showed how everyone we’d worked on was now on there. I also showed how one might expand the query to see their LC identifiers, see which employees don’t have LC identifiers, or see fields of work represented.

Moving Forward

Most participants stayed late to discuss ways we might work this into the department’s work. One of the most promising options was the possibility of putting in data related to ECIP work. We might also review all folks affiliated with Penn State and see who doesn’t have library identifiers and where they might be added.

Coming up, I plan to hold a second workshop on creating entire records for people. I will likely gather similar kinds of information and have participants create the whole record in the browser. In the meantime, I’ve shared the materials included in the download package, such as a reference sheet for properties related to people, a worksheet for gathering information about a person one plans to add to Wikidata, etc.

Footnotes

1. Contents of the package are:

• Wikidata-Intro-Catalogers.pptx — slides with speaker notes
• Wikidata_Fields_People.pdf — a reference document with properties names and examples. Provides guidance fields one might add to a person’s record.
• Wikidata_People_Worksheet.docx — a worksheet based on the fields above. Provides field names and blank spaces so one can gather information about a person either in a working document or in a printed copy before creating the record.
• Finding_Identifiers.pdf — a guide I created for finding identifiers in international library authority files (using VIAF as a central source) as well as places like GoodReads and ORCID.

Last updated 2019-12-04.^back

2. NB, one doesn’t need an account to edit Wikidata, IP address would be recorded instead.^back

The post Wikidata for Catalogers: Workshop Materials and Design appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

Motley’s piece is a strong rejoinder to anyone who gives Society of American Archivists grief for being too political when they bring up global warming or other issues of national import. It’s a rebuke to those who get angry that the “kids” are trying to change the organization.¹ Keep it up, friends, colleagues, and comrades. Grab hold of the bits of legacy which surprise you and let them carry you forward.

Out of the Hollinger Box

The following quotations are directly from the piece and are not out of context, though there may be typos from my transcription. I’ve provided my own commentary, much of which is marginalia scribbled on my printout. An informal citation for the article is: Motley, Archie. “Out of the Hollinger Box: the Archivist as Advocate.” The Midwestern Archivist v.9, no. 2 (1984), pp. 65-73. You can find the issue in Wisconsin’s IR.

Activism is a natural function of human beings. (65)

yes!

This article is rooted in the belief that we should be hesitant to distinguish so-called “professional” concerns from concerns of an extra-professional political nature. Our work must be situated in a larger social context. (65)

our work MUST be situated in a larger social context!

Activists fought for the hiring of a paid executive director for the SAA when Council said we could not afford to hire one. (66)

I literally never thought about how we got that positions.

Activists campaigned for contested rather than single-nominee elections and were the first to secure position statements from the candidates for SAA office and present them to the membership for its information and consideration. (66)

wait — contested elections weren’t always in place? I know it can be hard to fill every slot, which raises some questions about whether we need the number of things we have or whether people just don’t want to do it … but you’re saying contested elections and position statements were a thing people had to make happen? I can see how it would’ve been hard before HTML. I, the presumptuous youth, salute you and all the work that went into getting those statements out!

Activists were early advocates of open council meetings… and in 1971 suggested the open forum that is now a regular part of SAA annual meetings. (66)

again, things I didn’t realize were new!

They first suggested a letter to the editor section in SAA Newsletter (67)

The newly expanded Council minutes, which record votes on issues, can also be regarded as the product of activist efforts to provide more information to SAA members about the inner workings of the organization. (67)

I have been presuming so much! Nowadays, I can and do easily read these online.

Activists were in the forefront of the fight to place the SAA on record in support of public ownership of the papers of the Presidents of the United States and to involve the SAA in related litigation brought by numerous other professional organizations. (67)

yes! This kind of work is our wheelhouse and we should provide our perspectives.

An extended discussion of the role of women in the profession and society reached its zenith at the 1978 SAA annual meeting when the membership overwhelmingly passed a resolution in support of the Equal Rights Amendment… (67)

record scratch … did WHAT?

… and recommended that the 1982 SAA annual meeting be moved from Virginia, which had not ratified the amendment to a state which had. (67)

*blink*

Council quickly endorsed these recommendations and shifted the site of the 1982 meeting to Massachusetts. (67)

*faints*

But really. Really really. I was born after the ERA’s 1982 deadline passed and it was presumed failed (Nevada and Illinois both ratified it in the last 2 years?). If you’d asked me, knowing what I know of that fight and of the SAA I’ve known in the last decade and presumptions I’ve made despite reading histories of things like descriptive standards… I would never… what I’m saying is, this part really blew my socks off.

During the historic SAA business meting in Nashville in 1978, attended by more members than any business meeting held previously or since, the majority of members present decided that conditions under which we work and the legal framework in which those conditions are situated are very proper subjects for consideration by members of a professional organization. (67)

They decided that in 1978? Who let this slide!? These are extremely proper subjects, but sometimes it feels like we have to constantly make a case for talking about it. 1978. Let’s put that citation in our pockets.

Several members resigned from the Society as a result of the debate in Nashville. But rather than dividing us, as many opponents contended they would, activist-sponsored resolutions supporting the E.R.A. produced a common pride in ourselves and our colleagues, and promoted an increased respect for the SAA Council for implementing decisions of the membership. (67)

None of this actually surprises me (except that it happened in SAA! Society of American Archivists? That one?). Change will always lose a few people. Taking a stand will always lose some people. We have to decide what we want a professional body to be. I want it to be opinionated. Ethics and practice matter in a profession.

