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Digital Culture

Back from Thanksgiving

And there’s a bevy of stuff happening at MPOW. We’ve launched the official beta of our new website, and I’ve signed to write an article for Library Journal.

Yeah, yeah…let the stoning commence!

To be fair, I did request and get the “better” publication agreement from Reed, as well as request and receive permission for a clarifying line of text to be added to the agreement (the clarification was in the realm of the term of the contract, and what rights reverted to me after 6 months). I will be able to self-archive the work, which was a big deal. I feel like I was treated fairly in the negotiations, now I just have to write.

So what am I writing about? There’s a great opportunity at MPOW revolving around our instruction section and podcasts/vidcasts/netcasts/whatever the cool kids are calling it these days. I wrote a grant proposal for 30 ipods and supporting equipment (including everything we need to produce nearly professional level videos), and we’ll be moving forward with integrating podcasts into our new instruction/outreach efforts. So my work for LJ will be chronicling that process, as well as looking at ways that libraries can leverage this technology to greatly enhance their efforts towards patron education.

I’ll be blogging some of the process…it’s exciting, because it’s a completely new feature for MPOW, plus it will involve a lot of integration with the new website and the instructional team.

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

4 replies on “Back from Thanksgiving”

Looks good, Jason. I’d be interested in learning why you chose Joomla over other CMS systems. Also, is there any concern that the URL’s do not have pretty names? For example, do you see a problem with your “students” page being a long url as opposed to something like http://www.librarywebsite/students ? I doubt most folks remember URL directories and addresses, but some users may have a desire to just type in a URL, rather than visit the home page each time. However, the CMS’s ability to generate dynamic (and up-to-date) content may outweigh the need for a traditional directory and URL structure. Anyway, nice job, and I look forward to hearing more about he instruction project.

Good questions, Chad!

We looked at Joomla, Drupal, Mambo (which is effectively Joomla at the present time), Geeklog, and at least one other one I don’t remember with a wide lens, then focused in on Drupal and Joomla. Both were good, and I know that Drupal is probably the current leader in the Open Source CMS world. But we thought that Joomla was a bit more straightforward, would let us develop faster, and would give us the tools we needed on the backend to make distributed content management easier.

re: URL: yep, and we’re gonna fix that. The current setup will transition with the removal of the old site into the Joomla install running at the root level of the webserver, with pretty URL’s that we can control with a Joomla module. This means that we will have complete control over the actual URL, with just about push-button ease of use. It may take a bit to work out the bugs (I’ll have to migrate the installation, which will be a bit of trial and error) but I expect it will go pretty smoothly. The goal is to get the migration done before students return for Spring semester.

Looks good, Jason. I'd be interested in learning why you chose Joomla over other CMS systems. Also, is there any concern that the URL's do not have pretty names? For example, do you see a problem with your “students” page being a long url as opposed to something like http://www.librarywebsite/students ? I doubt most folks remember URL directories and addresses, but some users may have a desire to just type in a URL, rather than visit the home page each time. However, the CMS's ability to generate dynamic (and up-to-date) content may outweigh the need for a traditional directory and URL structure. Anyway, nice job, and I look forward to hearing more about he instruction project.

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