I have spoken at national and international conferences, for regional library groups, and for local library groups on topics ranging from implementation and use of Web 2.0 tools in libraries and higher education to mobile technologies and the future of information. I have also led workshops, preconferences, and University-level classes. My areas of interest and expertise include:
My blog, Pattern Recognition, has been active since 2003. Content from my blog has been featured on BoingBoing 4 times and Digg once. Pattern Recognition has a Google Page Rank of 5.
BoingBoing Posts
Digg Post
That scruffy gentleman to the left is me, Jason Griffey, the Head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I'm busy with lots of things these days:
Library Blogging, by Jason Griffey and Karen A Coombs, is a book from Linworth Press. It was released in the Summer of 2008, and is available for order now at Amazon and other fine retailers.
I write online in a few places, primarily Pattern Recognition, my personal and professional blog, which has been active since 2003. I'm an administrator and author for LITABlog, and a columnist for the ALA TechSource blog.
I'm very involved with the ALA, specifically LITA, and am the past chair of the LITA Interest Group BIGWIG, and one of the organizers of the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase. I'm also the 2008-2010 Chair for the LITA Program Planning Committee. I'm running for LITA Board in 2010, and hope that you'll vote for me.
At my place of work, we are working hard on a new building project...a brand new $48 million academic library for the UTC campus. We're in the planning stages, and should break ground in just about a year. I put together a wiki for the project, and the entire process is being done as transparently as possible.
I was honored to be named one of Library Journal's Movers & Shakers for 2009. At Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian, I have been one of the faculty for the Academic Library 2.0 preconference.
I spend my free time with my wife Dr. Betsy Sandlin, and our daughter Eliza. I enjoy reading genre fiction (horror, sci-fi, fantasy) and science and food-related non-fiction, playing games, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.
You can find me online nearly everywhere, but especially Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, blip.tv, ClaimID, LibraryThing, Last.fm, Pandora, LinkedIn, Slideshare, and probably other places I'm not thinking of. If you want to just get everything all at once, here's an RSS of Jason's lifestream.
I currently have one book in print, and one on the way in January of 2010. In print is Library Blogging, which I co-authored with Karen Coombs. It's from Linworth Publishing, and discusses the how and why of libraries and blogging. Technical and practical, it's a great guide to the form.
My second book is coming in January from Neal Schuman publishers, and it's called Mobile Technologies and Libraries. It's one book in a larger set that is being called The Tech Set. It is, perhaps obviously, about the explosion of mobile and how mobile services change library services.