Farther down, I read…

[in Boston, 1982], again at the urging of activists, the SAA joined many other professional organizations in passing a nuclear freeze resolution (68).

Well, bless me.

The rest of Motley’s article goes on to talk about what our advocacy might look like. I’ll grab just a few more quotes which still speak to me today:

When faced with the dilution of sound archival programs through frequently unnecessary budget cuts and the curtailment of employees’ rights by hostile supervisors, administrators, and managers, we must oppose cuts and defend our rights by taking strong stands in our institutions and in the archival profession as a whole. We simply cannot accept efforts beginning with the White House and the Congress own down to the state and local level to annul the gains of the 1960s and 1970s … We must never underestimate the fact that current efforts to curb trade unions and curtail workers’ rights are not so much the work of those angered by the admitted excesses and corruptions of some unions, but are the handiwork of those who feel that the average workers should have little to say about the nature and purpose of his or her work because such concerns are those of management rather than the employee. (68)

My note “just @ Frank Boles next time.” This quote is for Boles, who in 2019 tells archivists to keep their heads down, do what their workplaces tell them to, and not worry about justice… and for everyone who reviewed that piece without challenge² and defended it…

“those who feel that the average workers should have little to say about the nature and purpose of his or her work because such concerns are those of management rather than the employee” — these are the enemies of the archivists as workers, the majority of archivists and all other workers with whom we align ourselves.

Efforts to return America to the McCarthyism of the fifties are flourishing, particularly through the gathering of alleged incriminating information on individuals and groups, and by intensive efforts to restrict this information once it is on file. Individually and collectively, we must strongly support free access to information on people, gathered, ironically, at their own expense as taxpayers. (69)

…we may also begin to sting the conscience of America to forbid the gathering of illicit data that continues to cause so much unnecessary grief and economic, social, and personal hardship… (70)

Allow people to review the terrorist watch list and get their names off it. Cut back on overall surveillance. Less surveillance on Black Lives Matter activists. These are all reasonable demands from information professionals.

And finally…

…we should… be alert to the dangers inherent in the currently pervasive management syndrome. … We should keep in mind that trade unionists and the average blue or white collar worker often understand management’s frequently adversarial relationship to workers better than do most professionals, including archivists, who are often oblivious to the similarities between management attitudes and practices in “big business” and in the non-profit sector. (71)

This was a heck of a premonition.

[if the SAA is conducting management workshops], SAA should also conduct workshops to advise workers how to cope with management, how to stand strong in the face of adversity, how to consider and effect unionization in their shops, or other collective means to improve their conditions (71).

I underlined and drew stars beside this section.

There’s more in this piece. I don’t believe it was in my archival education. I am fairly sure it wasn’t. I would’ve come to SAA with higher expectations. I encourage others to read it. When people tell you to stay in your Hollinger box, remember the majority vote of 1978 which affirmed that it was necessary we address the conditions of our work and the legal frameworks of those conditions. Remember the people. Remember this piece. None of these things happened without archivists speaking up.

Go forth! Make the SAA address questions of ethical sponsorships. Support discussion of and action on climate change as an issue which will affect all of our workplaces and lives over the coming decades. Write and bring those organizing workshops. Name the poison of white supremacy where it arises. Keep the spirit of the 1978 gathering in your back pocket, add to it the spirit of Motley’s piece and the spirit of everyone else you’ve seen make change for good.

Be excellent trouble.

A Bit About Motley

Since I’m not from the Midwest and have never really been an archivist, you’ll have to forgive me for not having heard of Motley. The page for the Motley Scholarship doesn’t surprise me after I’ve read this piece, though. An abbreviated excerpt:

Archie Motley was born on December 2, 1934, in Chicago. Son of prominent African American painter Archibald Motley Jr. and Edith Granzo, Motley graduated from Englewood High School and later earned a BA in philosophy from DePaul University in 1960 and an MA in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago in 1965. He began working at the Chicago History Museum in 1955 where he ultimately advanced to the position of curator of archives and manuscripts in 1974. He spearheaded active collection development of Chicago’s urban, social, and cultural history—especially collections related to labor, African Americans, and community organizations—but also many other types of material related to Chicago’s complex and tumultuous history. In 1998, he was named Chicago History Museum’s archivist emeritus.

…

Motley’s life and legacy cannot be easily calculated. His impact on the archival profession and on the history of un- and under-documented communities is impossible to quantify.

Notes

1. You should hope the younger generation is still engaged enough to try to change the organization. Otherwise it will die.^return

2. Or proper, peer-review scrutiny. Tansey’s public review of the print shows exactly what was missed. It’s also in the spirit of the piece above, challenging our organizations to do better. It’s a challenge to what’s supposed to be our flagship journal not to publish sloppy work. The outcry of archivists has already led to changes on the publication’s website saying that reviews will now be double-blind.^return

The post Reading Motley in 2019 appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

Because of my strained relationship with him and our knowledge he had a preplan (and would be with my mom, so I was willing to make a lot of concessions to how I might otherwise bury a family member) I hadn’t prepped with the family for any of this. And his estate was paying for the funeral. I knew he had the money to do so. It wasn’t worth the fight.

It still irritates me, though.

