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Digital Culture Library Issues

Google @ ALA

Here’s Google’s video relating their experience at ALA 2006. Included are shots of the booth in the exhibit hall, a little video of the party they held at Muriel’s, and snippets of interviews they did with librarians at the party. You can see the swanky glowing drinks that I talked about earlier.

I was interviewed, but evidently didn’t make it into the video…but they did put up a picture of myself and Charles at the booth:

me @ ala

The most amusing thing to me about the picture? Google put these up as a Picasa Web Album, but I’m linking to it from my flickr account. Why? Picasa doesn’t give you easy linkability…I could copy image location and paste in the URL, but that’s not a friendly user experience. Flickr EXPECTS you’re going to hotlink their images, and gives you the URL to do so.

Picasa also doesn’t give you an easy way to browse to a specific picture…this was pic 166 of over 200, and when I went back to find it, I couldn’t be bothered to click next picture 165 times. There must be a jump to picture option for usability, guys. What else…oh yeah…no multiple sizes to pick from, so the resolution you get is just what’s there. I love Picasa as a local picture manipulation solution, but Google is a long way from flickr for online experience.

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.

2 replies on “Google @ ALA”

Ha. I thought those were actually your photos pasted into the Google logo. The scale is deceiving. It wasn’t until I looked at the photo album that I realized you guys were standing behind the logo looking through it. Cool.

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