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.
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3 replies on “Stranger garnering some attention”
I’d never considered that location based awareness could help solve the digital lending/DRM quagmire. Let’s hope!
I found your ramblings to be not at all crazed, but very reasonable. Now, how about metaverses like Second Life? So far all of the “library” activity in SL is found in clumsy replicas of library buildings and is related to the technics of SL itself. But as more people spend more time there via mobile devices (which you can now do in SL), a need for more “real life” answers might arise. Maybe our avatars can be walking around there too via our mobiles with chat or IM answers. The avatar, not the building, would be the locus of information.
Jason–your article is compelling. I enjoyed it a great deal. In fact, having been around for a little while, I was reminded of some of the better “future-casting” that was going down in library-land right around when the Web became a serious proposition. There was the good, the bad, and the irrelevant–with the latter two categories in ascendance. But a few people were getting it right. I think you do as well on this topic of uber-mobility.
The Web is currently the preferred medium for personal and corporate communications. It works well and has an abundance of information. Your article on the new mobility strikes a daring note by suggesting that we are, yet again, on the cusp of another technological leap. I think you’re right.
The “mobile library” is already upon us; thanks for the well-considered remarks about where we might be going.
–Terry Huwe
IRLE UC Berkeley
Columnist, Computers in Libraries