The authors, Karen A. Coombs and Jason Griffey, have years of experience blogging and administering blogs, both personally and for the Library Information Technology Association and their respective academic institutions.
More about Karen
Karen A. Coombs is the Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries. Her current projects there include the implementation of new blogging software (WordpressMU), and digital library software for Electronic Thesis and Dissertations.
Karen blogs at Library Web Chic, her professional blog which she has had since 2004. She also helps with the maintenance and code-monkeying at LITABlog.
She is the outgoing (June 2008) co-chair of the LITA Interest Group BIGWIG, and is one of the organizers of the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase. Additionally she is a member of the LITA Top Technology Trends panel and co-teaches the AJAX for Libraries post-conference at Computers in Libraries.
If that all hasn’t made your head spin, Karen’s writing and speaking commitments are, according to her loving husband, insane. She actively writes for Library Journal, has several book chapters in progress and has spoken at ALA, LITA Forum, Computers in Libraries, Internet Librarian, code4lib, and too many other conferences to count.
She tries hard not to take herself too seriously and enjoys spending her “free time” cooking, reading, and taking nature photographs. You can find her online at Flickr, del.icio.us, LibraryThing, Last.fm, and LinkedIn.
More about Jason
That scruffy gentleman to the left is Jason Griffey, the Head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He’s busy with lots of things these days:
Jason writes online in a few places. His primary residence is Pattern Recognition, his personal and professional blog, which has been active since 2003. He is an administrator and author for LITABlog, and this year will be a columnist for the ALA TechSource blog.
He is the current co-chair of the LITA Interest Group BIGWIG, and is one of the organizers of the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase.
At his place of work, he is working hard on a new building project…a brand new $48 million dollar academic library for the UTC campus. We’re in the planning stages, and should break ground in just about a year. Jason put together a wiki for the project, and the entire process is being done as transparently as possible.
At Computers in Libraries, Jason is one of the faculty for the Academic Library 2.0 preconference.
He also feels very funny writing in the third person, but thought it would be interesting anyway. He spends his free time reading, playing games, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.
You can find Jason 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, or you can follow him on Profilactic.
