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
Berkman Digital Culture Images Technology

OpenArchive

Sitting in the Internet Archive Great Room (see photo above for reference…yes, it’s in an old church….) I’m reminded that I never pushed out the link to the amazing new app that was created in part by my friend Nathan, available now for Android and coming soon for iOS that allows you to use the Internet Archive like your own personal Instagram:

Screen Shot 2016-06-07 at 12.03.22 PMOpenArchive

and because Nathan and his group are awesome, the app is also open source:

Github repo for OpenArchive

and finally, direct link to the Google Play store for the app.

I’ve not seen an easier way to add photos to the Internet Archive directly than this app, and it’s got some really fantastic side benefits..the primary one being that it works transparently over Orbot if you’d like, so that uploads and connections can be driven over the Tor network without any extra effort on the user’s part.

UPDATE

The Guardian Project just posted their own announcement for the app. Their take on it is also timely since I’m spending this week at the Decentralized Web Summit:

We see this as a first step towards a more distributed, decentralized way of managing and sharing your personal media, and publishing it and synchronizing it to different places and people, in different ways.

Categories
Berkman Library Issues Media

A Special Obligation to the Future

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, writing, and editing in the last few months that all revolved around libraries and the future of the Internet. It seems more and more obvious to me that there’s an opportunity for libraries as participants in the growing number of decentralized services on the Internet. These services are multiplying, and it seems to me that the future of communication is likely to be a better one if distributed services were more normalized on the Internet.

I’ve decided to share two essays about this topic. The first is
How Libraries Can Save the Internet of Things from the Web’s Centralized Fate over at BoingBoing, which is the highly edited and polished version of the much longer A Special Obligation to the Future over on Medium. Normally I wouldn’t share two similar pieces, but I feel like the shorter BoingBoing essay is the compressed and focused “official” version and there were things that I liked about the longer, more emotive original. So I’m sharing both here, and you can comment on, share, and critique either or both as you’d like.

I’m hoping these serve as conversation starters, and possibly as inflection points for thinking about the future of libraries in terms of their role as pillars of democracy and freedom. I’m going to be doing more work on this topic, speaking and writing and organizing over the next several months. If you’re interested in helping out and lending a hand, let me know.

And if you’re interested in decentralization in general, I highly recommend checking out Yochai Benkler’s work, especially Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power. Also recommended is Phil Windley’s Decentralization is Hard, Maybe Too Hard.

They are both right, decentralization is amazingly difficult to pull off. This is why it needs help in the form of library infrastructure, political capital, and skills.

Thanks especially to David Weinberger, who was instrumental in both the conception and the editing of this piece. Also thanks to everyone who read and commented on the piece as it developed, you are all awesome.

Categories
Maker Personal Video

SXSW 2016

I attended my first SXSW conference this past week, and have been struggling about how to describe it. On one hand, I was able to find interesting things and have a great time. On the other, the conference felt so very desperate, like a marketing team and a brogrammer had a kid. It was a non-stop barrage of things that were really-well-known being well-known (Game of Thrones, Mr. Robot) and things that weren’t well-known trying desperately to be so.

Libraries and librarians were, as always, the saving grace in the midst of the chaos. I spent time with the Library IdeaDrop house this year, and all I can say is that they run a tight ship, full of interesting people and awesome events. I would be a part of it again in a heartbeat.

I wrote up my experiences for American Libraries, here’s the three-part story:

And here are all the interviews that I did with IdeaDrop this year:

SESSION 6 from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Jason Griffey @ #IdeaDrop from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Knight News Challenge from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

SESSION 8 from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Copyright and Creators: 2026 @ #IdeaDrop from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Digital Content and the Legality of Web Scraping from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Categories
Personal

LibraryBox & Google Summer of Code

I am thrilled to be able to announce that The LibraryBox Project has been invited to be one of the projects included in the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Google Summer of Code.

