Author: 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.

Categories
Books Library Issues Media

A shot across the bow

If you had any doubts that Amazon’s Lending Library was eventually going to compete with public libraries, here’s where your doubts get shattered. From Amazon’s homepage today, on the announcement of all 7 Harry Potter books entering the Kindle Lending Library program:

With traditional library lending, the library buys a certain number of e-book copies of a particular title. If all of those are checked out, you have to get on a waiting list….the wait can sometimes be months.

With the Kindle Owners Lending Library, there are no due dates, you can borrow as frequently as once a month, and there are no limits on how many people can borow the same title…

The full image of the announcement is included after the click:

Continue reading “A shot across the bow”
Categories
Personal Sewanee

The beauty of Sewanee

Here, in a time-lapse by Steven Alvarez, is 3 minutes of why we live here in Sewanee. Man, is it beautiful.

The Light from Stephen Alvarez on Vimeo.

Client: University of the South

Music by Boy Named Banjo

http://boynamedbanjo.bandcamp.com/

24 hours on the campus of the University of the South.

The original page for the video is

http://give.sewanee.edu/thelight/

There is no video in this video.

I shot 27,000 images in the course of 3 weeks. Around 5,000 appear in the finished video.

Everything was shot as Canon raw, converted in Adobe Lightroom and edited in Apple Final Cut Pro.

Motion control is with a Dynamic Perceptions Stage Zero Dolly.

Cameras were Canon 5D MK II, the MK IIIs didn’t fit into my workflow.

lens are all Canon

16-35mm L 2.8 model 2

24mm L 1.4

34mm L 1.4

50mm L 1.2

70-200mm L IS 2.8

85mm 1.8

300mm L 4

Categories
Library Issues Media podcast

Bibliotech Podcast

I was lucky enough to be the guest on the Dquarium Bibliotech podcast earlier this week, and had a great time talking to Kayhan, Erin, and Doug. We talked about library technology, the Librarybox project, ebooks, and more. Listen in, and if you have any questions feel free to drop them in the comments.

Categories
ALA TechSource

Gadgets in the Library Workshop

On two days in May I will be doing a workshop for ALA Techsource called Gadgets in the Library: A Practical Guide to Personal Electronics for Librarians. If you or your library is interested in managing tablets, ereaders, or other gadgets for staff or patron use, and if you’re interested in hearing about where I think gadgets in libraries are going in the next 2-3 years, spend 3 hours with me. I’ll help you get comfortable with gadgets and try to give you options for how to deal with them.

When: May 10th and 24th from 2:30pm until 4pm Eastern time
Where: Online! Listen from your desk?
Who: You! Or if you’ve got a handful of people that are interested, get a discount with the group rate.
Why: Because you want help with managing personal electronics in the library
How: Register here.

Categories
Library Issues

Commoditizing our complements

In business and economics, there is a concept that is often expressed with the phrase “Commoditize your complement”. A complementary product is has some form of necessary connection to the product in question…the usual example is automobiles and gasoline. As Joel Spolsky puts it:

A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants. In a small town, when the local five star restaurant has a two-for-one Valentine’s day special, the local babysitters double their rates. (Actually, the nine-year-olds get roped into early service.)

All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.

Thus the concept of commoditizing (making available uniformly and interchangably) your complement. If you can decrease the cost of your complement, you by necessity increase the cost of your product. Microsoft learned this very early, and went on to great success, making hardware (the complement to it’s product, software) a commodity product…it didn’t matter if you bought from Dell, or Gateway, or Asus, or IBM, or Lenovo, or…the list goes and on. Those companies struggled to make money in a market driven to complete interchangability, while Microsoft made billions on software. A reversal of this strategy, as Marco Arment has pointed out, is Apple is attempting to commoditize software via its iOS and Mac App Stores, because its product (where they make their profit) is the hardware.

My questions to the library world: What is our product? What should we be commoditizing in order to make our product more valuable? The concept isn’t just about money, it’s about market values, even when the market in question isn’t measured in dollars but in reputation, importance, and community value. What should we be pushing to commodity so that our business becomes more valuable to our communities?

I have my theories, but want to hear yours.

 

Categories
Media

Guest on Bibliotech

On Monday, April 23rd, I’ll be the guest on the BiblioTech Podcast, talking about technology, gadgets, LibraryBox, and whatever else the gang decides to ask. As soon as it’s done, I’ll post the link to the audio here.

