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Library Issues Personal

TENN-Share, and thoughts

I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Nashville Public Libary attending a small conference made up of Tennessee Libraries called TENN-Share.

The venue was really quite nice…the Nashville Public Library is in a wonderful building. However, none of the technology worked as it should (basically all presentations were done without computer assistance) and when a major portion of the program is Federated Search, that’s an issue. Also, for a major metropolitan library to not have wi-fi? Whassupwidat? I had planned on live-blogging the sessions, but NO wi-fi left me in the technological dark ages.

There were a number of good sessions, especially the ability to see different vendor products and be able to ask questions about content and usage of those products. It was also a great opportunity to meet other Tennessee librarians and network a bit…something that I haven’t really had a chance to do yet here.

Due to the majority of Thursday being about federated searching, I learned a lot about a word that was unfamiliar to me. De-duplication. Possibly this is because I haven’t done sufficient real database work, but I had never encountered the word before. I’d used the classic deselect, a grand old library term for remove from the collection. Patrons tend to be less excited about that when you use a word they don’t understand.

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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.

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