And as I prepare to go down to DC for Maintainers III this coming week, I have been reflecting on the maintenance of the dead.

Maintaining the Cemetery

My parents are buried in a concrete-lined vault, with a tombstone (probably actually called a memorial plaque or somesuch) that lies flat to the earth. The bronze plaque contains a vase which one can pull out, tip up, and use to hold flowers. It’s cunning. One brings flowers, waters them from a nearby spigot, and can leave them between mowings.

Before the cemetery mows, they send someone through to clean out all the flowers and objects, tip the vases back into the plaques, and leave a flattened landscape for the machine. The machine mows high enough not to score the plaques. And the cycle continues.

The concrete sides mean their caskets won’t slip into their neighbor’s plot if there’s a rainstorm. The concrete top means the grass stays flat. Is there a concrete bottom? I hope not. But I don’t know. When my mother was buried, I was too devastated to ask. I didn’t have the language and was still a few months away from my journey to learn more about death and burial. When my father was buried, I was too exhausted. And it was pointless, since everything was in place.

The arrangement’s neat. They’re shelved like a couple of Hollinger boxes, in case anyone needs to find them. There is a strange comfort in knowing that they’re filed together. It’s 10am on a Saturday morning and I know exactly where my parents are and what they’re doing. Or at least where my parents’ bodies are. Shit, they’re probably right behind me. Cue the October jump scare.

Everything about this cemetery is build for order, efficiency, and convenient maintenance. It’s ordered. Neat. Tidy. Only scary in the ways that vast lawns and nothingness are scary.

Maintaining the Body

The sealer casket is and isn’t part of this. It doesn’t functionally contribute to that tidy order which makes for convenient cemetery maintenance. It’s just part of the atmosphere. I’m not gonna explain exactly what it is, for that you’ll want to watch the video linked in the first paragraph.

It’s not like it would be holding his body the whole time until the funeral (4 days from the conversation). During that period, he’d be in a cool space. Morgue. Fridge. So it’s not like he needs the seal because he’s not being embalmed and there was a risk of… odors.

And then, once the funeral’s over? He’s in the ground. It would be a lot of time, money, headache, and paperwork to get him back out. When someone’s buried, the family tends to fight particularly hard to keep them that way.

Or, as Caitlin asks in the video above: “Even if the sealer casket did work perfectly, to what end are you paying for this? Are you planning to occasionally exhume mom…?”

I went to see her on her book tour on my birthday, which was also the 6-month anniversary of burying my father. I wish I’d thought at the time to do an audience question: “I buried my dad, unembalmed, in a sealer casket exactly 6 months ago. What state would he be in today?”

Embalmed bodies like my mom’s (I had no hand in her arrangements) decay a bit slower, but big picture? They’re both decomposing down there. I assume his got started right away. Seal or no seal, the decomposition comes from inside the body. Concrete or no concrete, the world will get things done. Water will chip away at the cement. Bugs will get in. If they don’t? Bacteria can still make it happen. THIS IS WHAT DEAD BODIES ARE SUPPOSED TO DO.

After the funeral, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to want from these body maintaining techniques from embalming, which isn’t legally required and not necessary for many funerals, to sealer caskets. Do we want to encounter them again as some kind of dried husk? As a colleague said recently “I was raised Catholic, if they’re not gonna corrupt, they’re just not gonna corrupt.” Otherwise, I don’t understand the end game.

Maintaining a thing must be maintaining it for some reason or purpose. Your loved ones are already pressured to be maintaining their looks, their weights, their flexibility, their lifestyle… when you’ve said goodbye, don’t push their bodies into maintaining one more idealized form. Allow them to go the way of all flesh with less of a fight.

Having written this, I’m now thinking about cemeteries I saw in Romania and things I learned. Perhaps I’ll write about that and share some pictures. Photograph of my parents’ grave is by my aunt.

The post Maintenance of the Dead appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

Thanks to feedback from the heads of Access Services and ILL, I streamlined the on-page text and am much more pleased with the results. Since the configuration, display, and textual editing options weren’t intuitive (to me), I decided to write this blog post in which I outline the steps we took to end up with the display below:

Turn on the OA Button: Link 2.0

You should enter your Link 2.0 administration console in the side tab “Link Activation and Configuration.” Scroll down to the section “Enable Open Access Lookup Services.” This is almost at the bottom. As pictured below, enabling the Open Access Button requires only one click. (note: we may also add Unpaywall but need to figure out how to avoid duplication)

Buttonify the ILL Link: Link 2.0

In Link 2.0’s “Custom Links” side tab, I improved visual symmetry by turning our “Request via ILL” link into a button. The Open Access Button displays as a button by default. In editing the link, I made the configurations shown below:

Note: We do not use form options for our ILL, instead creating a custom OpenURL Illiad link using the following available variables (“meta tags”) to populate the data in Illiad’s form: /OpenURL?sid=sersol&genre=<?genre?>&title=<?title?>&atitle=<?atitle?>&volume=<?volume?>&part=<?part?>&issue=<?issue?>&date=<?date?>&spage=<?spage?>&epage=<?epage?>&issn=<?issn?>&isbn=<?isbn?>&aulast=<?aulast?>&aufirst=<?aufirst?>.

Simplify and Remove Language

I initially stalled on the next part because I hadn’t remembered that changing the language around the no result page default message, etc., had to be done in the old 360 Link settings. Shout-out to the Ex Libris support person who quickly pointed me to the right place! Start by going to plain old 360 Link.

