Author: griffey

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.

Categories
Digital Culture

Chronicle catches on, just a little late

So the Chronicle has an article in this week’s issue regarding the possible changes coming down the pike for scholarly communication in the digital age, and what form that might take.

To say they are a little late to the party is a bit of an understatement.

Welcome to what is either an expansive new future for the book in the digital age, or a cacophonous morass that will turn scholarship into a series of flame wars — or both.

Scholars like Mr. Wark, who are as comfortable firing off comments on blogs as they are pontificating at academic conferences, are beginning to question whether the printed book is the best format for advancing scholarship and communicating big ideas.

In tenure and promotion, of course, the book is still king — the whole academic enterprise often revolves around it. But several scholars are using digital means to challenge the current model of academic publishing.

Thanks to the Internet, they argue, the book should be dynamic rather than fixed — not just a text, but a site of conversation. Printouts could still be made and bound, but the real action would be online, and the commentary would form a new kind of peer review.

Even some publishers are experimenting, though so far the most ambitious efforts have been at scholarly journals. Nature, for instance, started a program this summer in which authors can opt to have articles they submit made available immediately as electronic pre-prints that anyone can comment on. Those papers are still reviewed the old-fashioned way, but the comments by online users are also taken into consideration.

Many academic publishers shrug off open-review e-books as simply the latest technological fad, saying that the time-tested peer-review process should not be replaced by bands of volunteers.

Whether traditional publishers join in or not, there is no doubt that academic discourse is increasingly occurring on blogs and other online forums. So how can that energy be channeled into accepted forms of scholarship? Is it time for the book to get a high-tech makeover?

We in the blogosphere have been doing this sort of thing for some time…Wark’s experiment with this is amazing, but he’s hardly the first to open up a scholarly paper to online critique. And the Chronicle is woefully behind the times in talking about it now…the first blog entry from here that I could find on the subject dates back to April of 2004.

But it’s timely that this is published now. I just realized last week that as much as I have said about blogs and other online contributions counting for tenure and other academic advancement, I hadn’t listed this very blog on my CV. Talk about an oversight! So I added it, and in my most recent quarterly report to my Dean, I added statistics for the blog as well. Any discussion about this subject is welcome, dear readers…I especially would love to know if other library bloggers list their blog on their CV or in reports to those higher up.

But my point of view on this subject is pretty clear: Scholarly Publication, as it has been known, is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet. The new digital models of open communication that allow for commentary while maintaining clear versioning of documents, combined with the Open Access movement and the nearly-costless ease of online publication will become the dominant scholarly communication method in the next 20 years.

Categories
Digital Culture

Wikipedia’s Reference Desk

How could I have possibly not known that Wikipedia has a Reference desk?

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Google @ ALA

Here’s Google’s video relating their experience at ALA 2006. Included are shots of the booth in the exhibit hall, a little video of the party they held at Muriel’s, and snippets of interviews they did with librarians at the party. You can see the swanky glowing drinks that I talked about earlier.

I was interviewed, but evidently didn’t make it into the video…but they did put up a picture of myself and Charles at the booth:

me @ ala

The most amusing thing to me about the picture? Google put these up as a Picasa Web Album, but I’m linking to it from my flickr account. Why? Picasa doesn’t give you easy linkability…I could copy image location and paste in the URL, but that’s not a friendly user experience. Flickr EXPECTS you’re going to hotlink their images, and gives you the URL to do so.

Picasa also doesn’t give you an easy way to browse to a specific picture…this was pic 166 of over 200, and when I went back to find it, I couldn’t be bothered to click next picture 165 times. There must be a jump to picture option for usability, guys. What else…oh yeah…no multiple sizes to pick from, so the resolution you get is just what’s there. I love Picasa as a local picture manipulation solution, but Google is a long way from flickr for online experience.

Categories
Library Issues

And yet more on the website redesign…

So, a bit of an update.

CMS? Check.
Install? Check.
Template? Check.

Got the rough template design done earlier this week, and while there will be lots of updates to it, the very rough structure is in place. Now it’s all about verifying the migration plan. We’ve got a test server that I’ve been doing all the experimenting on, and the question is now do we do content addition on the test server, or go ahead and move on the production server, with the risk that entails?

In the spirit of answering the question, I’m going to attempt to move my current Joomla installation to another spot on the server…fresh install, and then move the database over. We’ll see if that works, and that will answer the above question, I hope.

Next week? Actual, honest-to-god content migration begins! (I desperately hope…)

Categories
Digital Culture

Valleyschwag #3

Valleyschwag posterMy Valleyschwag showed up late last week, and it was a great one:

Stickers Plaxo shirt

But the best schwag was this:

messenger bag

One of the rockin’ messenger bags! The poster was also a neat surprise, and very well done. Very happy with this month’s schwag…here’s hoping that it keeps up! For anyone who loves the Web 2.0 explosion and is a tech-head, this is a fun once-a-month surprise.

Categories
Library Issues

Next Step Blogging, take two

A very nice writeup of my ALA presentation from Karen Schneider via LITABlog…it was just a ton of fun to do, and Karen is entirely too mum about her involvement in the process. She was the instigator that got Steven, Karen C., and myself together to do the thing in the first place. Thanks, Karen! I hope to get the chance for a repeat performance next year.

Go take a look!

Categories
Digital Culture

Google Cubes

Google Cubes

Another pic I’ve been meaning to get to…these are little promo items from the Google Bash at this year’s American Library Association Annual meeting in New Orleans. They were at the bar, and when you ordered a drink the bartender would pop one in along with the booze and ice. When you do that, they light up:

Google Cubes all lit up

They have a couple of electrodes on the back that need to be bridged with some conductive item before they light up. Clever, and they gave the party a decidedly sci-fi aura, with everyone walking around with different colored glowing drinks.

Categories
Books Library Issues Media

Turn it up!

I’ve got a ton of leftover stuff I still want to talk about from ALA Annual. Here’s my favorite vendor sign from the exhibit hall at ALA in New Orleans…

Large Print Audiobooks

Large Print Audiobooks? Do they just talk louder?

Categories
Digital Culture

Blue in Kentucky

Most people have heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, but few have probably heard of the blue people from Kentucky. Seriously. Blue. People.

They’re known simply as the “blue people” in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.

There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one old-timer that “their blood is just a little closer to their skin.” But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the “blue Fugates ” lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate’s descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.

I grew up just north from Hazard and Perry County, and heard about these genetically interesting folks growing up. I never met anyone with this genetic quirk, but there are still some in the area. Here’s a really well-written story about them, how they came to be so blue, and how they’ve dealt with it. Story is old, but fascinating.

Categories
Monkeys

Monkey Tuesday!

cue the theme music

From NPR, a fascinating story about a bonobo that seems to have linguistic skills far beyond any other non-human in history. From the story:

Savage-Rumbaugh made a decision; She would stop trying to teach words and sentences to apes. She would give Kanzi a reason to talk, and something to talk about.

“What I had to do is come up with an environment,” she says, “a world that would foster the acquisition of these lexical symbols in Kanzi and a greater understanding of spoken human language.”

…

Before long, Kanzi was doing many of the things humans do with language. He was talking about places and objects that weren’t in sight. He was referring to the past and the future. And he was understanding new sentences made up of familiar words.