How to use this Page

Want to offer more hands-on learning opportunities for and with the teens in your community?  3D Systems Corp., in partnership with YALSA, is giving away up to 250 3D printers to members of YALSA.  Learn more and apply online by Oct. 30^th.  Are you not a YALSA/ALA member yet?  Membership starts at $60 per year.  Contact Letitia Smith at lsmith at ala dot org, or 312.280.4390, to get the best rate and to learn about paying in installments.  And don't forget to check out all of the great maker and connected learning resources on YALSA's wiki!

Add a Comment

To end out our week of making I've asked my colleague Michelle Angell to share her experiences with Maker culture. She started out with programs and wanted to create makerspaces, but found that a Maker Fair was an even better way to celebrate and embrace the Maker community. The following is Michelle's response.

Libraries have a long tradition of providing making resources to the public. We offer information on gardening, landscaping, furniture and toy making, home and car repair, sewing, knitting, drawing, painting, computer programming, electronics, robotics and countless other DIY topics. As the role of libraries in the community continues to evolve, we have an opportunity to provide maker services that go beyond the customary print medium. Many libraries across the nation are developing their own makerspaces. The creation of a successful makerspace is not something that can happen overnight, however. Makerspaces require planning, adequate physical space, substantial staff time and somewhat prohibitive set-up costs.

Maker Faires are alternative opportunities for libraries to participate in the maker movement. Maker Media, publisher of Make Magazine, hosts two annual, large scale Faires -in the Bay Area and New York. Hundreds of licensed Mini Maker Faires are also held around the world each year. In the spring of 2013, the Lakewood Branch Library became aware of an interest in the community to host a Maker Faire type event. This was spurred by Kurt Sample, coordinator of the Lakewood Computer Clubhouse. The Computer Clubhouse is a free outreach program for youth, sponsored by Intel. Adding our local Pierce Community College as an additional partner, also secured a free venue for the event on their beautiful campus.

Lakewood MakerFest initiated the Mini Maker Faire license application process, but due to time constraints and some concerns with fulfilling contract costs and requirements, we went with an independently produced event. Our event is ultimately inspired by Maker Media’s Maker Faires, but not affiliated with or endorsed by the MAKE brand or company. The first Lakewood MakerFest held in 2013 at the Pierce College Fort Steilacoom campus, in Lakewood, WA. A total of 144 people attended the 2013 inaugural event. MakerFest was absolutely free to attend and there was no cost for exhibitors to participate. The 2014 MakerFest saw it attendance increase to 287 people, and at the May 2015 event that number rose to 425! Features of the Fest included; displays, demonstrations, workshops, and hands-on activities. Many of the attendees were families with school age children. One of our ongoing goals each year is to provide more opportunities for a more ethnically and economically diverse population to participate in maker culture.

The MakerFest Manifesto:

• MakerFest is a festival-style celebration of makers. A Maker is a person that engages in the process of making or producing something. Makers run the gamut from woodworkers, tinkerers, coders, crafters, to robot builders. The Maker movement includes amateurs, enthusiasts, hobbyists, innovators, and entrepreneurs.
•  MakerFest is a free, non-commercial, non-competitive, community-building event. It provides an opportunity for people to gather, connect, and explore the processes, products, and joys of making. The goal of MakerFest is to engage and excite youth, families, and adults to explore Maker/DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture and become Makers themselves.
• MakerFest is an inclusive event; gathering folks of all ages, ethnicities, cultures, genders, and sexual orientations.

MakerFest is a true collaboration of community partners. Our event sponsors are The Pierce County Library System, Pierce College, The Pierce College Science Dome, the Lakewood Computer Clubhouse, and Brown Paper Tickets.The Fort Steilacoom campus of Pierce College hosts MakerFest in their large science building for no cost. The Pierce College Science Dome, a 58 seat digital planetarium, is located in the same building and is a highlight of the MakerFest experience. Throughout the afternoon the Science Dome provided free shows and demonstrations. Brown Paper Tickets was a new and invaluable partner for us this year. Brown Paper Tickets is an organization that provides free ticket sales and event listing online. They also employ “Doers”, described as, “…They aren't sales people but professionals, with a lifetime of experience in their chosen fields. Brown Paper Tickets simply puts them on the payroll and encourages them to fix, improve and revolutionize. If you ever needed someone without a corporate agenda in your industry, you found them.” Our Doer & Maker Advocate, Tamara Clammer, is based in Seattle and provided us with much needed expertise and contacts in the maker movement.