If you aren’t familiar with the Google Summer of Code, it is a program that gets undergraduates connected to open source projects via mentor organizations. The goal is to give the students experience working on useful open code, while projects benefit from their skills to set and meet development goals. Google pays the students a stipend, and the whole open source community wins.

The LibraryBox Project has a few different goals in mind for the summer, and is looking for awesome students who want to make a difference in the world. If you’re a student that is interested in working on an international open source project that is being used in more than 40 countries and on all 7 continents, one that makes a difference in education in developing nations and acts as a tool for activism and social change in repressive countries, come join us.

Applications open March 14th, and close March 25th.

If you know anyone that’s applying, send them our way.

Categories
Apple Legal Issues

Apple, the FBI, and Libraries

I’m sure most people who might read this blog are at least familiar that there is currently a battle occurring between Apple and the FBI over access to information on a phone that had been used by the San Bernardino terrorist. The details of that case are fascinating and nuanced, and can be summarized very roughly as:

The FBI has obtained a court order that compels Apple to create a new version of iOS that is different from the existing version that lives on the phone in question in three ways: one, that the new version will bypass the time-delay between password attempts that is standard for iOS; two, that the new version will be able to enter password attempts in a programmatic fashion instead of through finger presses on the screen; and three, that the new version of iOS will disable the security setting that may be active that erases the phone unrecoverably if 10 password attempts are incorrect. The reason that the FBI needs this to access the information that is stored on the phone is that iOS uses encryption to secure the information on the phone when it is, in the parlance of computer security types, “at rest.” The FBI could make a bit-for-bit copy of the software that is on the phone, and examine it until the heat death of the universe, and not be able to decrypt the information into a readable form.

While the court order and the responses on both sides are not directly about encryption, the reason that this is a question at all is encryption…if the FBI could dump the contents and read them, there would be no need for them to access the phone at all. Indeed, the information from the phone that they do have, given to them by Apple, is from a 6-week-old iCloud backup of the device that isn’t encrypted (currently, iCloud backups are NOT encrypted, or rather, they are encrypted but with a key that Apple has).

Why is this relevant to libraries? I think it’s past time that we start paying very close attention to the details of our data in ways that we have, at best, hand-waved as a vendor responsibility in the past. There have been amazing strides lately in libraryland in regards to the security of our data connections via SSL (LetsEncrypt) as well as a resurgence in anonymization and privacy tools for our patrons (Tor and the like, thank you very much Library Freedom Project).

Data about our patrons and their interactions that isn’t encrypted at rest in either the local database or the vendor database hosted on their servers (and our electronic resource access, and our proxy logins, and, and, and…) is data that is subject to subpoena and could be accessed in ways that we would not want. It is the job of the librarian to protect the data about the information seeking process of their patrons. And while it’s been talked about before in library circles (Peter Murray’s 2011 article is a good example of past discussions) this court case brings into focus the lengths that some aspects of the law enforcement community will go to in order to have the power to collect data about individuals.

For a great article on the insanity associated with the government’s position on this, please take a moment and read James Allworth’s The US has gone F&*%ing Mad. Also take a look at the wonderful article by Barbara Fister from Inside Higher Ed, wherein she boils the case down and does some deft analysis of the situation (sidenote: I’m a massive fan of Barbara’s writing, if you do not regularly read her stuff, fix that).

It’s fairly clear, I think, that the FBI is using this case to seek to set a precedent that would allow for future access to information on iOS devices. The case was chosen specifically to have the right public relations spin for them, it’s a thing that is technically possible (unlike a request to “break the encryption” which may actually not be technically possible), and they have asked for a tool to be created that is easy generalizable to other iOS devices. I back Apple on this, and believe that strong security measures (including but not limited to strong encryption) make us safer.

And I would feel lots, lots better about the state of data in libraries if I knew we were using strong encryption that protects our data. I would love to see an architecture for a truly secure (from a data standpoint) ILS, because I’m pretty certain that none of the ones in use right now are even close. In the same way that I’m certain that Apple is working on producing a version of iOS that they cannot access at all….we need to architect and insist on the implementation of data storage that even we can’t get directly into. If patrons want us to keep their lending history (and we have some evidence that opting in to such a system is something that patrons do want), then let’s insist that our ILS treat that data like toxic waste: behind closed and locked vaults that neither we nor the vendor can access.

