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.
The presentation slides and video are coming, I promise! I’m having a hell of a time getting the audio to work the way I want, and when you have 2 hours at night to figure it out, and each time you render the video takes 2.5 hours…well, you don’t get much done.
So: it’s coming, soon.
Really.
Thanks to my coworker Andrea for the wording below…we have a quandary at MPOW, and we’re trying to work out the best answer. We need your help in seeing other ways of handling the situation. So: to the question!
The context:
Here at UTC, we require our patrons to login with a username and password to use our library’s public computers. Current UTC students, faculty, and staff have these logins, but other library guests (alumni, patrons who have purchased courtesy cards, people who walk-in off the street) do not.At present, our Reference Librarians use a guest account to login courtesy card patrons (alumni, retired faculty/staff, those who purchase a courtesy card etc.) and faculty/staff/students of other universities. Courtesy Card patrons can also check out a laptop computer for 3-hour in house use at our Circulation Desk. For everyone else, we have set up three “research stations” — computers without logins that have no productivity software and can only access the library databases and .edu/.gov websites. No general Internet access is available on these.
Unfortunately, we consistently find all of our computers in use during the fall and spring semesters. And, we find that some of our guest users monopolize our equipment to the exclusion of our primary patrons: UTC students, faculty, and staff. We are also getting some pressure from our campus IT people to not allow “anonymous” logins to the campus network – which is essentially what our use of a generic guest login provides.
The Questions:
We’d like to know what others out there in a similar situation have done (other than buy more computers). Have you cut off access to guest users completely? Have you implemented time or access limits through some technological or manual method? What has been the reaction from your guest users to the policy change? How about from others on campus?
Thoughts?
Just to let those of you who read this blog, but maybe not TechSource, I have a new post up over there on Hot Games for the Fall. Go check it out, and leave a comment or three. 🙂
So I took the plunge and decided to Jailbreak my iPhone 3G, just out of curiousity as much as anything. I wanted to see what apps were available outside the app store, as well as see what customizations were out there for the phone. What I’ve found is that I haven’t found a lot of apps that I would consider truly worth Jailbreaking. There are two or three real standouts that I’m playing with, but mostly the apps on the App Store are pretty amazing on their own.
The three things that I am having some fun with that aren’t available via Apple: Qik, Tunewiki, and Winterboard. Qik everyone is probably familiar with, and I think will eventually make its way thru the actual Apple vetting process. The camera on the iPhone will only do around 15 frames per second in ideal conditions, and streaming live to the net you are looking at only 6-8 even on wifi. But I’m going to take my phone with me Internet Librarian and play with the live streaming some, if the Jailbreak lasts that long.
Tunewiki is an amazing app that will, I think, never make it to the app store. It takes your music, and in realtime finds and displays lyrics for the song…timed to the song itself. I have no idea how it works, and its awesome.
Winterboard is a theming app for the iPhone which gives you control over certain visual aspects of the display, as well as reskinning the whole thing if you download appropriate skins.
All in all the phone has been running well since the Jailbreak, although I would say it is slightly less stable…I’ve had to reboot it a couple of times to get it unfrozen after an install or the first launch of a new program. With that said, it’s neat to have a no-longer black box phone…like they say, it’s not really yours if you can’t open it up.
So in a pretty convoluted story with a straightforward beginning, Amazon has announced that it will be purchasing the social book network Shelfari. Just last month, Amazon also purchased AbeBooks…which is a minority investor in LibraryThing.
*boggle*
So Amazon buys a competitor to a service that they, in effect, already own part of. I can see them wanting Shelfari for the interface, especially as part of a “next generation” Kindle device. But Shelfari doesn’t have much else for Amazon to want, honestly…Shelfari relies on the Amazon book data to begin with, so they don’t have any data that will improve Amazon in any way (except the little bit of social data that can be scraped from the site).
There’s a long discussion about this over on LibraryThing, where Tim is talking the thing out in his open and transparent style. I don’t think this is going to hurt LibraryThing at all…they have better book data, for one, and Amazon now has to fit Shelfari into its systems, which will take a looooong time.
