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…I’m trying to decide whether or not to go ahead and upgrade to WordPress 2.0, the new release of my favorite blogging platform. On the plus side, it looks like they’ve really done a great job rebuilding some of the backend functions. On the other hand, I’m not certain how much it will break my various customizations that I’ve made to my template and such.
Anyone out there want to tell me some horror stories, or to reassure me?
Out of town for the holidays for the next few days, visiting family. Hope that everyone has safe travels, and I’ll see you all in a week or so.
The first foray of this new web startup into the media seems….confused. Here’s a few snippets from the ZD Net article:
A new online information service launching in early 2006 aims to build on the model of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public.
Called Digital Universe, the project is the brainchild of, among others, USWeb founder Joe Firmage and Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia’s earliest creators.
Ok…so far, so good. Misguided, I think but…doable.
By providing a service they’re calling “the PBS of the Web,” the Digital Universe team hopes to create a new era of free and open access to wide swaths of information on virtually any topic.
The “PBS of the Web”??? WTF does that mean? That’s like saying the “NPR of the publishing world”. I have no idea what that’s supposed to engender in me, and it certainly won’t capture the imagination of the public.
The vision of the Digital Universe is to essentially provide an ad-free alternative to the likes of AOL and Yahoo on the Internet,” said Firmage. “Instead of building it through Web robots, we’re building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world.”
Errr…what? First PBS and now AOL and Yahoo? Huh?
But Firmage, Sanger and Digital Universe President Bernard Haisch think their project can avoid the pitfalls of its predecessors. They’ve created a system built around the idea of portals–one for each major subject area, such as climate change, energy, education, the solar system and so on. Each portal will contain many different kinds of resources.
Ohhhh…so it’s completely unscalable. A portal for each subject area would be nightmarish, and completely unable to scale up for every possibly entry.
My vote at this very, very early stage? Not a chance in hell this is gonna work.
“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” – George W. Bush, Transition of Power: President-Elect Bush Meets With Congressional Leaders on Capitol Hill. Aired December 18, 2000 – 12:00 p.m. ET
Finally, maybe, people are beginning to see that President Bush has overstepped his bounds. The recent wiretapping scandal has brought both parties down around his ears, and the American people are slowly realizing what sort of person they elected.
Absolutely amazing analysis over at Bruce Schneier’s blog. Excerpts below, but you really should read his whole piece, as well as the copious linkouts to other stories.
In defending this secret spying on Americans, Bush said that he relied on his constitutional powers (Article 2) and the joint resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 that led to the war in Iraq. This rationale was spelled out in a memo written by John Yoo, a White House attorney, less than two weeks after the attacks of 9/11. It’s a dense read and a terrifying piece of legal contortionism, but it basically says that the president has unlimited powers to fight terrorism. He can spy on anyone, arrest anyone, and kidnap anyone and ship him to another country … merely on the suspicion that he might be a terrorist. And according to the memo, this power lasts until there is no more terrorism in the world.
Yoo then says: “The terrorist incidents of September 11, 2001, were surely far graver a threat to the national security of the United States than the 1998 attacks. … The President’s power to respond militarily to the later attacks must be correspondingly broader.”
This is novel reasoning. It’s as if the police would have greater powers when investigating a murder than a burglary.
This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don’t use that term lightly; the very definition of a dictatorship is a system that puts a ruler above the law. In the weeks after 9/11, while America and the world were grieving, Bush built a legal rationale for a dictatorship. Then he immediately started using it to avoid the law.
Indeed. Just a few years ago, the American people decided that we would impeach a president because he lied under oath about a blowjob. Why aren’t we impeaching Bush for directly ignoring the Constitution of the United States?
Just a quick note to those that may have noticed a few odd posts over the last couple of days. I’ve set up a script via del.icio.us that feeds my blog my del.icio.us links on a daily basis, partially for my own edificiation, and partially to note on the blog what I’m interested in/researching each day. I’m using del.icio.us more and more every day it seems, and thought it might be interesting to have them posted here.
If it becomes too busy, or if anyone has any thoughts about it, let me know.
I was going to comment on Jenny’s post concerning the ALA and conference fees, but my thoughts seem irrelevant in the face of Meredith’s incredible post. Excerpts below, with small amounts of commentary:
Librarians sacrifice enough by being librarians (and getting paid so little) that it’s not their duty to serve the ALA. Librarians should help their patrons. They shouldn’t have to make little money and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice their financial well-being or the well-being of their family so that they can speak at a stupid conference.
