respecting teens doesn't mean thinking they're adults

My posts have a tendency towards the Fully-Formed Opinion model of essay, but this one is more of a request for you guys to help me formulate my opinions, and my burgeoning discomfort with a new form of exceptionally clever ™ young adult and middle grade fiction.

( This post contains one minor spoiler for Adam Rex's Fat Vampire, in that it mentions where one scene takes place. Comments may well contain more substantive spoilers. )

Sometimes the intersection of Libraries and Technology has a 10-car pileup

I'm currently trying to normalize and shift into comma separated values files the disambiguated name lists created by four different students who don't work for my department, with whom I'm not allowed to communicate, and for whom I'm not allowed to create standard documentation. (Don't ask.) After title casing everything, my current (incomplete) Vim regular expression is: (screenreader users be warned you should skip!)

:%s#\(<\([^>]*\)>\( \)\)*\(\(\((\)*\([^)]*\)\()\)*\) \([^{]*\)\)#\2,\7,\9,,,,,,,,,\2\3\7 \9;,MS165.001.010.00001


Yes, this is what happens when the people dealing with metadata that need to be normalized are not being managed by professionals.

(I'm doing this in Vim instead of in Perl because each file is a little bit different, so every time I open one I'm doing some hand manipulation of the data and massaging the regular expression slightly to accommodate the fact that each of the students copes with variant names, titles, and unknown personal or surnames differently.)

This is why we can't have nice things.