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Re-Imagining Carter County, KY

I’ve talked before on this blog about where I grew up, in Eastern Kentucky. It holds a special place in my heart, as I suppose all childhood homes do, and is a place that I am reminded of often. I am thrilled to see this video, thrilled to see that there is a group working to make the place a better one. If you want to know what it’s like where I grew up, this video is a fantastic place to start.

It does my heart good to see that the community identified the Carter County Library as a vital piece of the rebuilding and re-imagining of the area. Carter County has two “cities” (and I use that word very loosely), Olive Hill and Grayson, with the main library being located in Grayson and a branch library in Olive Hill. My take on the revitalization of the library would include more efforts being throw at Olive Hill, as the town has far fewer other resources for children and adults in the realm of education…read that as “none at all”. Whereas Grayson, as the County seat, has always had more people and more resources.

I’ve also just spent most of this past week at the Aspen Institute Leadership Institute on Library Innovation as a part of their Communications and Society Program. I’m writing a separate post with lots of details on that effort, but one area where I can see Carter County really benefitting is through the new efforts by the FCC to do rural connectivity via fiber optics and the E-rate program. Look for a post on that, and the rest of the Aspen experience, later this week.

By griffey

Jason Griffey was most recently the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he worked to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise was 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 Library IT and a tenured professor 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 a chapter in Library 2035 - Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries by Rowman & Littlefield. His latest full-length work Standards - Essential Knowledge, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, was published by MIT Press in March 2025.

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.

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