Jason Griffey is the Executive Director of the Open Science Hardware Foundation. Prior to joining OSHF, he was 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.
…the 5th of November…
Or, in the case of the US, the 7th of November. Go and vote, please…and if it helps to think of the man who, 400 years ago, used a terroristic act to get the attention of his government, instead of the current man who uses terroristic threats to remove the rights of US citizens, so be it.
It’s time for a change.
I’m falling so behind on blogging! Right now, I feel guilty writing here, knowing that it’s Nanowrimo and I’m not working on the novel. Add to that I now have 2, count’em, TWO possible publication opportunities that hit me this week. One involves blogs and blogging, and the other is a write-up of some podcasting work that I’m in the preliminary stages in setting up. More on that later as well…I don’t want to talk too much about any of this stuff before contracts are signed and such, but it wouldn’t be far off to say I’ve got many irons in the fire.
So right now, in order to not be terribly overwhelmed, I’m concentrating on nanowrimo. Once there’s a bit more clarity on the other issues, I’ll share as I can. Especially about the podcasting…an exciting opportunity might be around the bend on that front.
Because I’ve let a friend talk me into trying National Novel Writing Month. What’s that, you say? In the month of November, a few thousand people will agree to attempt to write an entire novel solely between Nov 1 and Nov 30. For those keeping score, that’s 50,000 words in 30 days.
It’s focused insanity. I clearly don’t have time.
I’m going to try it anyway. Want to join me?
One more conference! This time around, in my backyard (mostly): Netville in Nashville, the 2006 LITA Forum. I’ll be speaking on Saturday about libraries and wikis, and trying to give my spin on when they are useful, and when they aren’t. If anyone is attending, I’d love to meet you.
I’ll be blogging some of the conference over at LITA Blog, and some here. So check both if you’re interested.
On my campus, as well as others, there has of late been a terrific focus placed upon student plagiarism. I’ve been asked to teach a handful of plagiarism workshops (4 down, 1 to go…this Thursday, if anyone’s in town) and I was recently asked to produce a “statement” of a sort to be used in advertising a conference on Academic Integrity that is being held here at UTC. So I said:
There is a lot of confusion among students as to citation in academic writing, including what needs a citation and who should be cited in specific circumstances. My feeling is that if we continue teaching the specifics of what, who, and how, we’re missing the real issue. Students need to understand why we insist on citation, and the purpose and goals of this very specific sort of writing. We as educators need to encourage students to be willing to see themselves as part of the academic dialogue, as a piece of the ongoing attempt at the creation of knowledge. Students need to see academic writing as a conversation between themselves, the professor, and the rest of the Academy, and not as a hoop to jump through or a check-mark on their transcript. A large part of their vision of academic writing is formed by the way educators present assignments, and I think that we can better serve the student by re-imagining the way this is done.
Plagiarism is something that strikes me as old news…always been here, always will, and until we can convince professors that traditional “write a paper on X” assignments aren’t the best sorts, we’ll always have to deal with it. I need to find a way to get my workshop online…it uses music as a metaphor for academic writing, and shows how something can move from “bad” reuse to “ok” reuse, and how to think about academic writing in a different way. I believe that the current “millenial” student really has a difficult time understanding plagiarism, and the workshop is designed to get them thinking in a new way. I’ll put that on the pile of things to do in the next year or so…
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few months as I worked through the website redesign at MPOW is how reference departments interact with patrons in the virtual world. In conjunction with the re-launch, we’re going live with our IM reference service, and re-visiting how we take virtual reference questions. As I think about how we do things, I realize I’m not happy with the overall way we’re dealing with email reference…it’s distributed, so there’s no single record that can be browsed for common questions. It’s not archived in a meaningfully searchable way. It’s not flexible. It requires us to manually forward emails and potentially miss a followup.
So in re-envisioning email reference in a new way, I realized that what I really wanted was a Help Desk/Trouble Ticket system. Is anyone out there using a formal Trouble Ticket system as a reference tool? Or, is anyone using one at all, in any capacity, and could recommend a good Open Source php/MySQL system?
I’m looking for something that presents a browser-based form for collection of issues, with a big plus if it also allows email reception into the system. Anyone got a favorite?
After a comment from a friend, I’ve decided to throw this up on Cafepress and see if anyone else thinks it’s as funny as I do. I suppose it’s one good reason to vote republican…head off and buy one! I’ll donate 10% of any proceeds to an appropriate charity (ACLU? EFF? Leave a comment if you have a suggestion as to the best charity).
I’m just hoping this doesn’t devolve into a flame-fest in the comments…I don’t think anyone reading this is particularly conservative, but you never know.
Tarantino is back, and he brought Rodriguez with him.
Oh hell yeah.
Tom Savini and Zombies? Machete? Rose McGowen as a grindhouse dame? I’m so very, very there.
I am absolutely enamored with physical representations of virtual objects. We’ve skipped over the marvel that a digital photograph can become a physical print (mainly because the digital photo is a mimic of the physical, down to thinking of photos as single objects and talking about something as nonsensical as “digital filmmaking“), but I love the idea of Fabjectory:
Bring your avatar out of the virtual world and into the real world with Fabjectory’s avatar creation services. We’ll fab a miniature statuette of your avatar that you can take with you anywhere.
Create a digital you, and then have your own action figure statuette made, complete with tattoos and pithy t-shirts. I know a lot of WoW players who would jump on this.
According to their blog, they’ll also let you create a customized USB key case in-game (graphics, logos, textures, legs…whatever) and then create it for you IRL. We’re getting closer and closer to The Diamond Age and drawing things off the Feed. I want me a matter compiler!
This is roughly related to my adoration of the new Moo Flickr cards…it somehow makes your photos both weightier and more desireable. These little things are awesome…you want to share them, but you want to keep them all for yourself. I ordered the free sample of 10 cards, and immediately ordered 100 when I got them…they are that cool. My next plan is to take a picture of my Moo cards, upload that to Flickr, and have cards made from it…how many cycles of Meta-Moo can you go?
That’s what Google reportedly just paid in stock for YouTube. The interesting question is whether Google Video will go away, or will YouTube? The press release says that both will stick around…but that makes little sense. It will be interesting to see, that’s for sure.