Categories
ALA presentation

Presentations from ALA Midwinter 2016

Back in January, I did a few presentations at the ALA Midwinter conference. Two of them were recorded and I’ve finally tracked down the recordings and got them ready to post here. I only have slides for one, but hopefully someone finds the recordings useful.

ALA Master Series
Jason Griffey & Measuring the Future

LITA Top Technology Trends – ALA Midwinter 2016

The two trends that I talk about are the Blockchain and it’s potential for decentralization of the web, and the confluence of AI/Machine Learning and autonomous agents as interface for data.

The video below is a great presentation about Blockchain and its potential, by one of my compatriots at the Berkman Center, Primavera De Filippi.

Categories
presentation

OLA SuperConference 2016

I was thrilled to spend the last few days at the Ontario Library Association SuperConference 2016, the largest library conference in Canada. I was invited to be the Spotlight Speaker for the Ontario Public Library Association, and gave a talk I ambitiously titled “Incubating Ourselves: Internal Iteration and the Quest for Better Libraries.”

The presentation itself was design as a series of stories, with an introduction dealing with innovation itself, and how libraries might consider what and how to approach innovation in their own operations and activities. The core of the talk was two stories about me, the first illustrating why libraries offering innovative technology to their patrons can help change their patron’s lives, and the second about how the same technology can also help to improve libraries themselves. I closed with a look at near-future tech that I think will impact society, as a suggestion about what libraries and librarians should be looking at as next-stage technology for themselves and their patrons. Throw in a bit about LibraryBox and Measure the Future, and that’s a lot to get into an hour, but I think it came together really well.

While the presentation doesn’t hold up remarkably well without the audio bits, if you’d like to take a look, here are the slides from the talk:

Two things stood out to me as a result of this talk. The first is that it was the first of my talks to have a Graphic Recorder/Graphic Facilitator assigned to it, and I’m over the moon with how amazingly cool the resulting poster turned out. If you aren’t familiar with the idea of Graphic Facilitation, here’s a video on the process:

So here’s my talk in graphic form, with details of different parts pulled out:

IMG_3382

IMG_3388

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The other thing that I was really thankful for was that people seemed to appreciate the effort I make in trying to not only present good ideas, but to do so with some style:

Canadians really ARE the most polite and friendliest people around. 🙂

Thanks again for having me, OLA! It was fantastic, and I hope to be back someday keynoting for you.

Categories
Personal

State of the Union 2016 Tag Cloud

Every year since 2007, I’ve done a weighted word cloud as a visualization of the State of the Union address by the President of the United States. Here’s the 2016 version, with all of the previous versions linked for comparison. Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for a decade at this point!

State of the Union 2016
State of the Union 2016

 

Categories
Personal Writing

Libraries in the Exponential Age

In late summer of 2015, I was invited to take part in a gathering at the Aspen Institute for a discussion that revolved around the general theme of how libraries can be more innovative and can drive innovation in their communities. It was one of the best groups and conversations that I have ever had around the general topic of the future of libraries, and I’m thrilled that the work we did is coming out in the form of some great writing and tools.

First up, on the Knight Foundation blog, is the post that explores the work that I was a part of, including a video I did talking about one of the things I’m most concerned about for the future of libraries.

From this and other gatherings, the Aspen Institute has built out a website and an action guide that:

…leads you through a variety of strategic activities and provides worksheets that evaluate the current level of support for your library and the resources needed to plan and convene your own community dialogue.

I’d recommend that libraries and librarians take a good look at these resources. The reports coming out of this work are among the best that I’ve read about the future of libraries, and I’d highly recommend that you take the time to look at both Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries and Libraries in the Exponential Age. The latter is the one I was a part of, and I have almost no complaints about the way it approaches the future of libraries.

