I’m not completely sure what to make of this, but it is incredibly cool.
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Author: 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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A gustatory tour of Salt Lake City
Or rather, the world. I’ve made it a point to avoid any semblance of American food while I’m in the big city. Thus far I’ve had:
- Curry from a fast food Indian/Pakastani place, with spinach and potatoes
- Plunderschnecke, a German pastry from an absolutely AMAZING German bakery. Plunderschnecke is a flaky pastry dough rolled with a vanilla custard, brushed with honey and
nutsstreusel. I nearly wept with joy when I had this. - Brazilian Barbeque for lunch, where I was able to have everything from beef and pork to chicken hearts and alligator sausage
- Dinner at a Chilean Deli, where I had a pork sandwich with tomatoes and avocadoes, and an amazing caramel tort
My plan today is to have lunch at a Thai place called Lemongrass, and dinner at my hotel where I will finally be stuck with American food from Bambara. Of course, it has been voted the best restaurant in Salt Lake City, so I think that will be ok. 🙂
- Lunch at Lemongrass was incredible. I stuck with Pad Thai, partially because I like comparing the differences between how different restaurants flavor it. This one was nearly perfect…sweet/savory/spicy, with shrimp and chicken and egg blending with the noodles. The best part of the meal, though, was the Thai custard I had for dessert…small chilled custards on hot sticky rice made with coconut milk. The custard by itself wasn’t particularly sweet, but with the rice it was perfect. An excellent combination of hot and cold, with the smooth texture of the custard and the slightly chunky texture of the rice. I’m in food heaven.
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Salt Lake City
EDIT: Because Justin asked: I’m in Salt Lake City for training on the SCT/Sungard product Luminis Content Management System which MTSU is adopting. I’m here to learn how to create, edit, and manage templates for the CMS. I’ll post more about that when it’s all sunk in and it’s not just a rant about proprietary systems and silly markup.
Just a few notes on my current abode: the Hotel Monaco in Salt Lake City, Utah. Behold the pictures:
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The lovely King sized bed. |
One of the more interesting inclusions in the giftpack: the Intimacy Kit. It includes 2 prophylactics, 1 package lubricating jelly, and 2 obstetrical towelettes. I’m interested in the fact that 2 condoms are included, but only one package of lubricating jelly. |
My new best friend. The Monaco will loan you a goldfish for your room to help you feel less lonely. I can’t say that the goldfish is as cuddly as either Betsy or my kitties, but it’ll do in a pinch. |
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The interesting giftpack at the door. I don’t really need the stuffed goldfish, but it is an interesting selection of candy and such. Props for the Altoids, the Jelly Belly’s, and for including a bunch of locally made foods. |
The cool-as-hell cheetah print terrycloth robe. |
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Folksonomies and flat hierarchies
Sometimes when a new technology hits the Interweb, especially the blogosphere, it just spreads like a virus. Two of these things are Folksonomies and Flat namespaces. A flat namespace is a form of faceted classification (something that may or may not have popped up in some of your time at SILS) . The most popular sites that are good examples of this are del.icio.us, Flickr, and Gmail. For those of you not familiar with any of these, the big deal about a flat namespace (especially those mentioned above) is that content is given metadata by either the user or the community, which allows for filtering/searching of the data by its tags.
I’m just starting to play with del.icio.us, and I’ll say that it certainly looks like an interesting way to deal with classification, and is radically different than the hierarchical methods traditionally used by libraries (Dewey and the Library of Congress system). Imagine this: a library system that, via RFID tagged books and the right cataloging system, allows for users to virtually tag the books in the system. Given a large enough user base, a library could build a HUGE amount of data not only about their collection, but about how people use the collection. You may never expect people to catagorize books the way they do, and finding out how they see your books may give you a ton of information about circulation patterns and collection development that you would have never had otherwise.
Of course, you’ll still need a tradtional system like LoC for locating the works…for physical organization there’s still a need for some form of heirarchy. But if you add on top of that a searchable layer of user tags, we might have an exciting new way of dealing with physical information.
So we’re laying around last night, trying to decide what to have for dinner. I’m leaning towards the Quidnunc Cafe, which serves excellent sandwiches and calzones here on the mountain. Here’s a transcript of the exchange between Betsy and I:
Me: “Come on…you know you want a yummy calzone. You can put anything you want in it, and they bake it all golden brown…”
Betsy: “Like Paris Hilton?”
🙂 There’s a reason I love the girl. 🙂
An interesting event today online that I’m calling “instant commercialism.” Here’s the breakdown:
- At roughly 10:03 am, someone named Jeremy emails BoingBoing about a picture in a slideshow on the MSNBC site for the Bush Inauguration that features the First Daughter Jenna Bush showing off the manu cornuta. Here’s the BoingBoing post.
- Someone points out that the MSNBC site has taken the pic down and replaced it with some shots of fireworks, but mentions that it would make a great parody T-shirt a la this one from the guys at Penny Arcade.
- At 12:30pm, Grant Henninger has the photo photoshopped and ready, and a Cafepress site ready with the shirts for sale.
Of course…Jenna is probably not pledging her allegiance to either rock or the Dark One, but is more likely giving the “horns” from the University of Texas where she is a student. Judging from the fact that her mom and dad have both been caught on camera doing it, seems a family kinda thing.
In any case…in a roughly two hour period we went from “odd pic of first daughter” to “buy the t-shirt”. Behold the power of the Internet!
…I’m going to go so broke.
I just found CMH Records, a recording company that specializes in bluegrass cover albums. Covers of what, you may ask yourself…the answer turns out to be….well…freaking everything.
There’s the expected: String Cheese Incident, Phish
The sort of makes sense: Bruce Springsteen (Vol. 1 and 2), John Mayer, Counting Crows
The yes-we-are-hip: Modest Mouse, The White Stripes
The WTF were they smoking: Metallica, Guns-n-Roses
At the very least, I’ve got to get the Counting Crows album, and maybe one of the Springsteen’s for Betsy. I’m greatly tempted by the Metallica, though.
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When I take over the world…
I want one of these as my secret escape pod. I’m sure that I could rig it up with some appropriate hover jets/rocket pods/antigravity units.
Short of that, I just want one as a cool little hideaway. Would be a great place to hide and write, or just as a treehouse to re-enact childhood pirate/ninja/spaceman fantasies.
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One reason I will own a Mac Mini
Among the many, many reasons that I will ensure that a Mac Mini is purchased this year are:
- I want a DVR, but don’t want to let Tivo or whoever decide to shut out something with DRM.
- I want a dedicated box to manage my digital media, including music and video.
- I’ve used Macs for a long time for business related things (photo editting, layout, etc.) but never owned one. It’s about time.
- There is amazingly freaking great software like Delicious Library out there, and it’s NOT for Windows.
- It’s got BSD underneath the OS, and it’s trivial to run linux programs from a command line.
- OS X has built in support for a webserver, file server, etc…
This is just another cool way to view Google results, but wow…it’s an amazing piece of coding.