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.
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Homepage Update
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks monkeying with different looks and feels for a homepage update. For a long while, I’ve had my homepage set as a lifestream, running SweetCron, but decided awhile back that with my tenure dossier coming due that I would like to rework it into something more polished. Also, the lifestream presented me as what I’m doing, and didn’t adequately represent either what I’ve done, nor what I’d like to do in the future.
So: redesign!
I wanted something clean, without a ton of design overhead, but also something that was flexible enough to take whatever I thought to throw at it. I also decided that I wanted to try using a pre-existing framework, specifically as CSS framework, and then tweak it to my needs. After looking around a bit, I decided to use Blueprint, a lovely CSS framework that allowed me to not worry about positioning, other than to figure out how Blueprint does it. Blueprint is extensible, and I wanted tabs, so off I went to the Blueprint Tab plugin.
The basic icons for my “social” tab were found here, and I took the look/feel and created a handful that they didn’t have using Photoshop. I also created the “rollover” images for everything using photoshop, and am using a clever little javascript simpleswap to handle that bit. I also had to install jquery for the first time, for the tab fade effect.
Other tools used in putting this together include: Blip.tv and slideshare for the presentations and videos, scribd for my CV, FriendFeed for my Lifestream, and Meebo and Google Voice for the Contact page.
After getting all the pieces in place, it took some time to work out the bugs. My wife convinced me to stick with the black/green scheme that I’ve been using for years…I’ve used it since graduate school, and I like it because it reminds me of the good old days with the green phosphor CRT terminals.
See what you think, and I’d love to have any feedback, especially if it’s broken in some way. 🙂
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The Gospel of Good Enough
Incredible article in Wired this month on the Good Enough Revolution, which explores and explains a set of emergent economic principles that I think are equally applicable to information seeking. There’s a degree to which we really need to start looking hard at economic models in library and information science…I think they can really inform the creation and distribution of the services that we offer. Check out this quote, for example…
…it happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products. You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough…
At the OITP panel I was a part of at ALA, I think that Eli and I shocked a few people in the audience when we asserted that quality of information doesn’t matter. That isn’t to say it NEVER matters…I want my doctor and my lawyer to have the best information possible. But for the vast majority of information need, good enough is good enough.
Think about the services in your library, and the amount of effort and resources poured into making your services as good as they can possibly be. What if good enough is really enough, and instead we should be expanding our range of services instead of seeking perfection in any single one? How does that change the way libraries operate?
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Google Wave and Igor
For the BIGWIG Showcase this year, I talked about and put together a presentation on Google Wave, and what I think it will do to library services. One of the things I talked about was the ability for software robots to watch the Wave, and alter it in specific ways. Well, it looks like we’ve got our first bibliographic example of this, with Igor. Stew over at Flags & Lollipops has put together a robot that will watch a given Wave for mentions of citations, and then query and automagically fill in footnotes from PubMed, Connotea, or CiteULike (for now, I’m sure that Zotero and other coverage is easily possible).
I’ve got no idea how he did this, given that Wave isn’t public yet…but the demo shows what’s going to be possible with Wave. Take a look, and get ready….Wave might change everything. You may need to click through and enlarge the player to really see what’s going on.
Igor – a Google Wave robot to manage your references from Stew Fnl on Vimeo.
Igor is a robot for Google Wave written in Java and running on Google App Engine.
It allows users to pull in references from PubMed & personal libraries on Connotea or CiteULike by querying services with keywords that they supply inline with the article you’re writing.
From the LITA listserv, and because I’m doing a preconference that should be a lot of fun:
The early bird registration deadline has been extended for the 2009 LITA National Forum, October 1-4, 2009 in Salt Lake City. Now is your opportunity to realize excellent savings on registration for the forum. Registration rates are $50 lower through August 31– Register Now: http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/registration.cfm
Keynote Sessions Feature Dynamic Speakers:
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/keynote.cfm
On Friday Joan Lippincott of Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) will kick off the Forum with her talk Mobile Technologies, Mobile Users: Will Libraries Mobilize? Lippincott will discuss what roles libraries can and should play in delivering content for mobile devices, developing services for mobile device users and configuring physical spaces to respond to their needs.
Saturday, David Weinberger will present Knowledge in the Age of Abundance. Weinberger will examine how our new connected age is one of abundant and ready access to knowledge and how this is bringing a change in the nature, shape, value and role of knowledge itself.
Liz Lawley of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology will close the Forum on Sunday with Technical/Tangible/Social. Lawley’s talk will cover the growing importance of “social objects†in technology implementation, and how those objects serve as a focal point for cohesive social interactions.
Preconferences Offer In-Depth Examination of Topics:
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/precon.cfm
Choose between two full-day workshops, spanning Thursday afternoon and Friday morning:
Jason Griffey of University of Tennessee, Chattanooga will present The Future of Mobile. The workshop will examine the future of mobile technologies and their impact on libraries, including how service models in libraries change with ubiquitous computing and how content delivery becomes different. Attendees will look at specific tools that are currently available that model the direction that mobile is moving.
Accessibility Update: Section 508 and WCAG in a Library 2.0 World, presented by Nina McHale of the University of Colorado, Denver will provide an introduction to Section 508 and WCAG Web accessibility guidelines and how they relate to online library tools. The workshop will include demonstrations of popular assistive technologies and guidelines for optimizing library resources to comply with Section 508 and WCAG.
Visit the LITA Web site for more information on the Forum including concurrent and poster sessions, travel and lodging, and complete Forum schedule.
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/index.cfm
Be sure to Connect with Forum participants on Facebook and the Forum wiki:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php??eid=34666759559#/event.php
http://wikis.ala.org/lita/index.php/2009_LITA_National_Forum
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Seen on campus today
A new use for a figure 8 descender. For those who haven’t seen one, that’s an aluminum figure 8, used in rappelling. Or, in this case, an umbrella holder.
I’ve been trying to find ways to enliven PatRec for awhile now, as I don’t post as much as I used to, and some of my energy/content has drifted off to other shores (Audioboo, TechSource, etc). I think I finally found a solution that I can use: FeedWordpress.
It’s a plugin that pulls RSS, and throws it into my timeline here on the blog. While I’m not going to be feeding in everything (no Twitter or Friendfeed) I do want my audioboo feed, and my Tumblr feed, to repost here. I’ll probably set up a Posterous as well to feed in, and then, no matter what kind of access I have, I can get things posted easily and quickly. We’ll see how this goes.
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Testing tumble
Testing tumble