Enter the side tab “Custom Text” (which has that helpful +2.0 beside it to remind you that this is where you set the Link 2.0 custom text too — oops!). The page is divided into quite a few sections. Move down to Link 2.0, expand it, and locate the following fields. The item numbers below are as of 2019-09-03.

Changing No Result Page Default Message

For item 30, no result page default message:

Rather than the apologetic and sometimes inaccurate “Sorry, this item is not available online. Please use options below to get it:” I substituted “Use the options below to get a copy of this item.” Action! Hope! Promise! One or more options!

Changing Note That Displays Next To OpenAccessButtonLink

For item 66, note that displays next to openaccessbuttonlink:

I removed the message entirely. In initial feedback, folks pointed out that the message, “Use the Open Access Button service to find a free version on the open Web,” besides being very long, implied that there was something not-free about ILL. ILL here is free for our users. It’s not free for us, of course, but we don’t want people worrying about cost to us or them when requesting items they need. Removing the text cleared up any possible misunderstandings and clutter in one go.

And with that, you should have the same results view as we do above! If you’re not the person who manages E-Resources, I’d recommend getting together with them or the ILL folks to identify a couple items in your Summon holdings which load the no results page. It may take a few tries to find one which has an OA copy, but the act of clicking through and getting straight to a copy made all the messing around in Client Center feel worthwhile. I hope it does for you too.

The post Implementing the Open Access Button in Summon’s Link 2.0 appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

The library is going to adopt a new repository and you just got hired to make it happen. You may be fresh out of library school with a few metadata projects under your belt. Perhaps you did metadata work on a two-year digitization grant and are looking forward to getting out of the spreadsheet mines. Or maybe you worked in a similar job at your last institution—running a turnkey repository like DSpace, CONTENTdm, or BePress. Perhaps you’ve moved into the role at an angle, from something more traditional like cataloging.

Whatever the case, congrats on becoming a metadata librarian, digital collections librarian, digital archivist, or whatever they’ve decided to title this position no one quite understands! Looks like the institution has a couple developers on staff, so you’re going to adopt something more extensible than BePress—Repository Q. You’ve heard great things about Repository Q. A lot of tech questions and decisions are about to come your way, so you cram Agile/Scrum/XML/RDF/Linked Data/DublinCore/MODS/general design principles.

You do a lot of reading and go to presentations. You look at other repositories built using Q and its earlier cousins, P, J, and F. It’s exciting! Some of the top libraries in the country use Repository Q. You do outreach to stakeholders. You gather requirements. You do your best to make a whole lot of different needs work. You prioritize. You try to understand what the developers are asking. You try to explain what you need. You ask questions in the community, but it seems like everyone else is on a slightly older and different version of the software. Some major underlying pieces have changed. But how exciting! You get to be on the cutting edge.

You start preparing objects and data. You ask how you can add things in batches. You’re told it’s doable, but it doesn’t come out of the box, so you add it to the development roadmap. A couple years go by. You attend community groups. You do lots of testing. You keep meeting with the stakeholders. You remind them that you’re adapting this software to meet all kinds of different needs and you’re very close. Yes, that other person’s needs got prioritized first. No, that doesn’t come out of the box, but you’ve heard it’s being developed by another institution! You saw a demo at the last conference you went to. You send out a link to the presentation. Everyone loves it. It’s great that you’re adopting this software because community development means you’re going to get so many cool features automatically once you’ve adopted it.

You keep going to community meetings. You present on how your institution’s project is nearly done. You’re sitting in a tech talk where you only understand about a third of what’s being said. You start to get an uneasy sense about the really cool new feature you were expecting. What’s that they’re saying? Different direction? Some new product names you don’t recognize?

After the meeting, you check in with your dev coworkers. They’re really excited but also a bit stressed. Yes, you got the gist correctly. A group in the community has decided to take a completely new approach to how an underlying function is done. It’s going to allow for a lot of awesome stuff and make it much easier to implement that new feature. They’re already using it in production at Institution Y. One of the devs went to a half-day workshop on it yesterday and thinks it’ll be really transformative.

Of course, you won’t be able to adopt it quite yet. It’s much too close to your launch to completely change how you do that underlying function and would require shifting some major components. So you’re going to go ahead with Repository Q, but you should start learning now about Repository X in order to make sure you can migrate the data once X is more mainstream. You redo your schedule to attend sessions where you can learn more about X. You learn that X is going to bring you in line with some very cutting-edge data practices you’ve heard about elsewhere, but don’t quite understand yet.

You come back from the conference and report to your stakeholders. That new feature isn’t actually on the roadmap for this version of the software any more, but here’s all the cool new features you’ve learned about in those sessions on X. You do your best to manage expectations. It’s going to be a little while before you can move to X. Your software is still built on Q and all the data you’ve been preparing is intended for that. Anyway, the launch is coming up soon and how exciting is that?

You work very hard on preparing the data, putting it in, testing. You’re lucky, and you’ve got a pretty straightforward migration from some older system and a lot of new data to create and work with. You’ve heard stories from people doing much more difficult migrations. You watch the software’s Slack and show up to affiliate meetings online and in your local area. You notice that X has become the really new thing. Your AD for tech asks you about X. It seems like nobody is moving to Q any more. Of course, you’ve met a few other people who have recently adopted Q. You start talking about X migration with them.