Categories
ALA LITA Measure the Future Top Tech Trends

ALA Midwinter 2016

Next week brings with it the ALA Midwinter 2016 meeting, which means I’m bundling myself up and heading back to Boston for a few days to revel in more library than anyone can take. This is my first ALA conference in almost a decade in which I don’t have overwhelming amounts of LITA commitments (the last ten years looked like: Created an interest group > Chaired said Interest Group > Chaired committee > Elected as Director-at-Large to Board > Appointed as committee chair and Parliamentarian of board). So what did I do with all of my newfound freedom and time?

Over-scheduled myself like mad, of course.

Here’s a quick rundown of things I’m getting myself into at ALA Midwinter! If you’d like to meet with me about anything, I would love to talk to you. Drop me an email and let’s find some time to meet up!

Booth 2232

For the first time, the Measure the Future Project will have a booth in the ALA Midwinter Exhibit Hall! We will be showing off examples of what we’re building, including hardware and software, and will be taking signups for libraries and librarians interested in the project. I’ll be at the booth any time I’m not speaking at one of the below, so if you’re looking for me, it’s a good bet that’s where I’ll be. We’ll have cool giveaways, a LibraryBox sharing information about the project, and we’re sharing a booth with the Library Freedom Project (who are basically made of cool and awesome and you know you want to come hang out).

Thursday

7-10pm
EMW Drink Salon on Tech & Ethics: Libraries
EMW Bookstore, 934 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
https://emwdrinksalon-libraries.splashthat.com/

This is going to be an amazing time. Trust me. Take a look at the website, register, come have some drinks and talk tech and ethics with a bunch of awesome people.

Saturday

Knight News Challenge on Libraries 2016
9-10am, Convention Center Room 206A/B
Myself and a few other of the winners of the previous Knight News Challenge for Libraries will be on a panel with Knight Foundation staff to discuss how you (YES YOU) can apply for a News Challenge grant. Open to individuals as well as organizations, this is IMNSHO the very best funding available for library projects. If you have any ideas that you’ve been kicking around, now is the time to pick them up and dust them off and polish them up. Another News Challenge is coming this year, and if you want to know how to apply from previous grantees….this is the way to do it.

Master Series: Measuring the Future
12:30pm-1:30pm, Convention Center Room 206A/B
One of the most valuable assets a library has is the physical building itself, but aside from gate count we have remarkably little information about how it’s used. What if you could have a Google Analytics style dashboard and understanding of what happened in your library yesterday? Over time, longitudinal data about activity in your library can do amazing things: allow you to plan staffing predictively, let you A/B test displays or furniture arrangements, check what rooms are most popular during different parts of the day or year, and much more. Why just collect statistics when you can use them to actively make your library better for both staff and patrons? Come have a discussion with us about these issues and let us know what you’d like to see from the Measure the Future project!

Sunday

LITA Top Technology Trends
10:30-11:30am, Convention Center Room 253A
I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of this august panel a handful of times in the past, and I’m thrilled to be included again. This time around I will be talking about Blockchain and its potential to revolutionize library systems, with a detour over into the Rise of the Machines (AI, computer vision, semantic analysis, ubiquitous computing, mesh networks, Internet of Things) and how that is going to make the future stranger than we can imagine. This is a do-not-miss panel (not because of me, but…trust me).

LITA Happy Hour
6:00-8:00pm, MIJA Cantina & Tequila Bar, Quincy Market, 1 Faneuil Hall Marketplace
The best gathering of library technologists anywhere, LITA Happy Hour is an amazing time full of awesome people. This is the best place to meet tons of techie librarians, and is where I will be happily sipping a drink amongst friends. Come introduce yourself and say hello if you make it!

 

This doesn’t count the half-dozen other non-public meetings I’m attending, or seeing friends and such. It’s gonna be fun, and exhausting, and great. Come see me at the booth! I look forward to meeting all the librarians I don’t know yet, and can’t wait to see old friends.