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.
Just in case you follow me here, but not over at my American Libraries blog, Perpetual Beta: I’m holding a contest where I am giving away a copy of my newest book, Mobile Technology & Libraries. All you have to do is create a Google Search Story about libraries, and post it in the comments over at PB.
Free book, people! Show me your creativity!
If all goes according to plan, we should have an internal testing WebScale Management site very early next week…Monday or Tuesday. There’s still a boatload to be done in the next 2 weeks, but it’s almost all tiny, tiny weird sets of data (microform bib records that have the print OCLC number attached to them instead of the Microform one). We’re still working on getting good data from our campus student information system, Banner, but I feel like that will get sorted soon.
If stuff works like we hope, we’re are still on track for a go-live on August 20th. It won’t be 100% there…we’ll still be fiddling with pieces of data for a few weeks, I’m guessing. But we’ll be 98.92% or so there, and that’s good enough for me. We will gain more functionality on August 30th, as the Web Scale software gets updated, and that’s when we’re expecting the full go-live to happen.
I can’t believe that it’s been 2 weeks since we announced that we were going to be transitioning to the OCLC Web Scale Management ILS, and that I haven’t blogged in the meantime. Although to be clear, the second is a direct result of the first.
We have been working like mad to make this admittedly insane timeline work. I’m pretty sure that my ILS Manager/Queen of All Data Andrea worked 100 hours that first week, moving data around and massaging it into what OCLC wanted from us for Web Scale. As the first live site, we volunteered to take upon ourselves a huge amount of the data manipulation, so Andrea has been moving MARC out of Virtua, into Access to manipulate, and then finally through an XSD to provide OCLC with the final mapped XML for all the fiddly-bits of data. We’re also dumping huge amounts of MARC directly, but for non-bib records (holdings, items, patrons, etc) we’re doing a ton of conversion.
This isn’t to say this is the way that everyone will do it…but with our somewhat aggressive schedule, we were determined to give them whatever made it easiest to make WMS happen.
I’d like to publicly thank everyone at MPOW who have really put themselves out on a big limb to help with this implementation. We’ve got three major working groups doing different parts of this massive job, and all of them are digging in and getting stuff done. I’m so, so proud of the team that I work with at UTC…serious, I couldn’t have hand-picked a better group of librarians. They freaking rock.
We’re still on track for an August 20th launch, and we’ll be rolling WorldCat Local to our patrons before the full go-live….so we’ve got just short of 3 weeks to finish this thing off. Between now and then we’ve got to finish the little troublesome data sets, get an updated patron file ready, start a marketing blitz on campus for our patrons, get a redesigned index page up for the website that highlights WorldCat Local, and kick the hell out of some really, really shiny new tires.
I am very pleased to finally be able to announce that the Library at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is scheduled to be the first live implementation of a product that has been talked about for years: a web-based, collaborative, modern library system that does away with silos of data. We are implementing the OCLC Web Scale Management library system even as I type, and will be going live with the system for circulation on August 20, 2010, and with circulation, cataloging, and acquisitions on August 30, 2010. A wiki page documenting the process, working groups, and more is available, and will continue to be updated as the process continues.
I could talk for a long time about how excited I am about the possibilities of this system…and probably will for the next few months at least. I’ve been pursuing Andrew Pace about this product for what feels like years now, and after seeing it and understanding what may come as a result of this…well, I can’t wait.
This is a major shift in the library world, and it’s one where I think the repercussions will take years to really be felt. The simple time-saving that will be immediately felt for libraries in their processes are enormous…the workflow necessary to get something from order to shelf is so straightforward and fast that I feel strongly that we’ll save several person-years of staff time in short order. In addition, there is a shared-plugin architecture for the staff-side that combines with the open API calls that give incredible access for mashups of data that directly interact with the system. One example that I’ve seen is a plugin that combines the New York Times bestseller API with the acquisitions module in Web Scale to allow for single-click ordering from a list of bestsellers that is a live call from the NYT.