You present on your brand new Q Repository at the next big community software meeting and everyone is very complimentary. Your developer colleagues have done a great job. Your stakeholders have found some great collections to highlight. Of course, it’s still new so it doesn’t support quite everything you’d like yet. That’s fine, one of the upsides of working on community software is you can find partners to develop this stuff together. You keep adding materials, meeting with stakeholders, and letting them know what’s next on the horizon.

Bad news. One of the developers reports back that four features on which you’d counted to make repository shine have been moved from Q-model to X-model. The community just put in two sprints to change a bunch of underlying code to fit with X and your coworker isn’t sure it would be really feasible to bring these back to Q. They work on some of the other changes you’ve identified, and you push those features to your “once we migrate to X” sheet. Since you presented on these features library-wide, you get a few questions about when they’re coming. You try to keep a positive attitude.

You’re pretty lucky, though. After about 2 years of having the repository up, you’ve put in some nice collections. You’re proud of it, even though you’ve got a mental list of all the features you’d like to see. You’ve had some rather rough encounters with coworkers whose collections can’t really go into the repository until after the X migration. You didn’t realize how much of your job would require expectations management and walking back things you had told people you’d be able to do. Mostly they’re not mad, just disappointed. But, you’re lucky. You’ve got some coworkers who love what you’ve been able to do.

Now that your repository has been up for a bit and the developers have had a chance to get their hands onto X, you start preparing for an X migration. You make some library-wide presentations about Repository X, why it’s a good idea to migrate to it, and what this will mean. Your AD has approved the work, as quite a few of their peers are interested in Repository X too. As you add more data, you continue to think about how you’ll migrate it and what you’ll be forced to change. You slow down a bit on adding data as you start to write out new data profiles for Repository X. You’re lucky, your developer coworkers are pretty good at data manipulation and they work with you on the crosswalks you’ve come up with. You start to get some copies of existing collections into your Test Repository X.

You bring the test repository to the next community meeting and present on your migration strategies and what you plan to do with these four great new features you’re getting. You start to hear about some even cooler new ideas and know exactly which stakeholders would love those. You come back to your library and present to stakeholders about how the Repository X migration is going. You explain that you’ll have to put a freeze on adding new collections while you work through the migration. Someone whose work got pushed to the end of the queue is pretty disappointed. Fortunately, this cooler new idea would be a bonus for their collection and you come up with a few really great examples which get everyone in the room excited again.

A few months go by and your move to the new Repository X instance is going pretty well. You’ve heard some real horror stories that make you grateful for your coworkers’ assistance and the knowledge you’ve picked up along the way. By now, you have a pretty decent idea of about two-thirds of what people are saying in community tech presentations. But you can’t help noticing a new term around the repository community. Someone’s gotten a big grant to work on Z. Five institutions are participating. Z will have all the features of X but be easier to manage. It’ll also have some rad new features and a better way of handling the underlying data.

You can’t help but notice that several of those new features are things which are on the Repository X roadmap. You take a deep breath and email the repository tech listserv. What does Project Z mean for Repository X. This time, you can only understand about 25% of the responses. You feel embarrassed. You’ve been part of this community for years, but sometimes it still all sounds like another language to you. You thank people for their replies, but don’t really know what it means.

You message one of your former developer coworkers who now works at an institution working on the Project Z grant. They’re a great person and always tell it to you straight. They confirm your suspicion. These features, including that one you introduced in the last stakeholder meeting, are all going away from the Repository X roadmap. Your former colleague notes that only one person is really maintaining stuff around Repository Q any more, so it’s good you’ve moved to Repository X, but advises you to stay on top of Z.

You hear more and more about Z and notice that nobody seems to be working on anything related to X any more. That one person who’d been maintaining Repository Q is keeping things from breaking in X too. Well, from breaking too often. Your new developer coworkers plan a couple sprints to fix some serious issues with X. They’re mostly familiar with Repository Z, because by the time they joined the community, that’s what most of the conversation was around. It looks like Repository X is pretty much dead. The team you work with knows how to maintain it and add a few little local tweaks which make your life easier. But it’s not getting those features you wanted. Of course, you don’t have as many people as the institutions working on Project Z.

You check in with that former coworker who’s on the Project Z grant. They suggest that you might apply for a job at their institution soon. They’re about to do a big migration from Repository J to Repository Z and they’ll be hiring people with your skills. Your CV looks great. You have 5 years of experience in the community. You know some people at the institution who’ve been very nice to you.

But you feel like a fraud. You feel so discouraged. You are sure everyone else is ahead of you. You do not yet see that you are just one more person riding the Repository Ouroboros.

NB, This is often a very gendered situation. This does not mean that even male developers at well-resourced institutions do not experience similar crises, but I ask Who’s the One Left Saying Sorry to institutional stakeholders as the course continually changes?

Image: Fol. 279 of Codex Parisinus graecus 2327, wikimedia commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

Further reading

The above is an affective and observational approach to the struggles of librarians working in repositories. The following articles provide scholarly perspectives on aspects of the work. Dohe’s “Care, Code, and Digital Libraries,” is the most directly parallel to this piece in its focus on repository development processes and roles. Kendrick studies morale on the whole. Salo’s writing deals more specifically with issues of scholarly communication and institutional repositories. My own survey on deposit rates and institutional repositories was conducted to provide context to those who might feel their own repository an outlier for having low deposit rates, but does not address issues of development process.

