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.

Categories
Personal

Missed my Blogoversary

Given my infrequency of posting, its obvious that I’ve been a little busy lately. Mostly it’s been Eliza based, but work is also nuts. This time of year is crazy, and you pile working 3 days a week instead of 5 AND building a new library…well, its a little slice of insanity.

I’ve been so nuts that I completely missed my 5 year Blogoversary!

February 10th, 2003, after an inauspicious start, I started blogging. Five years, 1241 posts, and 1445 comments later, and it’s still going strong. Over the course of those years, I’ve been featured on BoingBoing four times, Digg once, highlighted by the ALA, and it’s led to an enormous amount of opportunity for me.

Pattern Recognition also led directly to being invited to write a book on Library Blogging, which will at long last be out this Spring. Another writing opportunity has presented itself as well, which will be announced in the next few weeks…I’m not at liberty to say quite yet, but if you want to read what I have to say, you’ll have at least one more place you can be sure to see me in 2008.

Most of the above isn’t thanks to anything special I’ve done, but instead thanks to the readers and comments on Pat Rec…thanks to everyone who takes time from their day to read me. I appreciate it more than I can adequately express, and hope that you’re getting some value for your time.

All in all, this crazy blog has done a lot for me. Here’s hoping the next 5 years are as auspicious as the last!

Categories
Legal Issues

Clickthrough licensing dreck

I’m in the middle of reviewing a hosted blogging solution for K-12 called ePals…this is to determine if it needs to be/should be included in Library Blogging. I’m reading through, when I get to a click through license. Every once in a while, I love to read these things to see the insanity they think they can impose…here’s a great example. Check this out:

V. LINKING TO THIS WEB SITE

Unless you have a written agreement in effect with ePals which states otherwise, you may only include a link to an ePals Site on another Web site if:

(a) the link is a text-only link clearly marked “www.ePals.com;”
(b) the link “points” to the ePals’ home page URL and not to other pages within the ePals Site; (c) the appearance, position and other aspects of the link does not damage or dilute the goodwill associated with ePals’ or In2Books’ brand name and trademarks;
(d) the appearance, position and other aspects of the link does not create the false appearance that any entity is associated with or sponsored by ePals;
(e) the link, when activated by a user, displays the Site’s full-screen that is not within a “frame” on the linking Web site; and
(f) the link will not be used in connection with or appear on a Web site that a reasonable person may consider offensive, obscene, defamatory or otherwise malicious.

ePals reserves the right to revoke its consent to the link at any time, in its sole discretion. If ePals revokes such consent, you agree to immediately remove and disable any and all links to ePals Sites.

To illustrate this insanity, if I were to, say…link directly to their Email description page, I would be in violation of this license. Or if I link directly to their Blog page…again, in violation.

Can you imagine a Web where people had to request the right to link to something?

Categories
Library Issues Technology

Win a Wii, donate to an amazing cause


Jenny and Michael, in a fit of brilliance, have set up a Win a Wii donation drive for Blake Carver, who runs LISHost, my very favorite internet hosting service. If you read a library-focused blog, there’s a better than average chance that Blake is hosting it…including Pattern Recognition.

So: go and donate, and maybe win a Wii!

Categories
Library Issues Technology

Autonomous Self-Checkout Idea

Here’s an idea I had today that I wanted to get down so I don’t forget it…autonomous self-checkout with cell phones. Here’s the idea:

You write a web-service that logs the customer into their account from their cell phone browser, and then takes over the camera on their cell. They point the camera at a bar code on the book in question, and you software looks it up in the catalog and checks it out to the patron.

The difficult part for the library is how to enable the deactivation of the security strips that most of us use…ideally, the security system would be tied to the catalog, and would know when a book was checked out and when it wasn’t, and alarm only as appropriate.

This would take library staff completely out of the checkout process (which self-checkout already does) but would ALSO take any specialized equipment out, and allow for nearly complete patron autonomy in the stacks.

The interesting thing is, I’m pretty sure that all of this is possible with current open source software. Certainly there would need to be some development, but I don’t think anything would have to be completely written from scratch…maybe connectors that transfer data from one system to the other.

Thoughts? Is this being done anywhere? Or did I actually have an original thought?

Categories
Gaming

Happy Mardi Gras!




JasoninMask

Originally uploaded by griffey.

Mardi Gras is a really special time for Betsy and I. During our undergrad days, we made a yearly pilgrimage with some of our best friends down to the Big Easy for Mardi Gras, watching the parades and generally acting silly. Years later, it was where and when we decided to get married, eloping to New Orleans and getting married in the New Orleans Parish courthouse on Lundi Gras of 2001.

It’s a great holiday, and to everyone: Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler!

Categories
Media

2008 State of the Union as Tag Cloud

Last year’s 2007 State of the Union Tag Cloud was such a hit, I decided to follow up again this year. A few major differences: Congress is mentioned a lot more this year, while health and oil don’t show up at all. This year’s address looks more active…instead of “fight” we get “fighting”. Overall, the themes are still easily picked out: “terrorists” still play a major part in the speech, and we get “empower” and “hope” and “trust” as themes.

created at TagCrowd.com

Categories
Books Gaming Library Issues Media

Orson Scott Card: the author and the work

I’ve kept up with the recent Orson Scott Card controversy in libraryland, and I respect nearly everyone who has taken a strong stance against the decision by the YALSA to award OSC the Margaret A. Edwards award for adolescent literature for 2008.