Bravo! There’s not a single librarian that couldn’t be making more money in another profession, and I’d be willing to say that goes triple for those of us on the tech edge of the world. We’ve make individual choices to come to this profession, and we shouldn’t have to further our financial burden in order to share the knowledge we bring to it.
In the past, there were certain ways that librarians contributed to the profession. They wrote articles for professional journals, they served on committees for professional organizations, and/or they spoke at conferences. The first option involves research and time. The latter two involve travel, expense, and time. Is that the only way to contribute to the profession these days?
Here’s a topic near and dear to my heart. As a new academic librarian, I have things like tenure and reappointment to worry about, and “what counts” is a huge deal. Does my blogging count towards “forwarding the profession”? I’d like to think so, but I’d be willing to bet that my committee might not feel that way.
They spend more than $25 million on payroll and operating expenses alone! And I would feel really good about that if I thought that the ALA was doing a lot of good. But I don’t see it. And I certainly don’t see them representing a younger generation of members. When there is talk of a shortage of librarians rather than a shortage of entry-level jobs (which is the reality), new librarians feel betrayed. When the ALA is so behind technologically and its President insults basically anyone interested in any sort of online publishing, digitization, or Web design, techies feel betrayed. When the ALA doesn’t lobby for better pay for librarians, those of us who barely make ends meet feel betrayed. What does ALA stand for? Who do they help? It is an organization that represents libraries, not librarians.
Why do we need the ALA? Is ALA really relevant anymore? Does anyone really feel like ALA represents their interests? At my job, none of my colleagues has been to an ALA Conference and have no interest in going. They seem to consider the ALA pretty irrelevant. And that perspective is only confirmed when the only thing the ALA Council can seem to accomplish is passing a resolution on Iraq!!! The ALA is a huge organization that is hard to understand, hard to feel a part of, and hard to know what it stands for. I paid out-of-pocket for my membership this year, but it will certainly be the last unless the ALA changes. But they won’t.
This again has been rattling around in my head for some time. I re-upped my ALA membership recently, in the belief that making change happens more easily from the inside. But I can see a time when that membership letter comes, and I decide that my $150 is better spent on me than on the nebulous ALA. It’s clear that the ALA needs to change, especially in the face of an upcoming generation of librarians who are largely questioning of their purpose and direction. When the older generation leaves the profession, where will the ALA be then?
And after my discussion below, this seems a necessary addition:
Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.
The meat of the story is:
Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.
The average number of errors per article in each? 3 per article reviewed in Britannica, 4 per article in Wikipedia. “AHA!” say critics. “The Wikipedia is worse!” Except, of course…the wikipedia can be fixed. Brittanica is wrong forever.
Here’s the full list of errors from each article…it would be interesting to revisit these and see if the wikipedia has been corrected.
| Entry | Encyclopaedia Britannica inaccuracies | Wikipedia inaccuracies |
| Acheulean industry | 1 | 7 |
| Agent Orange | 2 | 2 |
| Aldol reaction | 4 | 3 |
| Archimedes’ principle | 2 | 2 |
| Australopithecus africanus | 1 | 1 |
| Bethe, Hans | 1 | 2 |
| Cambrian explosion | 10 | 11 |
| Cavity magnetron | 2 | 2 |
| Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan | 4 | 0 |
| CJD | 2 | 5 |
| Cloud | 3 | 5 |
| Colloid | 3 | 6 |
| Dirac, Paul | 10 | 9 |
| Dolly | 1 | 4 |
| Epitaxy | 5 | 2 |
| Ethanol | 3 | 5 |
| Field effect transistor | 3 | 3 |
| Haber process | 1 | 2 |
| Kinetic isotope effect | 1 | 2 |
| Kin selection | 3 | 3 |
| Lipid | 3 | 0 |
| Lomborg, Bjorn | 1 | 1 |
| Lymphocyte | 1 | 2 |
| Mayr, Ernst | 0 | 3 |
| Meliaceae | 1 | 3 |
| Mendeleev, Dmitry | 8 | 19 |
| Mutation | 8 | 6 |
| Neural network | 2 | 7 |
| Nobel prize | 4 | 5 |
| Pheromone | 3 | 2 |
| Prion | 3 | 7 |
| Punctuated equilibrium | 1 | 0 |
| Pythagoras’ theorem | 1 | 1 |
| Quark | 5 | 0 |
| Royal Greenwich Observatory | 3 | 5 |
| Royal Society | 6 | 2 |
| Synchrotron | 2 | 2 |
| Thyroid | 4 | 7 |
| Vesalius, Andreas | 2 | 4 |
| West Nile Virus | 1 | 5 |
| Wolfram, Stephen | 2 | 2 |
| Woodward, Robert Burns | 0 | 3 |