Kate Dohe. “Care, Code, and Digital Libraries: Embracing Critical Practice in Digital Library Communities.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, February 20, 2019. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/digital-libraries-critical-practice-in-communities/.

Kaetrena Davis Kendrick. “The low-morale experience of academic librarians: A phenomenological study.” Journal of Library Administration, 57, no. 8( 2017): 846-878. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01930826.2017.1368325

Dorothea Salo. “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.” Library Trends 57, no. 2 (2008): 98-123. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22088

Dorothea Salo, “How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative.” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 1, no. 4 (2013): p.eP1075. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1075

Ruth K. Tillman. “Where Are We Now? Survey on Rates of Faculty Self-Deposit in Institutional Repositories.” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 5, no. 1 (2017):, p.eP2203. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2203

The post Repository Ouroboros appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

It should be alphabetized and indexed Tillman, Ruth Kitchin.

My name is not hyphenated.

Kitchin is my original last name.

Kitchin is (legally) my middle name.

You can call me Ruth Tillman, that’s fine.

Ruth K. Tillman works too.

Ms. Tillman, not Mrs., please. Mrs. Tillman is my mother-in-law. She has been in my life for decades.

I changed my last name to Tillman because I got so very tired of spelling “Kitchin” to people. Tillman is pretty easy to spell.

I kept Kitchin as my middle name as a tie to my family.

I had a perfectly fine middle name, but it didn’t sound great with Tillman.

“Ruth Kitchin Tillman” should be unique.

Having had this name for 12 years now, I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever change it again. It seems like too much work.

When I get old, I will be like my grandmother Tangerine and change it to Ruth Bright-Needle.

The post A Brief Guide to My Name appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

In the last couple months, I’ve found myself traveling with death and grief, from the loss of a kindred spirit I never knew to the death of my father after decades of illness. It’s forced me to sit closely with what this movement to me in a way that I hadn’t when my mother died (the movement started just around the time she died, so it was a thing I encountered after my initial grief).

While death positivity could be loosely described as accepting and acknowledging that death is a part of life, it doesn’t mean “yay, death is great let’s all be happy about death.” It’s not that kind of positive. Before I write about what it means to me, this is the definition which the Order uses on the front page:

The Order is about making death a part of your life. Staring down your death fears—whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety of modern culture is not.

There’s a list of beliefs, which I affirm and encourage any one interested to read. My own reflections don’t speak for the Order, though I do think they align with a lot of others’ beliefs and experiences.

Allowing Grief

As I said, there may be a misconception that positive means joyful or stoic. Death is a part of life we cannot avoid. Accepting that fact does not mean we do not suffer, sometimes deeply. Deathlings reject timetables, shoulds, and shame for how we grieve. I am absolutely seeing a therapist and talking with her about it. I am also fighting the expectations and prescriptions I’ve picked up in our death-negative culture about how I will act around grief and the resulting shames and shoulds which creep in.

There is no shame in feeling deep grief for the loss of a 90-something grandparent who lived a full, happy life and died peacefully. There is no shame in bodily responses accompanying your shock, grief, and rage when you learn of the death of someone who wasn’t even your internet friend. There is no shame in feeling relief that a person has died, whether because they’re no longer suffering, because they had hurt you, or for some other reason.

There’s no shame because there’s no should. And, as I rant to my therapist, there’s no learned skill to grieving. I’m constantly fighting my ingrained expectations that there should be. Years of experience and therapy have given me some tools so that I’m not entirely unmoored. But I find myself fighting the “shoulds.” I should be better at engaging with feelings as they arise, I should be more sad right now, I should be less sad right now, I should benefit from all the time I’ve spent thinking and talking about death. The message comes back to: I should be able to do this right.

That’s not how it works. There’s no “right.” No two deaths and losses are the same. With my father dead, I now have no parents at all. I grieve for that. I grieve for the fractures in our relationship. I don’t find myself wishing I could do things over, but I do grieve. It’s entirely different and complicated. So as I’m in this place before I move on to living with mourning, I reach back often to the things I’ve read or affirmations from other Deathlings that grief is a part of death.

Living With Mourning

This is where the Order first entered my life. If you know me, you have probably heard me talk about my mother, who died just before my 25th birthday. I talk about her, about how I miss her, about her terminal illness, even about her death. I’ve heard the same from many other friends who lost their mothers when they were young adults. But as I mentioned above, there are expectations we absorb around timetables, about what is and isn’t abnormal. There are the senses we get from others that they think this is unusual or unhealthy.

Just as death is a part of life, so is mourning. I think I will always mourn for my mother. I’ll mourn the adult-to-adult relationship we never had. I’ll mourn her smile. I’ll wish I could share things with her. (I won’t miss arguing.) This isn’t the same as the grief one feels right after a loss or even in the first few years. This is the rest of life. It’s not as debilitating as that initial grief, even when it hits in a flood. It’s a part of me like the arthritis in my feet. Not a constant pain. Not debilitating. Not as wildly unpredictable as grief. It is often present, sometimes painful.

There is a gift in not denying that one person’s death may stay with you forever…and another’s may not. No shoulds. No shame.

