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.
I presented an encore of my VALA2012 presentation to librarians in Perth as well, at Curtin University. Here’s a recording of that particular presentation, where you can better see some of the slide effects and design choices that I talked about previously. The audio isn’t fabulous, but is serviceable and the video came out quite well.
I re-tweeted Roy Tennant to try and bring some more eyeballs to this exceptional blog post by Nicolas Morin, entitled Engineers Crashing Our Gates, but had to follow it up here. So much goodness to be mined from this post!
I was lucky enough to interview Jason Chen via email about his new ebook startup Storybundle. He had some interesting things to say about the ebook market. Unsurprisingly, as a new ebook startup, he didn’t even consider libraries at first.
As to whether or not this is good for libraries, at the current time I hadn’t even considered libraries, so I’m going to aim for personal use for the first few bundles and see where things go from there. It depends heavily on the author, because the promo is a limited time thing, and making a sale to a library becomes a forever thing.
I had a handful of people at VALA 2012 ask me not about the content of the talk (although I got a ton of those) but about how it was I put together and ran the presentation itself. My goal with the presentation was to make it look and run like no other presentation that people had seen…I don’t think I got 100% of what I wanted to achieve, but I got about 75% of the way there, and definitely got the idea across. I told a few people that what I wanted was for my presentation to look like something out of Harry Potter, something that was surprising and magical.
So how did I do it? I create all of my presentations in Keynote, the Apple presentation tool. It’s slide-based in the same way that Powerpoint is, but Keynote makes it very easy to produce awesome looking presentations. Honestly, the difference in the two couldn’t be more apparent as soon as you start using them. Keynote makes things like spacing, fonts, effects so smooth and easy that there’s no excuse for bad slides.
You may want to give these images a second to load…they’re pretty huge animated gifs. They were the easiest/fastest way I could think of to show off some of my animated slides.
One of Keynote’s strengths, especially in relation to Powerpoint, is that it handles media very, very smoothly. When I started thinking about my VALA 2012 presentation, I made the choice to include a ton of video content, including animated backgrounds for some of my slides. Some of these were animated gif files, and some of them were Quicktime videos (or other formats that I converted to Quicktime via IVI Video Converter). Keynote has controls available for Quicktime files built-in, allowing you to choose a start frame, end frame, poster frame, and whether or not the video (or gif!) loop, or loop back-and-forth. So I collected or created the videos and gifs and then used Keynote to set their start and stop times, and in the case of some of the gif backgrounds, whether they should loop directly, or loop back-and-forth. This gave the presentation a very distinct feel.
To drive the presentation, I use the Keynote Remote app for the iPad, which links to Keynote on your Mac via either Wifi or Bluetooth (but NOT BOTH…that can be really weird). This lets you use the iPad as a remote, moving from slide to slide and seeing your Presenter Notes as well (you do know that Keynote and Powerpoint both have a Presenter View…right?). So the iPad is my “cheat sheet” for the presentation, showing me where I am and my notes for that slide.
If it all works, it’s brilliant! If it doesn’t (and sometimes it doesn’t…wifi goes down, bluetooth is being flaky, tech gremlins act up) then we need to have a plan B…or C, or sometimes D. I always have a backup presentation remote with me, just in case, and I always know my presentation well enough that I don’t need my notes, mostly, to do the talk.
Between the ease with which Keynote makes beautiful slides, the iPad as a remote to make my life easier, and a bit of aesthetic judgement in the arrangement and choice of images (if it helps, I like to think of my slides as the set of of a play), I think that you can put on a pretty compelling presentation.
If you’d like to see the presentation in full, a full videocast of it is online. It’s not exactly as it was in person, as the slides didn’t always get captured as video, but it’s as close as you’ll come without being there. 🙂
My talk from VALA2012 is now up and online! Please take a look, and let me know what you think. I’ll have the slides up separately, but the live show is a better way to get a feel for the presentation.
Very interesting announcement today from Jason Chen, tech blogger of Lifehacker and formerly of Gizmodo. He’s getting out of the tech blogging business and launching an ebook startup, StoryBundle. From the StoryBundle site:
You know those indie video game bundles where you pay what you want for a batch of quality titles? We’re like that, but for ebooks.
We give you a handful of ebooks (about five or so) for a low price that you choose, all DRM-free, delivered to your ereader.
We only choose quality independent authors so you can be sure what you’re buying is good. Plus, you decide how much these books are worth. Great reads delivered cheaply without killing a single tree? That’s something everybody can feel good about.
Very, very interesting. I have a huge number of questions, mainly: how can he possibly hope to compete against Amazon in this space? I suppose the idea is that DRM free and name-your-price luring readers, but I’m not sure why that will lure authors. I can’t imagine that it’s a better deal for authors in terms of either reach or profit. But it’s a really interesting experiment, and we all know that we need more models for this stuff. I’ve got a request for an interview out to Jason…I’m very curious as to how this model might work with libraries.
At CES 2012, I had a chance to talk with Bre Pettis, CEO of Makerbot Industries, about how libraries and 3D printing can be a really, really great match. Take a look at the video…I’ll be writing a LOT more about 3D printing in the near future, or you can go back and see some of the stuff I’ve already written.
Here’s a product that intrigued me, but I can’t really nail down why. It’s not immediately apparent what sort of problem this solves. But it was interesting enough that I’d love to see if anyone out there sees a use for libraries. I’m going to see how it works for writing practice with my daughter, so there could be an instructional use for toddlers…
Here’s a look at color eInk, the next generation of the technology currently found in just about every eReader on the market. This particular screen (the eInk Triton display) is good for just over 4000 colors, and certainly isn’t the fastest page-turn we’ve seen…but the display is very, very pretty. Great contrast, sharp lines, and the color really adds a lot to the feel of the thing. Check it out:
Some more video from CES 2012, this time a new presentation/smartboard from InFocus with some interesting features, the best of which didn’t make the video. I was told after I stopped filming that the software that drives it can use the Windows web tools/IIS to make the display publicly available to the web…so with just an IP address, you could share everything that was happening on the board to the world. That’s pretty cool!