As some of you know, I’m part of UMSI’s MakerBridge project (site, blog, Twitter), which connects librarians to maker ideas and fellow making librarians. We’re thrilled that our project founder and coordinator Sharona Ginsberg was featured in Publisher’s Weekly this week! From the article “ALA 2014: Hands On”:
Librarians know a thing or two about getting their hands dirty. Sometimes it’s in ways they’d rather not discuss (cleaning messes, ahem), but more often it’s in the name of learning. And these days, learning at the library is very much about making things …
Sharona Ginsberg, the driving force behind MakerBridge, a resource-rich website designed to help librarians learn more about makerspaces, agrees, noting that libraries today “are changing the public image of what a library is and what it’s for.” She believes that more communities are getting interested in the maker movement in general and that the “library offers an opportunity to collaborate.”
In the broader view, maker culture is driven by people who want to make a difference by creating solutions to a range of everyday problems, and offer a response to the spread of consumerism and a “disposable” culture. “We used to repair something when it broke,” Ginsberg says. “We didn’t just throw it away.”
Ginsberg got on board with the movement a few years ago when she was earning her MLIS [my note: actually, an MSI!] at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. “I did a practicum working in a 3-D lab and got really interested in exploring makerspaces and maker culture,” she says. She built a pathfinder on the subject as a class project. Soon after, Ginsberg recalls, “I saw a lot of interest, but not a lot of know-how” …
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While librarians’ opinions vary on what exactly constitutes a makerspace (some believe its key focus is technology tools), the broader idea of making means that the range of definition is infinite…
Just as libraries’ collections and programming are tailored to specific audiences, their makerspaces also reflect the needs and interests of the surrounding community. Knitting groups, gardening classes with seed-swaps, and the ability to check out a power tool, musical instrument, or electronics kit, are all library services that can be considered part of the larger idea of maker culture …
The article also discusses historical examples of making in libraries, as well as an extended section on Ashley Spires’ Kids Can Press title The Most Magnificent Thing, which is the best picture book on the mindset and value of prototyping I’ve seen.
Congratulations to Sharona, to Publisher’s Weekly, and to featured commentator Barbara Stripling for emphasizing that making is much more than technology. Thank you also to the team at the U-M 3D Lab who gave Sharona her first experience with 3D printing and similar tools (it was her practicum for the information literacy class I was teaching). Further thanks to the U-M School of Information for hosting the MakerBridge project and for being the kind of place where 3D printing can be explored as a facet of the information literacy landscape. I work in a swell place.