I Will Die

I encountered the Reality of death around the time of my mother’s diagnosis, when I was still in college. I suddenly Knew that everyone I loved would die. I knew that I would die. Everything felt overshadowed by death. This was not death positivity. This left me overwhelmed and suicidal. Understanding death as a part of life, accepting that I cannot change it, being open about my rage and grief, years of therapy and engagement with folks in the Order have helped me reshape that into something less hopeless.

I still know that I will die. But rather than make bucket lists or fight death and aging, I am trying to focus on how I want to be. I try to live up to the name my parents gave me. I try not to put my hopes in a future I’m not promised. Almost every day, I reflect that I have lived another day. Whether I only live a few more weeks or 60 more years, I’ll never get through all the things I’d like to do. But each of those days I can do my best to be the person I’d like to be. Grief, rage, and mourning will be part of such a life. I hope that denial won’t.

There’s a lot more that death positivity has meant to me which I haven’t had space to write about here. I was grateful to recently be able to help a friend find a natural burial site for her father, whose health is failing. I have written up my own wishes about my burial but have so much more to make explicit, even though I hope these won’t be needed for a long time and I know my ideas may change. I have a thought-provoking journal called I Will Die, where I write out responses to prompts about death and how I want to live.

My husband just found a sign at one of our local coffee shops for Death Cafes happening monthly. I’m going to check out the next event and hope the conversation continues.

The post What Death Positivity Means to Me appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

When I was attending LD4 last week, a session on tools/cataloging moved to the subject of linked data fatigue. One attendee noted that when she’d graduated library school a decade ago, she was told the move to BIBFRAME wasn’t far behind. Others, including me, recounted similar experiences, or struggles we’d had in learning linked data.

To be entirely open, although my job title currently includes “Linked Data Strategist,” I responded very poorly to attempts to teach linked data in my library school class on description. Charitably, the attempts didn’t fit my learning style. Less charitably, they reflected a tendency we have in libraries to downplay the concreteness in our profession and dive right into theory and examples outside our domain because “we’re about so much more than books.” We are. That doesn’t mean complex topics aren’t best taught starting in a domain familiar to the group, even though it would also be a limiting choice not to move further.

(Having taken SPARQL Fundamentals I & II with Robert Chavez, once I had already begun to understand linked data, I’ll add that some people are very good at teaching it. I am assuming the rest of his certificate course is as good, but I didn’t take them.)

The Systems We Don’t Have

It was after this conversation that the phrase “linked data is made of systems” began bouncing around my head. How is it that we can learn to do things in HTML, XML/XSLT, MARC, and even SQL, while linked data is often an extra reach? I believe it’s because of the systems that exist.

It’s easy enough to get a free text editor (like Atom, where I’m writing this) which highlights your HTML or XML tags and performs validation. You can view the HTML in a browser right away, even if you have no site to put it on. You can change tags and see what happens. Plenty of other people use HTML, so it’s not hard to find a buddy who can explain why your text is getting bigger every paragraph.¹ If you have oXygen or something similar, you can set up XSLT transformations of your XML and view the result. MarcEdit makes MARC something anyone can create, plenty is freely available online, and practically all libraries use it.

The landscape for linked data is far more promising than it was when I started library school nearly 10 years ago. It’s easy to update wikidata and see results within the system, at least. There’s a helpful SPARQL editor. You can use the SPARQL service or editor to query records in the British National Bibliography. I see some promise in data.bnf.fr. On the rest of the web, you can find some linked data (or data structured as RDF, at least) in search result knowledge cards and the like. But it’s not very…linked.

The Vision/System Disconnect

First, let me get this out of the way and say that while noble efforts are being made around BIBFRAME tooling, there’s nothing out there with nearly the scale/utility of BIBFRAME as there is for things I mentioned above. BIBFRAME is also extremely heavy — our 12GB of MARC came out at something more like 98GB when transformed to BIBFRAME. I experimented a bit with it in Blazegraph, but it was unwieldy.

We simply do not have the systems to match our vision. Instead, we have what are essentially a bunch of databases working in triples. They can be very nice databases. They’re very expansive because we can create new predicates. We can get data from their endpoints and include it in our pages. But while I’ve seen things like querying DBPedia or Wikidata to create knowledge cards in catalogs using data from just those systems, I haven’t seen cases of querying Wikidata to get some other data point, like a person’s ORCID, and then pinging ORCID to get data about that person.^{2 & 3} Such a case would be the simplest level of inferencing, not the web of interlinked data some of us imagine, but it’s a start.

When it comes to linked data that you or I can actually create, outside of wiki-type projects, we’re often limited to embedding schema.org data in our websites or the like.⁴ In fact, that’s what I was presenting on — a very satisfying partnership with a dataset catalog/center on campus. We generated schema.org and Google incorporated that into its dataset explorer. What we made was primarily text as RDF, with some linking and a simple relational model between datasets and the data catalog. From what I can tell, Google’s harvesting it, rather than doing any kind of live linked data querying. Hurrah for providing structured, machine-usable data. But we’re still not fulfilling the dream or promise of linked data.

The Unproveable Pudding

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I would argue that linked data is currently a pudding that we can smell—and most of the time it smells delicious—but it’s always out of reach and never edible. Considering how much I enjoyed LD4, this post came out more cynical than I’d anticipated when I started. But I spelled out similar concerns in my recent chapter “Barriers to Ethical Name Modeling in Current Linked Data Encoding Practice.” The sections on the promise of inferencing (page 247) and then, Barrier 3 “Infrastructure, Scale, and Searching the Open Web” (page 253) are particularly relevant here.

