Neil Gaiman @ ALA
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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.
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ALA Day One – Google!
Tales, Tips and Tools: Book Search, Scholar and the Library Team
Ben Burnell, Google Library Partnerships
Once more: notes in the form of a bulleted list!
- Larry and Sergey’s idea started as a library concept…digitize the library, make it rankable.
- Google
PrintBook Search divides books into three main IP categories: Public Domain (hey, I won a hat for knowing who Emily Dickinson was!), In Print, and “other”. - Here’s a sobering thought: over the Google 5 (the five libraries in the Book Print project), 60% of the books in the libraries are held in only one of the participating libraries.
- Another sobering statistic: of the Google 5, only 20% of the books in the library are in the public domain.
- Example from Google Book Search: Earl Robichau, in a picture in a book, is discovered when his great nephew find his name in Google Book Search.
- 5% of books are currently in print.
- The “snippet” view is designed to legally display and make findable the other books…those not in print and those not in the public domain.
- So there are three ways to look at a book in Book Search: Full Book View (Public Domain), Snippet view (Unknown copyright status), Sample Pages view (In Print, agreement with publishers).
- Will provide article results, book results, and citation results.
- Great quote: It’s better to be frustrated than ignorant.
- At AASL, Google handed out 200 invitations to the Google Librarian Newsletter…and got 3000 signups in a week.
Google Scholar
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More ALA love…
…over at LITABlog! We’ve got a veritable army of bloggers covering the convention, and we’ll have tons of info flowing in over the next 3 days.
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ALA Day One – Website as a Branch
First program/panel: Website as a Branch. The room is standing room only, so I’m forced to sit way back on the floor, which limits my view of the slides. The notes below are largely from the verbal portion due to that.
Presentation by Broward County Library in Florida. Short bullet point summary:
- Put yourself in the user’s place when you start the redesign.
- Then ask your users what they want.
- Identify user sets that you want to focus the website towards.
- Struggle with IT on campus wide issues.
- Identify technology and how to best use it to present information to users.
- All users agreed that navigation is a key issue.
- Staff needs more efficient way to update site.
- Cross-referenced navigation…users don’t want to have to backtrack in order to go to another portion of the site (in web speak: multiple entry points for each piece of content).
- How do you usability test distance users?
- Update/discard content…not something that librarians are NOT very good at.
- Keep in mind that users only tell you when something is wrong. If no one complains about the website, it’s doing ok.
- Empower librarians AND make them responsible for the content…where they should be.
- Give users warning of change, and allow them options for some time.
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Headin’ down to New Orleans…
As of tomorrow morning, I’ll be on my way to the Big Easy for the American Library Association conference. For those attending, if you see me, say “hi!” and make sure and attend the Monday 10:30 LITA Session “Next Step Blogging: Building a professional blog for your library” so that you may heckle me. It’s in the Convention Center Room 342. I’m also going to be out and attending a lot of the blogger shindigs, so I’m sure I’ll run into bunches of you.
I’m planning on blogging as much of the conference as I can, both here and over at LITABLog. There will be text, pictures, and other goodies…Stay tuned!
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He of Books
Betsy just sent me the coolest thing…a translation of mayan glyphs that include the symbol for librarian!
It also translates as “one who keeps, guards, or venerates.” How cool is that? I think I’ve found my next tattoo….there’s also a female version:
These are from FAMSI, a great site dealing with the history and cultures of mesoamerica.
Any librarians heading to New Orleans for ALA this weekend that want to track down a tattoo shop and get inked?
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Work work work
All work and no blog makes Jason a cranky boy.
I’ve been spending nearly all my available neurons on the website redesign and my upcoming ALA presentation. Doesn’t help that I have a trip right after ALA as well, so time is getting shorter on the website.
As an update for anyone interested: we’ve formally decided to go with Joomla as our CMS. The support seems good, the tool seems to do everything we need, and the final decision-maker was that it seems much more intuitive than Drupal. Also, the actual text-editing for adding content is far easier, richer, and more Word-like than Drupal, which is a big deal in a library where we are going to attempt to decentralize some of the content creation. Now we’re on to info-architecture and template design….wish me luck.
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What was WIkipedia created for?
Why, to list the problems and solutions the the TV character MacGyver came up with, of course.
In today’s era of fear, I can’t imagine a TV show that shows us so many ways to blow things up.
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Chronicle bias?
I’m curious about the spin that The Chronicle of Higher Education puts on this particular interview with Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia. Here’s a quote from from the article:
Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, ‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’†and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.â€
Sounds reasonable. Now here’s the headline for the article this is part of:
Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation
Ummm…yeah. He also is discouraging college-level researchers from using Britannica, and World Book, and Americana. I’m very disappointed in the Chronicle for this bit of wiki-bashing…it’s not wikipedia he’s saying doesn’t work/isn’t authoritative/is non-academic. It’s the encyclopedic format that he’s saying is not a source of university appropriate research.
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Allow me to reiterate…
…how exactly fucked the media conglomerates are. To be more specific, the RIAA and the MPAA’s of the world who are still desperately attempting to control content in an age where it is beyond anyones control.
The latest brilliant idea? LaLa, a CD trading site that lets you post your wants and haves, matches you up appropriately with other LaLa subscribers, provides postage paid mailers, and lets the USPS do the swapping. It’s like P2P without the digital. The cost? $1.49 per disc that you swap, giving you the ability to trade old music for new at prices that almost rival AllofMP3. For less than $20 a month, you could have more new music than you could comfortably listen to, all DRM free and with the ability to control it as you see fit.
Just another thing that the RIAA can’t stop. Just wait until some rolls this up with some open source social software that allows small groups to do this without the need for postage. How could they respond if Facebook provided this functionality?