The American Library Association holds two major conferences each year and this year the smaller of the two, Midwinter, was held in Seattle. A feature added this year was a track about making in libraries called “Maker Monday“. There were several presentations but the featured speeches involved Dale Dougherty and me in a session entitled “The Maker Movement Comes to Libraries“. We were very pleasantly surprised by the turnout.
I increasingly believe that making is in the future of libraries.
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The “Hardware Innovation Workshop” is a finalist in two categories of the FAME Awards in the “best first-time event” & “best overall single event (business-to-business)” categories. This is a total surprise and a total delight for me as I’m quite proud of the work we did last year and am pleased to see it be recognized.
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The American Library Association is serious about making. They had me present at last year’s Mapping Transformation conference then they asked me to follow up with an article for their American Libraries Magazine. I drove across the U.S. and visited ten libraries with makerspace ambitions out of which I sussed three successful models for implementation. My article was featured in their Manufacturing Makerspaces compilation; their editors did a wonderful job with the entire section.
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It’s a wonderful thing to watch others discover making. One clue is when a group asks for a speaker which is out of their mainstream. For the Ohio Library Council to ask me to present at their Widen the Lens conference is a bold step out of their safe zone. When my speech ends up being so well attended, when people are so curious, when follow-on dialog shows a strong desire to embrace making, well, it’s just remarkably gratifying.
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Maker Faire it’s just plain fun! This was the third year in NYC and this year Mayor Bloomberg declared it Maker Week. Amazing! The result was a huge increase in attendance over last year to 55,000 people across the two days. With 500 exhibits, a roster of speakers (that kept me busy running from venue to venue), many how-to workshops and a wide variety of attractions I was flat-out on a tear all weekend. My official agenda was constantly being adjusted by chance meetings with friends, impromptu business meetings, and interviews for articles. The MAKE folk work very hard to pull off excellent events and I think they do a remarkable job … as do the legions of volunteers.
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The Open Hardware Summit and World Maker Faire were back-to-back in New York so how could I be anywhere other than in the New York City during this week? The Open Hardware Summit is a chance to get current while meeting many people who care about advancing the powerful concepts of sharing hardware designs.
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As lending books becomes a less dominant theme within libraries, the question asked is “What next?” I took a cross-country tour visiting a variety of libraries which have expressed interest in makerspaces to learn what they’re planning. My goal was to gain a little insight to help advance the aspiration of having more libraries offer making programs and more maker spaces. I will be sharing my learnings with the library and maker communities through MAKE and American Libraries, the journal of the American Libraries Association.
There were ten libraries I visited and spoke with from which I drew a few conclusions.
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A pretty cryptic title, I agree.
Too often we delve into a world of insider codes using of three letter acronyms without thinking about our audience. In this case “HIW” is Hardware Innovation Workshop, the conference I co-chaired with Dale Dougherty at Xerox PARC back in May. The “CTO” stands for Chief Technology Officer which is often the senior technology title in a company. What the title refers to is my having delivered an ultra-condensed summary of the HIW to the Washington Area CTO Roundtable.
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That libraries care about making is amazing. Then again, it isn’t if you reflect on what their mission has been for hundreds of years: to bring free learning resources to the public. For a long, long time this meant having books available for people to check out but in recent decades that’s become less relevant.
Following in Andrew Carnegie’s footsteps, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation spent heavily this past decade to put computers into libraries. This helped libraries extend their mission into the Internet era when so many learning resources are available online. Now, however, the mainstreaming of ebooks and the effect of recession-impacted government budgets are causing a new challenge for libraries.
Remember, the mission of libraries is to bring free learning resources to the public. If not books then what? Well, learning is changing in important ways. Learning through doing is increasingly accepted as is the notion of life-long learning. In a country where our ability to fabricate is atrophying but the tools which empower making are being revolutionized, a new niche for libraries may be emerging. Libraries could house the new tools of personal fabrication and build programs around them to help people grow as makers. In so doing, they’ll help retool America to once again be competitive in the next industrial revolution.
In view of this dawning realization I was asked to keynote the American Library Association’s “Mapping Transformation” conference. Over the course of an hour I introduced how making has changed, explained the phenomenon of makerspaces, and encouraged libraries to learn more and reach out. Makerspaces are filled with bright makers who love to learn and to teach and who would likely be an excellent resource to assist libraries in taking their mission to the next level.
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First on the list and extraordinarily welcoming for a Saturday morning with little forewarning, the HackPitsburgh crew was decked out in their official uniform. This space is legendary for being early, being active, and having a great spirit. Touring HackPittsburgh reinforced that there is a rhythm to the lifecycle of spaces (accumulate and purge), consistency of layout (clean shop, dirty shop) and a good esprit de corps.
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