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.

Categories
ALA Media Personal Podcasts

Podcast Experiment

audiobooI discovered an audio tool the other day that was too well done and too interesting not to use in some way. Audioboo is currently an iPhone only audio blogging application that knocked my socks off when I tried it out. You sign up for an account, and download the application from the iTunes store.

Once you have the app installed, you can use it to record up to 5 minutes of audio, title it, tag it, attach a photo, and hit send…up it goes to the Audioboo site, and to your personal page.  If that’s all it gave you, it would still be a great app, but it goes the full 2.0 route and automatically feeds your audio into iTunes podcast store for download via iTunes. It gives you a raw RSS feed which you can do with as you will, and even supports embedding of the “boo” anywhere else on the web. Oh, and of course, it with Twitter for you. Here are my first two tries at playing with this new tool:

Listen!

Listen!

I’m going to play with this a bit at ALA Annual 2009 in Chicago, maybe track some people down and do flash interviews with them. Try and find something interesting to share, and see if this tool answers some questions on making media available to the masses.

So: Keep your eyes on this space, or even better, subscribe to the RSS feed directly. Let me know what you think, and see if this tool gives you another option when it comes to creating and distributing media.

Categories
podcast Podcasts

Driven Batty By Worldcat

View at audioboo.fm

Categories
podcast Podcasts

No Internets!

View at audioboo.fm

Categories
ALA BIGWIG PPC

Midsummer update

It’s been, unfortunately, another big gap in my blogging here. But I’ve been busy!

  • I finished my new book manuscript, and sent it merrily off to Neal Schuman for review.
  • I worked overtime trying to ensure that our new Academic Library got included in the state of TN budget.
  • I’m trying to, if not revolutionize, and least evolutionize the program planning process for LITA.
  • And I’m preparing for what looks like 3 different presentations at ALA Annual 2009:
    • Unconference on Friday at 9:15am at the Palmer House Hilton, Northwest 5 Room
    • OITP Libraries and Mobile Devices Public Policy panel on Sunday at 1:30 in McCormick place West, room W-192a
    • BIGWIG Social Software Showcase on Monday morning at 10:30 in McCormick place West room w-184

If you are attending ALA Annual 2009, please come join me at one of the talks above. I promise not to be too boring. 🙂

That, and a real job, will keep anyone busy, I think. But every time I fail to blog for a week or so, I feel guilty about it. I keep expecting to log in to PatRec, and have it be passive-agressive that I did so: “Oh, so glad that you could visit…no, no, it’s no problem that you’ve been gone so long. Here, let me just warm up the “add new” link for you. It’s not a problem, really.”

Categories
Media Technology

Death of Newspapers

As with many things, the Daily Show nails the death spiral of the newspaper with absurdity and humor. My favorite line in the whole piece is “Find me anything in here that happened today.”

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview
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Gaming

WordPress 2.8

Version 2.8 of WordPress is now official, codenamed “Baker,” and I just upgraded this very blog. Most impressive thing so far is just the raw speed of the admin interface. It’s many times faster than 2.7.1. I’m looking forward to seeing what else the upgrade has brought with it!

Categories
Gaming

Advice for Academic Librarians v.2

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click to Play

Interview that I did with Lauren Pressley for ACRL on advice for academic librarians.
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Technology Twitter

Catching the Wave

No sooner do I mentioned the thinking I’ve been doing about Proactive Reference, and Google throws all my thinking into a tailspin. Just a few days ago, Google announced a brand new product, called Google Wave. So what is Google Wave? It’s not easy to grok at first glance, but a the elevator pitch might be: Communication for the 21st Century. It takes the most popular communication formats (email, IM, Txt) and mashes them together with the new, real-time web (Twitter, Friendfeed, etc) and you get something that is greater than both parts.

There’s a TON to say about this, and at first blush I’m going to bet that it’s the biggest revolution in communication online since the invention of email. It’s both a platform and protocol, and will push existing thought-leaders like Twitter to open up in ways they might not be ready for.

Here’s a video of the launch preview…I’m trying hard not to gush about the possibilities. Look for much, much more on this from me over the next few weeks.

Categories
Personal

Wolfram|Alpha post at TechSource

Forgot to mention here that I have a new post up over at ALA TechSource about Wolfram|Alpha and how libraries can use it.

Check it out! I’m playing with W|A and still thinking a lot about proactive reference these days, while I put the finishing touches on my Mobile Technology and Libraries book for Neal Schuman that will coming out sometime in the Fall as a part of a 10 book “Tech Set”. Once I get the manuscript turned in, expect to see a lot more rambling in this space.

Categories
Library Issues Twitter

Proactive reference

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about something I’m calling “proactive reference.” The way I’m thinking about it, proactive reference is the monitoring of the real-time web (Twitter, Friendfeed, Seesmic, etc) by librarians who answer questions relating to their area or specialty, whether subject or geographically based. Public librarians who answer questions by searching for mentions of their city, county, or library, and Academic libraries who monitor for mentions of their university are two examples, but are many more possibilities.

I’m doing a bit of it now, just to see how effective it is at marketing the library’s services and such. Is anyone else out there actively monitoring these communication channels right now? My instinct is that this is going to be a HUGE market in a very short time, and that libraries should dive in fast and get used to it.