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A blogging we will go…

Suddenly and without warning, yours truly has become the blog expert at MTSU. It began slowly enough, with doing a workshop on academic uses of blogs and wikis at the MTSU IT Conference. Then we decided that actually having a blog for the conference would be a good thing, so that fell to me as well (never mind the fact that the campus had never even turned on PHP on the webserver). Once over that hurdle, and a few days of struggle to get MySQL happy with talking to PHP, the blog was born. Now I’m in the middle of putting together instruction pages, since this is a very, very new thing for everyone here. In addition, I was just asked to write up an article for the on-campus IT publication about blogs/blogging, so there’s another 300 words or so to pump out on the subject.

EDIT: also, I was just contacted today by the Library here at MTSU…seems they have 3 blogs that they are interested in moving off of blogger and onto our servers. Guess who’s gonna get to help with that?

On top of all that, I’m helping LITA with their blogging efforts, attempting to evaluate different blog software and figure out what they want to settle on as the official LITA blog.

Who knew that this would be a valuable job skill way back when we all started these damn things?

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.

5 replies on “A blogging we will go…”

Cause blogger sucks?

Actually, because there is a desire to not rely on outside servers, for very good reason. Reliance on external services is a way to end up high and dry later down the road.

There are other reasons as well, of course: more flexibility, higher levels of controls, robust backend management…etc, etc…

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