Has anyone seen a value given for the Shelfari acquisition? I’m curious what Amazon paid for them.
Here’s hoping this doesn’t cause Tim too many sleepless nights.
Kudos to DLK and Libraryman for putting this together, and for all my friends that took part. Is cool to see so many people collaborate on something so silly and yet interesting.
I’m just stopping in to make sure this still works. Feels like a month since I posted, but I know it hasn’t been that long.
I’m working on a couple of videos, though, that should explain why I’ve been so busy. Look for them here, soon.
The last two weeks have been not the most pleasant with our telephone provider, Vonage. We’ve been using Vonage as our land-line now for something like 2 years, with great results. I’ve been terrifically happy with the quality and features. But now, given my first run-in with their customer service…well, there’s an interesting outcome to this story. Stay with me for the payoff:
So, two weeks ago we came home after a trip to KY to find that something was seriously wrong with our house…cable out, no internet, and because of that, no phone. So we contacted Charter, and they were there the next day to fix the cable and our internet access. But even with the ‘net back…no Vonage.
So I put in an email to support, and that started a 2 week long exchange where they suggested fixes, I tried them, and then they suggested new ones that didn’t work either. It finally came down to the fact that they Vonage router seems fried. Here’s where it gets interesting.
So a new Vonage device on their website starts at $49.99, plus shipping, for the most basic of their boxes. The one I had was a wireless router as well, which pushed the cost up a considerable amount. I asked about the cost for a replacement, and was told that as an existing customer I could get a one time credit of $50. This was where I got interested in the actual customer service aspect of this…they weren’t offering me credit for the fact I’d been down 2 weeks, which seemed an obvious step to me. As well, isn’t it in Vonage’s corner to provide me with equipment, if need be, in order for me to continue being a customer? Even cell-phone companies will give you a reconditioned phone if yours gets broken, and by and large they have the worst customer service in the world.
To make matters worse, they were offering on their website a $79 retail router for $9 to new customers. So a new customer gets a $70 subsidy, but an existing one gets $50. And only after spending two weeks trying to fix the equipment.
So I got aggressive, more from a desire to see what the outcome would be than anything. I told customer support that I found the situation unfair, and that I was unhappy with the outcome. I gave them a chance to step up…and they didn’t. So my next letter, expressing my displeasure, was crossed to the CEO, the Chief Marketing Officer, and the Senior Vice President of Customer Care. How did I get their email addresses? I didn’t…I guessed. I found the emails of other Vonage employees online with a simple Google Search, and noticed that the format was always the same: Firstname.Lastname@vonage.com. Finding the names of any public company’s CEO and such is pretty trivial, and with those two pieces of info, we were off!
So what do you think happened? Not even 12 hours after I sent the email I received a phone call from a Customer Service rep. Said CS rep assured me that I would be receiving, at no cost to me at all, a new Vonage device…the $79 dollar one, as it turns out. Free shipping as well, all credited to my account, device shipping today. Huh.
What’s the moral of our story? That is shouldn’t take complaining to the CEO of a company to get results…the front-line people who are dealing with the public need to be enabled to make decisions like this and engender goodwill. This is even more true in the library…don’t force a patron to wade up the chain of command in order to get something done. Empower your workers, and hire people that have good judgment and can make these calls themselves.
Yesterday, in a fit of frustration at MPOW (well, not really MPOW, but the larger University), I started poking around some feeds, and found someone who had made their FriendFeed into their homepage.
“How did they do that?” I asked myself. Turns out that it’s an embed feature of FriendFeed that doesn’t look like it’s particularly well documented.
The code for the embed is:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/USERNAME”></script>
There are at least two variables that seem to work with this string: ?num=VALUE after the username, where value is the number of entries you want to show up, and ?source=VALUE, where value is the source of the feed in your FriendFeed account (Twitter, Last.fm, etc).
So I decided to redo my own homepage, and do something similar, where the FriendFeed just fills the page, with navigational links to my other, more robust online presence. I’ll probably convert it into a two column layout at some point, but for now, it’s a nice lifestream that’s always active and gives a decent accounting of my day-to-day online.