Categories
ALA Gadgets presentation TechSource

My Spring

I’ve got a few things going on this Spring that I felt I should promote here on the blog, just to tie together some interesting content that people might be interested in. So here’s a quick look at what I’m either doing or working on over the next few months.

This coming Monday, April 16th, I will be speaking at the Southern Illinois University LIS Spring Symposium about the Post-PC Era, which should be a lot of fun. I’m always excited to meet with new librarians, so this should be fun.

Coming sometime this month is Gadgets & Gizmos II: Libraries and the Post-PC Era (link forthcoming), a Library Technology Report from ALA TechSource that is a followup to my 2010 LTR on Gadgets and Personal Electronics. In it, I take a look at how the world of personal electronics has changed in two years (TL;DR version: A LOT) as well as some new tech that libraries are either just starting to implement (3D printing) and some trends that I see coming in the next couple of years (health and other personal data tracking, drones).

The thing that I am maybe most excited about is that this is the first Library Technology Report that will be Creative Commons Licensed. It will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which is a big experiment for ALA publishing. I intentionally asked to allow derivatives, because I’m very curious what might spring from that. I’m also very interested in how a CC license will effect sales of the LTR…most LTRs rely on subscription sales for the vast majority of their volume, but I wanted to try to reach as many people as possible. But it still makes ALA Publishing a bit nervous, I think, to have the CC on it, at least if you judge from the amount of time it took to get it ok’d.

And then finally, I’ll be doing a webinar for Techsource based on that very same tech report, a 2 day online workshop on May 10th and 24th titled “Gadgets in the Library: A Practical Guide to Personal Electronics for Librarians“. The workshop is going to be a great mix of practical advice for the management of tablets and eReaders (and other personal electronics…leave a comment if you want me to cover something specific!) and a look at some of the newly-affordable hardware coming down the road in the next year or so.

In June I’ll be attending the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, and will be meeting with various LITA groups, as well as the  Library BoingBoing/LibraryLab Members group. I’m also hoping to catch up with the LITA CodeYear IG, which has some cool things starting to come together. Exciting stuff happening at Annual, I hope you’ll come join me!

Categories
Gadgets LibraryBox Media Personal Technology

LibraryBox

What is LibraryBox? It’s my newest hack, a hardware and software project that takes the “pirate” out of PirateBox to produce a tiny, battery-powered, linux-based, anonymous file server capable of serving arbitrary types of digital files to anyone with a wifi-enabled device.

But, you may ask, what is it for? It’s for any situation where you need to distribue digital files but don’t have or don’t want Internet access. LibraryBox is based on a fork of the PirateBox project, using the TP-Link MR-3020 router, an 802.11n router that is capable of running on a USB 5 volt power source. This means that for about $40 and some time, you can have a file server that fits in your pocket. I loaded my demo unit with the top 100 Public Domain ebooks from Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, and hooked it up to an iPad battery pack that will run it for 16 hours.

This means I can be a walking digital library, giving people access to eBooks anywhere I happen to have the LibraryBox. These could be used in a million different ways, from bringing eBooks, Audio, even movies to areas with digital devices but without Internet access to just being a personal file server for conference slides or other resources.

More information, including pictures and such, are all up on the LibraryBox website. The code is all licensed under the GPL and is available on Github. Several people have looked at the project, and I’m hoping that others will see the value and help me make it better. There’s lots of improvements possible, and I (and hopefully many others) will be working on making the process easier and better for users.

Categories
Gadgets presentation

Computers in Libraries 2012

At CiL2012 I did a preconference about management of personal electronics called “Personal Electronics & the Library”. Here are the slides from that presentation, for your perusal:

Computers in libraries 2012

Categories
ALA LITA

Interview the LITA Presidential Nominees

LITA has amazing people on its ballot this year, but you don’t need to take my word for it…you can help make sure that the issues you think are the most important for LITA and ALA at large are put directly before the two candidates for President, Cindi Trainor and Aaron Dobbs. How, you ask? Go to this Google Moderator page and put your question there…Andromeda Yelton will be organizing these and getting them to the candidates to be answered. All of their responses will be put up on LITABlog.

Help us make these elections the most transparent and communicative in LITA’s history…ask your questions!