MakerFest has proved to be a successful introduction for the library to the maker movement. Rather than creating a makerspace from scratch, and due to our collaboration with community partners, MakerFest was a lower cost alternative for the library to participate and support maker culture. The most valuable benefit, perhaps, has been the strong relationships our library has built with other local organizations. These partnerships are expanding our outreach and community involvement opportunities. You may already have makerspaces, Maker Faire type of events, or youth maker programs in your service areas. If your library is interested in diving into the wonderful world of the maker movement, I suggest reaching out and discovering the existing makers in your own neighborhoods.

Visit our website, lakewoodmakerfest.org and facebook page!

Michelle Angell
Youth Services Librarian
Lakewood Branch
Pierce County Library System, WA
[email protected]

Add a Comment

Are you a maker? With all the emphasis on high tech gadgetry, it can make you feel a little left behind if you can't swing a 3D printer on your budget or lack the skills to wield some soldering equipment.

But, like the science-technology-engineering- math portmanteau STEM which added an "A" added to encompass art and become STEAM, the expansion of the "maker" trend to incorporate arts and crafts as a creative and productive use of time and space is a step towards recognizing the wide variety of material production that libraries have long been supporting. And it's an easy way to get in on the making trend with supplies you likely have laying around.

We've had success with this sort of low-stress, drop-in crafting at our library.

Fairhope, a top-notch public library in south Alabama, coined the term "crafterfnoon" for this sort of activity, which I am appropriating.

 

Don't have a dedicated makerspace? Crafternooning can take place from a cart, as Shannon Miller RTed:

Last month at the Library Technology Conference, I heard middle school librarian Jen Legatt talking about starting her makerspace with jigsaw puzzles and origami paper...so expand your thinking about making. Any space that gets people interacting and collaborating around a constructive activity works!

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

3D Systems, in collaboration with YALSA, is committed to expanding young people’s access to 21st century tools like 3D design, 3D scanning and 3D printing.  The MakerLab Club is a brand new community of thousands of U.S. libraries and museums committed to advancing 3D digital literacy via dedicated equipment, staff training and increased public access.

3D Systems is donating up to 4,000 new 3D printers to libraries and museums across the country who join the MakerLab Club and provide access to 3D printing and design programs and services for their communities.  Libraries can apply to be part of the MakerLab Club via an online application. now until November 17th, 2014. Donated printers will be allocated on a competitive basis.

ELIGIBILITY AND MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENTS
Membership in the MakerLab Club is available to libraries committed to creating or expanding makerlabs and/or making activities and to providing community access to 3D printers and digital design.

MAKER LAB CLUB BENEFITS
Libraries can receive up to four donated Cube 3D printers, as well as regular access to workshop curricula and content via webinars. Libraries will also receive exclusive equipment discounts and opportunities to win free hardware and software. In addition to resources and training library staff can join and participate in communities of practice in order to exchange ideas and best practices.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MAKING

Learn more about making in libraries via the resources on YALSA’s wiki, including a free webinar and downloadable toolkit.  And be sure to mark your calendar for March 8 – 14, 2015 when we celebrate Teen Tech Week with the theme “Libraries are for Making ____________.”

 

Add a Comment

Display Comments Add a Comment

1 and a half hour of digital painting (using Adobe Photoshop) reduced to 6 minutes.
Find out more stuff on his website.

Add a Comment

In Chaucer’s time, the word for a poet or author was ‘a maker’ - as witness the Scots poet William Dunbar’s luminous ‘Lament for the Makers’, in which he lists poet after poet taken by ‘the strong unmerciful tyrant’, death:

‘He has done piteouslie devour

The noble Chaucer, of makers flower;

The Monk of Bery, and Gower all three:

Timor mortis conturbat me.’

(In fact, damn it, go and read the poem first, and come back and read this after you’ve done.)

‘Maker’: I’ve always liked it. It’s less high-falutin’ than ‘author’ or ‘poet’: it links us inextricably – as we ought to be linked – with every other sort of human creativity. People make furniture. They make paintings, musical instruments and gardens. They make brain scanners, television programmes and films. They make homes. They make love – which as Ursula K Le Guin once wrote in the ‘The Lathe of Heaven’ (go and read that too), ‘doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.’