Going the other direction, the architecture allows you to pull your own data out and impose it on other pages. An example of this would be a Firefox plugin that shows you realtime budget information while you shop on Amazon.com…complete with recalculation as you add things to your Cart.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t a ton of questions still. We’re the earliest of adopters on the first product of its kind…to say that I am a bit nervous would be an understatement. But the potential and promise of Web Scale is something that make it worth it.
We are literally implementing Web Scale Management in 30 days. To my knowledge, I’ve never heard of another ILS migration even approaching this level of speed…so if I’m a little out-of-touch for the next month, you won’t be terribly surprised.
Just a quick apology for the software failure for the ALA Techsource Tech Trends webinar that was scheduled for today. There was clearly a massive failure of scaling for the new presentation software.
I’m holding off a day or so in posting my slides + comments, just to see if we can get it rescheduled and I can take part then. If for some reason I can’t, I’ll get my slides and comments up here asap.
Two days ago, I noticed some odd flickering on the lower fifth of my iPad screen, and shortly thereafter I got some very odd banding/video artifacts in the same area. It didn’t seem to have any obvious cause that I could recreate, and last night, this happened:
Needless to say, today I called Apple, and as always they were awesome about getting it fixed. There is a new iPad on its way to me even as I type, and I’ll throw this one in the box and send it back.
This looks like a faulty display or video cable to me…somewhere, a connection is shorting out. Can’t really troubleshoot a hardware issue on this sort of thing, so back it goes…and I’m actually just fine with that. Because of the iTunes syncing, I’ll be able to plug the new one in and restore it, and go right on about my business.
Here’s the MASSIVE slideshow from the preconference I was a part of for ACRL at the ALA Annual Conference just this past weekend. I was thrilled to be able to present with the team from my library, including the Dean of the Library Theresa Liedtka, our Head of Reference & Instruction Virginia Cairns, our curmudgeonly but kind Assistant Dean & Head of Materials Processing Mike Bell, and our current ILS Manager & Web Technologies Librarian and former Head of Access Services Andrea Schurr. A powerhouse of a team, I think we gave a great preconference about the process behind our renovations and new building. It’s a massive file, but it was also nearly 7 hours worth of content. Enjoy!
Here’s a collection of the entire Battledecks experience. Crazy funny, and awesomely inventive folks. <wayne&garth> I’m not worthy! I’m not worthy!</wayne&garth>
In preparation for ordering iPhone 4, I went about adjusting our AT&T plans this evening…the new tiered pricing actually works out for us, as Betsy rarely uses over 200Megs of data a month. As I was switching her over, I read this amazingly silly EULA from AT&T:
DataPlus 200 MB for iPhone
Terms and Conditions
DataPlus 200MB for iPhone may only be used for the following purposes: (i) internet browsing, (ii) personal email, and (iii) consumer applications. Using iPhone to access corporate email, company intranet sites, and/or other business solutions/applications is prohibited.
Bwahahahaha. Corporate email is prohibited? WTF? Talk about your unenforceable EULA’s….you can’t visit an intranet, for frak’s sake? Seriously, AT&T? Seriously?
And you wonder why people hate you.
After some prodding from Glenn in the comments of my post on Goodreader and the iPad, it turns out that the security culprit doesn’t look like it’s Goodreader at all. It’s the Port 4242 that gave it away, and much thanks to Glenn for pointing it out…I was too concerned with publishing fast, and didn’t follow up the details as well as I should have.
It looks like Goodreader lets you SEE any shared iPad on wifi, but it doesn’t share openly in the way that I described. The bad guy here appears to be QuickOffice, which DOES use port 4242 and share files by default across a shared wifi LAN. I could see in Goodreader the files that someone else had on their iPad in QuickOffice…not the normal set of events for the iOS devices, as the file systems are normally sandboxed to not allow that to happen.
So: revised security alert! If you use QuickOffice on your iOS device (iPhone, iTouch, iPad) please ensure that you have sharing off by default, so that others aren’t able to see your stuff at all.