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FFL Fab Lab: first Makerspace in a public library!

Oct 31 2011 Published by Fiacre under Hackerspaces, Makers, Present, Technology

I had the pleasure of meeting Lauren Smedley, Transliteracy Development Director at Fayetteville Free Library, while attending the Contact Summit in NYC earlier this month, where we had a chance to discuss the intersections between libraries and maker/hacker culture with other attendees, including Bre Pettis of Makerbot fame. Lauren is creating a Fab Lab at her library and won one of three $10,000 awards at the Contact conference to help make her dream a reality.

She is now seeking further funding via IndieGoGo. Lauren describes the fab lab as follows;

Our Story

The Fayetteville Free Library is excited to offer a new public service—the FFL Fab Lab. What exactly is a fab lab? According to Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and author of Fab: the Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, a fab lab is “a collection of commercially available machines and parts linked by software and processes developed for making things (Gershenfeld, 12).” At the foundation of the FFL’s Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, made available to the library through a generous donation from Express Computer Services.

The Impact

Over the past fifty years, the manner in which we process information has changed. New technological developments have changed the way we interact with information, allowing us to become “creators” rather than just “consumers.” There are few places that currently provide FREE community access to new, innovative creation technology like 3D printers. The public library provides a safe and accessible space where anyone in the community can interact, understand and develop through use of this technology.The FFL is encouraging local innovation, collaboration, and education through offering this new public service. We are documenting the process so that other libraries across the country can replicate it, making their own free, public access Fab Labs.

As Lauren states in the video, “makerspaces make a perfect fit with public libraries”, so please take the time to visit the site and contribute what you can to this important project. For more information see Lauren’s blog or follow her on Twitter for updates.

Update November 9, 2011: The FFL Fab Lab appeared on Boing Boing today quoting from this article on MindShift.

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DIY Book Scanner

Sep 18 2011 Published by Fiacre under Books, Copyright, EBooks, Makers, Open source, Present, Technology

Daniel Reetz – “DIY Book Scanning”.

A presentation by Daniel Reetz from the Open Hardware Summit on the creation and evolution of the DIY Book Scanner project

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Anika appeals to Toronto Council for her library

Aug 04 2011 Published by Fiacre under Libraries under threat, Present

Fourteen-year-old Anika Tabovaradan makes a passionate plea to Toronto City Council to keep her Scarborough library branch open.

“I’m no taxpayer, but when I get to use the computers in the library and do my homework, I’ll be able to get a good job someday … and when the day comes to pay taxes, I’ll be glad that you supported people paying the extra taxes to keep the system going.”

You can find out more at the Our Public Library campaign website.

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The Alternative Library Spaces project

Aug 02 2011 Published by Fiacre under Library buildings, Library design, Present

Alternative Library Spaces is a project by Ksenia Cheinman documenting special libraries or, as she defines them more specifically, libraries in the domains of arts and humanities, in order to create a database of these spaces.

This project has evolved out of a personal observation on the nature of artist-run spaces and other art organizations. Every art institution by its nature is bound to accumulate print materials (be that exhibition catalogues, brochures, event invitations, artist books and publications, zines, various periodicals or other ephemera). As these resources are constantly obtained, the questions regarding their use and storage quickly arise. Many such organizations have very limited space and yet they manage to hold on to these valuable materials. Unfortunately, however, these resources are rarely known about or made use of by the greater community.

The main focus of this project is to highlight the importance and unique character of such spaces (as opposed to public, academic and more specific art/design libraries that are part of universities and colleges) and to establish how they can be further used and developed by the institutions they belong to and by the broader public.

She is currently seeking suggestions for library spaces to include in the database and contact details are available on the project’s website if you would like to contribute.

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