I had originally intended to include here some of the system-type things I had to learn, like the difference between an XML schema declaration and an RDF ontology declaration. But I’m over 1,000 words and am going to save those for another post. I do have a post on an intro to RDF specifically for metadata-type librarians, but I feel I need another on the learning problems I encountered.

Coming back, then, to the subject of linked data fatigue and the lack of systems—do I have anything helpful to offer? I think, to start, understand that without a concrete way to engage and practice any kind of learning, it’s going to be far more difficult for people to understand what linked data is, why they should care, and how they can use it (partly because they can’t, much). Show the kind of info we can’t put in LC or don’t… and then where else we might get it.

Locate the places where it can work. It’s been a while since I tested this particular concept, but see what you can do with open endpoints. An experiment that comes to mind would be using LC (see footnote 3) to get a wikidata identifier for a person, find their DBPedia ID from wikidata, get the IDs of their collaborators from dbpedia, round-trip that to wikidata, and either generate something from wikidata or all the way back in LC.

As I did at LD4, I would also recommend this Code4Lib Journal Article by Stacy Allison-Cassin and Dan Scott, where they show how they demonstrated concrete effects of wikidata edits. It may not be a web of interlinked data, but it seems like a good way to introduce some of the concepts.

And keep working on those systems. If using a Fedora 3 triplestore that’s just a glorified database can undo years of negative feelings toward linked data (after that one class) and show me how much more could be done with truly linked data…(see note 4) then I don’t think it’s hopeless.

Notes

1. Each line opens a new H2 or H3 tag and never closes them. It’s sublime. Thanks to @xyzzy@cybre.space for reupping that beauty.^return

2. As far as I know, ORCID doesn’t provide the actual citations as linked data. But it does have an API. You can also get basic person info with queries like curl -v -L -H "Accept: text/turtle" http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4547-8879.^return

3. One of the people involved in the Library of Congress linked data authorities announced in an LD4 session that they would be publishing wikidata identifiers in LC linked data records, starting May 20. This could be one way to get (comparatively) canonical wikidata IDs and use those to get other IDs. And it is possible to set up linked data cross-queries. But it’s not easy and it’s not done at scale (from what I can see).^return

4. My first real encounter with RDF was in NASA Goddard’s Fedora 3 repository. However, I would not actually describe it as linked data, as it was more of an RDF-structured database and never linked outside itself to other linked data. It used internal URIs when possible and a small amount of text to create very nice interlinked RDF stubs which could’ve also been represented as SQL without a functional difference.^return

The post Linked Data is Made of Systems appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

While I wasn’t a dedicated follower, I had engaged with her work over the years. I had read a lot of her blog posts. I had read interviews. I’d heard her speak. I had seen some tweets with which I connected at a visceral level. Her statement “the story of Jesus is the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about,” is a real summation of my own faith choice. But until yesterday, I don’t think I’d have listed her as one of my spiritual influences.

As I process this grief and numbness, I’m starting to realize that her influence on me was not that of doctrine or politics, places in which we sometimes differed. Instead, I see her as a different kind of Tabitha (whose life was very important to me), because of the way she changed the lives of those around her. Coming out of a religious background which treats women as less-than, she loved, honored, and supported women.

I was grateful to see these words of Austin Channing Brown. This was how I perceived Rachel’s life from far outside. Austin confirmed it from her own experience:

“While it’s certainly true that Rach was [not] afraid to spar with male evangelical leaders, I guarantee the seeds of her legacy that will produce the most fruit are the women she inspired, uplifted, supported and conspired with.”

“Rach didn’t just tweet about women she admired. She created conferences with them. She featured us on her blog. She invited us to speak on stages that included an honorarium. She introduced us to her literary agent and her speaking agent. She was so generous.”

“Those are the seeds that are going to outlast any sparring with evangelical male leaders. Her deep support of us- of other women- just might change the world.”

“My heart hurts so much by this loss. Eventually I will detail her generosity in my own life, but today, I just want to say that she wasn’t just a fighter. She was filled with deep love for us.”

Or as Candice Marie Benbow wrote, “Rachel held open doors she didn’t have to.” She did. But although she didn’t have to, this loss would be not nearly so affecting if she had only been a writer grappling with her own faith. She did not have to open doors. She would not have been the woman we’re mourning if she hadn’t.

Just as when Tabitha died, so many of my siblings, and especially sisters, in the faith are mourning, from tributes to her life to the Psalmic/Ecclesiastic:

“this god i pray to fucking sucks, i want a refund. i want one that works. fuck this.”

or

“Dear God, I am so immensely grateful and fuck you. My heart hurts. So very much.”

These are how I feel. I grieve deeply that we lost an outspoken Millennial woman who was not afraid to grapple with hard questions and admit doubts. I had taken for granted that we would have her so much longer. That, unlike those of prior generations, she would still be around when I was old and we would both be growing and changing and grappling with hard questions.

She was not my friend. But she was my fellow traveler.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

Notes

1. It was also the two month mark of finding out that my father was going to die (he died 3 days later), a loss I’m still in the middle of experiencing and processing. The uncomplicated grief I felt at Rachel’s death certainly opened the floodgates of that more complicated mourning. back to text

The post On Rachel Held Evans and Losing a Fellow Traveler appeared first on Ruth Kitchin Tillman.