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.
So on the continuing saga of the UTC library website redesign:
We’re basically choosing between two different CMS’s…Drupal and Joomla. Neither of which is playing well with our server, an older Red Hat machine which hasn’t been updated yet to the appropriate versions of PHP. This is because RedHat hasn’t pushed the version out yet….even though it is well behind the actual PHP versioning.
*sigh*
Joomla I’m working on tomorrow. Keep your finger’s fingers crossed.
Don’t forget, folks: It’s National Slayer Day! Go forth and blast Angel Of Death to all in earshot!
Just to recap the last week or so for The Pirate Bay, the largest bittorrent engine in the world,
They were raided by the police, evidently under pressure from the United States and the MPAA. Keep in mind, of course, that this is in Sweden. You know, one of the places that isn’t the US. Their servers (along with other sites servers, which just happened to be in the same room) are seized.
Three days later:
Pirate Bay is back up, and now operating (evidently) as a distributed site in multiple countries with redundency. Ah, the beauty of Gilmore’s Law in action.
Their own take on it:
Just some stats…
… here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes – and how long it usually takes to fix:Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days
Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days
The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days
.. yawn.
And finally, an absolutely brilliant speech from some of the people responsible for Pirate Bay, given at the Reboot conference.
The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways.
How cool are these dudes? They have their own political party. Seriously. How much is a one way ticket to Sweden these days?
No comment…if you’ve never seen or heard this…well…there are just no words. Shatner does Rocket Man.
I recieved my first Valleyschwag package yesterday…I must say, I’m impressed. From the detail put into the packaging to the schwag itself, a cool once a month surprise. It’s like having a birthday every month!
It was, as you can see, wrapped in painted burlap. After you peeled away the burlap, the goodies inside were:
All in all, not bad for $14.95. The Rubyred T-shirt and the Goatse stickers will be worth that much in conversation at least, and the PerplexCity cards are just cool.
Sometimes real life IS just like the Interweb! Watch Fox News commit a real life Godwin!
From Think Progress:
Sterling Burnett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, an organization that has received over $390,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. This afternoon on Fox, Burnett compared watching Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, to watching a movie by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to learn about Nazi Germany.
Transcript:
That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.
ALA annual, my presentation, and what the hell I’m going to attend other than it. I’ve not had the chance to do any real planning, so I’m expecting I’ll probably be sitting in the van on the way to NOLA with the schedule on my lap trying to figure out what I’m doing while I’m there. If anyone is interested in saying “hey”, I’ll be attending at least the LITA BIGWIG meeting, as well as the LITA happy hour. I’d love to meet anyone and everyone, so come say hello!
Website redesign. Consuming nearly my every conscious thought are the issues related to the new website for my library\. Evaluating CMS’s is one thing, but the truth is that I don’t really know what I think of them until I actually build a test site…which I just barely might have time to do before I actually have to build the real site. Add on top of that information architecture (boy do we need a patron-centered rethinking), and the idiosyncrasies of templating for each CMS…I’m torn between reading everything I can, and just jumping in a getting my hands dirty.
On top of all this, Betsy is currently still in Costa Rica, which doesn’t improve things any. Talk about distraction!
No wonder I haven’t had much time for writing. I need to try harder on the “blog daily” thing. I find that if I miss a day or two, it becomes easier to not do it, and I hate not blogging.
Today I’m off to Dale Hollow Lake with the family for a little vacation. We were there in 2003, and it was a ton of fun and very relaxing. I’m hoping for more of the same! More on the website redesign, templating, and such to come.
So in preparation for the upcoming website redesign, we’re evaluating CMS‘s at UTC. I’ve managed to get Drupal and Joomla installed, and will probably go through 2-4 more (phpMywebsite, e107, a few others) to check look and feel, ease of structure, flexibility, etc. While I’m very comfortable with the overall website design process, creating a new template for the CMS we eventually choose is going to be interesting.
I’m going to attempt to chronicle the process here on my blog, including mockups, templating, etc…both for myself as a note-taking venture, and in hopes that others might find it interesting/useful.
So far, I’m not leaning towards any particular CMS. Drupal has enormous popularity and a ton of support in the form of modules, but Joomla is far easier out-of-the-box. I’ll have to take some time and play with both, creating new templates and such before I’m clear on whether they can do what we want them to do.
While I hesitated to talk about this before it became official and was announced, but I’m going to take over as webmaster for the UTC Library. I won’t be leaving my position in Reference/Instruction, and will still be teaching and being a reference librarian. This is just an additional duty that I’ll balance by doing less desk time overall. My skillset is probably atypical for a reference/instruction librarian overall, so this is an opportunity to leverage my technology skills to the benefit of the library.
This is an interesting thing for me to move into, since I effectively left a webmaster position to move into what I really wanted, Reference and Instruction. But this is a direction that I find interesting in librarianship, the taking of something that has for years been considered the domain of systems, and moving it to reference/instruction. A month or so ago there was a Blended Librarian webcast about these sorts of new positions in libraries…a sort of Instructional Technology librarian, who bridges the ability to do web design, instructional design, and other issues relating technology and the patron.
So my summer project: to redesign the library website, with usability in mind. We’ll almost certainly be moving to a CMS as well, and are evaluating those now. If anybody out there has tips/thoughts about open source CMS’s as far as pros/cons, let me know. As well, if you’ve got favorite library sites/must haves/other tips, I’m open as well. I know what I want, but it’s always good to hear what others find valuable.