None of these things (furniture, gardens, brain scanners etc) just happen. You can’t make anything worth having without a lot of effort. I should know, because my bones are currently aching from having spent three days digging bindweed roots (thick, white, snappy coiling things) out of my flower beds. But what a difference it will make come the summer!

Writers are makers. Creativity is toil. But it’s also wonderful, and as I read Meg Harper’s last piece, about getting the frightened writers in her workshop to get something down on paper, I was sad that children are frightened of using words.

My brother and I were part of the Blue Peter generation, and he was fantastic at making things out of Squeezy bottle and cornflakes packets. He went on to construct balsa wood planes that really flew, and can now turn his hand to just about anything, including boats, house extensions, and beautiful, glossy musical instruments like mandolas. He’s also an accomplished folk musician who can compose his own tunes.

Me, I tried. I longed to own a model sailing ship, so I made my own very ugly one out of balsa wood, and painted it yellow. It had so many holes in the hull, it would have sunk like a stone, but I made it and loved it till it was squashed flat in a house removal by heartless, careless men from Pickfords. I wanted to own an exquisite piece of Chinese embroidery I’d seen, smothered in birds and flowers – so I got a bit of frayed blue satin and laboriously stitched away at a puckered, lumpy, clumsy bird.

I wanted a miniature Chinese garden like one I’d read about in a book – so I borrowed a tray and arranged gravel and stones and moss around a tin lid (for the pool) and stood some china ornaments around it till the moss dried and the tray got knocked over. Oh, and I wanted an eighth Narnia book, so I got an old blue notebook and wrote my own. (You can see it on my website if you want.) And though none of the things I made may have been any good (by some ultimate critical standard), it was the making of them that counted.

For me, the writing is what has lasted. I’m not an embroiderer or a woodworker (though I would still love to be). But it’s all making, and any child who hammers a nail in straight, paints a picture or bakes brownies knows how good it feels.

Here’s a poem by Robert Bridges that I learned by heart when I was about nine.

I love all beauteous things,

I seek and adore them.

God hath no better praise,

And Man in his hasty days

Is honoured for them.

I too will something make,

And joy in the making,

Although tomorrow it seem

Like the empty words of a dream,

Remembered on waking.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Going to Wisconsin tomorrow to go to a wedding and hang out with the fam. Very excited.

Also, I'm blogging over at Geek Buffet today about the Death of the Author and J. K. Rowling's recent interviews adding more information to the text. (If you access the post from the Geek Buffet page, you will not be spoiled, as I hid them after the break. If you follow the direct link, beware the second half of the post. Everything after the Excuse me?!)

But let's talk about... books for librarians. These aren't books for a general audience, but I think both of them are really good for what they are.

From Cover to Cover: Evaluating and Reviewing Children's Books by Kathleen T. Horning

This is a great book if... you need to evaluate and review children's books on a professional level. It might be a bit much for parents who just want a good feel on kidlit for their own children. However, if you are a children's book professional, this is a must have for your bookshelf. She gives a lot of useful advice on what to watch out for, both in terms of text and in general book design. Horning covers pictures books, transitional readers, and older readers with tons of in-depth information about every single aspect (it seems like) of each group.

My one complaint is her dismissal of humorous poetry in favor of "more sophisticated forms of true poetry." I really don't think humorous poetry such as Shel Silverstein of Jack Pretlusky is any lesser than other types of poetry out there, especially when it comes to children's poetry.

Another great book is Managing Archival & Manuscript Repositories (Archival Fundamentals Series) by Michael J. Kurtz

Normally I don't count textbooks that I've read as part of my reading total, because, well, I usually don't read all of them. Rarely is an entire book assigned, and, when it is, I usually miss a chapter or two. Also, they're usually assigned a little out of order and you're reading it over the course of a semester, so you don't get a good sense of what the book is like as an over-arching whole.

This semester I tried something different. I had to read the first four chapters and the book is engaging and well written and really not that long so... I just didn't stop after the first four chapters and just read the whole thing. Plus, now I don't have to worry about reading for the rest of the semester. Woohoo!

Anyway, the book. If you work in information management (by which I don't mean managing information but rather being a manager in an information environment) or an archives, this is a good book to have on your shelf. If you're a manager in an archives, you really need this book.

Covering everything from management theory through the years, HR, budgeting, PR, planning, and project management, Kurtz writes and well-thought out handbook with a lots of information presented in an easy-to-understand way with lots of concrete examples.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm taking management right now with Dr. Kurtz. It's just a good book. You know, if you're a manager.

Display Comments Add a Comment