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.
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.”
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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 | ||||
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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!
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Advice for Academic Librarians v.2
Interview that I did with Lauren Pressley for ACRL on advice for academic librarians.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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InfoLink Tech is IT Day 2009
On Thursday, I’ll be speaking on the campus of Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ for InfoLink’s 6th Annual Tech is IT day. I was asked to talk about podcasts and videocasts, and given two and a half hours total to try and educate people about practical how-to stuff about both.
This will be the first speaking gig where I’m going to try and do the trip with my Hackintosh (a Dell Mini 9 running OSX). I’ve tested the video-out, and aside from a minor glitch it works well. Keynote runs well on it, and I’m curious how it will hold up displaying Keynote and recording audio at the same time, but we’ll see!
As long as the recording holds out, I’ll post my talk, along with slides and such, next week. If you’re going to be at Tech is IT day, make sure you say hi!