But.

I’m not sold on the controversy here.

There is no denying that OSC is a homophobe…no, that’s probably not strong enough. “Fear of homosexuality” doesn’t approach his views. OSC is a heterosexist bigot, based on his own words, and does not deserve either our respect or our patience. But the two works that are being honored, Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, are not homophobic. They don’t seem to speak with the same voice as OSC in interviews. They portray strong, smart kids doing incredible things, and should stand above and beyond the idiocies of the author.

The award is given, according to the description online, in order to:

…recognizes an author’s work in helping adolescents become aware of themselves and addressing questions about their role and importance in relationships, society, and in the world.

The works do just that.

The author can be an idiot…hell, it could probably be argued that most artists of any sort are damaged in some significant way. Insanity, adultery, substance abuse, and yes, crazy beliefs…all crop up in the pantheon of artists. Just because the author is nuts doesn’t mean that the work is nuts.

Would I give OSC an award? No. Would I honor the work? Yes, I would. It’s a fine line, but otherwise I find myself having to question every piece of art by examination of the artist.

Categories
The Living Dead

Diary of the Dead

Romero! The Living Dead!

As most of you know that have been reading for any length of time, I’m a huge sucker for zombies. Romero is the king of the zombie film, so this is a must-see for me. I’m a little worried about it coming out near Cloverfield, which takes the first-person-Blair-Witch style storytelling to a major motion picture, and it looks like this might be seen as a rip off. In any case, Romero + zombie = The Win.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues Technology

I really hate Zotero

There, I said it. Zotero should warm the heart of any academic, but somehow it escapes me. I’ve been loath to admit it for a long time, especially since I was part of the beta, and tried it for a long time. Plus, it’s exactly the sort of tool that I should really love.

Except I don’t.

Why not? Well, after examining my prejudice, I came to one conclusion: I no longer have any patience with applications that are local. Unless the application I want AND my data live in the cloud, I just won’t use it. I’ve found myself, over the last 6 months to a year, moving nearly everything I do online. Documents are created with Google Docs, I prefer Gmail to any local mail client I’ve tried, heck, I’ve even started using Flickr’s editing deal with Picnik to do my photo edits, and I luuuuuuurve me some photoshop.

What’s up with this change? I really only use two computers; my work PC and my Macbook. It wouldn’t be that hard to use local programs, and sync my documents. The problem is that it’s any effort at all. Syncing my documents shouldn’t be something that I think about, it should just happen…Mac nearly has it right with their .mac syncing, but the PC world just doesn’t operate like that without some serious effort on the user’s part. If Apple would move hard into this space, perhaps with Google as a partner…I think they could revolutionize computing yet again, especially if they leveraged their media power as a part of the cloud storage.

But I digress…

After using Zotero for awhile, I found myself cursing the fact that I had two different databases of information…the “macbook” stuff and the “desktop” stuff. This is why the third lobe of my brain is del.icio.us…I don’t have to think about where I might need that information. It just goes to the cloud, and I pull it down no matter where in the world I may be. I know that Zotero has listed on it’s homepage:

Remote library backup
Shared collections
Access your library from anywhere via the web

Give me that, and maybe it becomes a tool that is useful to me. But until then, local just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Categories
Digital Culture Images Technology

Product Review: Eye-Fi

As a part of having a new Eliza around, we went camera shopping for a new digital camera. I asked for feedback from a bunch of friends as to what digital camera they used and liked, and took those suggestions and matched them against my list of requirements. I wanted something that would do both still and video well, preferably HD video for future-proofing, and had a decent pocketability.

After a failed attempt at locating the Sanyo Xacti model that I wanted, I discovered the Canon TX-1. We’ve loved our Canons from the past…our last two cameras were Canon; one of the original Elphs, back with they were APS film based, and then our immediate past digital, a 4 megapixel Elph. With our history with Canon, plus the TX-1’s optical image stabilization, we decided to give up on the Xacti and just go with the Canon.

But that’s not the product I wanted to sing the praises of in this post. No, I’m beyond thrilled with the memory card I bought to go with the TX-1. Yep, the memory card…if your digital camera takes SD cards, you should immediately buy one of these:

eyefi

A brilliant little piece of tech, the Eye-Fi combines a 2 gig SD card with built in wifi, giving any camera the ability to automatically upload pictures that you take to your computer, to any of dozens of web photo sites, or both. The card comes with a little USB dock, and has the software necessary to tie the card to your computer and website on itself. You plug it into your computer, and it walks you through linking the card, your wifi point, the computer you’re on, and the website in question.

Once it is set up, the process is simply take a picture, and…that’s it. You take a picture and as long as your camera stays on it will upload your pics to your computer and to the web automagically. Now there are limits, and ways that I would love to have the product behave that it doesn’t.

For one, the card attaches itself to your wifi point…not to your computer. I would vastly prefer the card to attach via an ad-hoc network to my computer, and then have the computer do the heavy lifting to the web. That way it would work even when I was traveling, without having to logon to the Eye-Fi manager website and manually change the settings. You can make it work now, but it’s less easy than I’d like.

Still, if you do most of your uploading from home, it doesn’t get any easier than this.