Last
month, I attended an academic library conference in Tennessee where I met a lot
of librarians who were planning to implement or had already situated themselves
in makerspaces at their libraries. One of the librarians I met was Emily
Thompson, a UMSI alum who works as a “Studio Librarian” at UT-Chattanooga. What
is Studio? The Studio is UTC’s makerspace/media lab that has all sorts of
digital tools and resources for students to use. I found Emily very engaging
and willing to impart advice to other librarians struggling with their own
makerspaces, so I asked for an interview a few weeks after the conference and
she graciously accepted. A wide-ranging forty-minute conversation and an eight
page transcript resulted from our interview session. I asked approximately ten
questions about how The Studio operates and what projects are being made, and I
received very thoughtful, in-depth responses to those questions. From our
conversation, I perceived three core concepts that form the foundation of the
Studio at UTC, which are instruction, innovation, and inclusion. These three
“i” concepts interwove themselves throughout our conversation and made me
reflect on the best practices for not only the stewards of makerspaces, but for
information professionals at large. Each concept is explored in detail below:
1)
Instruction
One
of the key takeaways I got from the interview was that Emily’s job requires A
LOT of instruction. Essentially, the Studio Librarians partner with classes
that are doing a digital project, usually audio or visual production, and help
students figure out those tools. The Studio space is also open for any student
who is working outside of class or independently on a project of their own
volition. She said that although the Studio was only in its third year of
existence, they are already assigning to up to 100 classes and doing hundreds
of one-on-one appointments. This is a difficult feat to manage with only two
full-time staff and three part-time staff. Yet, what struck me most while
listening to Emily’s descriptions of her job was the passion she had for
working with students of all academic disciplines. She has English majors,
design students, health and human performance students, occupational therapy
students, and everything in between. The ability to successfully provide
services for people with differing needs throughout the day is not only
essential to providing good librarianship, but I also think it’s necessary to
creating a makerspace where everyone can learn regardless or prior knowledge,
skill level, or personal experience. Even the structure of the space (in Studio’s
case: chairs with wheels, a divided center table for dual instruction) makes
for an atmosphere that is conducive to learning, collaborating, and exploring.
2)
Innovation
Throughout
the interview, Emily cited numerous examples of students who brought fresh
ideas while working on a school project and making an innovative product. One
story that Emily likes to tell is about a young woman who lost the case for her
lipstick and ended up designing the case herself using Tinkercad and 3D
printing it. Another example of an inventive project was for a class called “The
Rhetoric of Women,” where students were assigned to create video interludes, or
video essays, that interspersed lectures about Beyoncé’s Lemonade. The students used video editing techniques learned in The
Studio to make an argument and support that argument with their ideas. Overall,
this type of innovation used over and over again in the studio demonstrates
what Emily calls a new way to think beyond traditional scholarship. To me, this
is what I find so exciting about makerspaces in library settings because it
presents the opportunity for all of these ideas across disciplines and skill
levels to come together and produce something truly unique and groundbreaking.
The library makerspace as a crucible for innovative ideas is a concept that
interested me in makerspaces in the first place.
3)
Inclusion
One
of the questions that I made sure to emphasize in my interview was a question
about how The Studio conducted outreach to underserved groups on campus. Emily
provided a very thorough explanation where she said that The Studio usually
does not need to conduct outreach because students usually come to them. In
order to substitute for a lack of formal outreach, Emily highlighted how she
and her staff made attempts to be extremely welcoming to students who might
come from marginalized communities. The Studio basically conducts its marketing
by word of mouth, so it was very important to Emily that students of color,
first-generation students, students with disabilities, etc. felt like they
belonged in that space and then they could tell their friends how awesome it
was to be in that space. Part of facilitating that belonging is banishing
assumptions from your mindset. For example, Emily was very adamant about her
belief that “digital natives is crap” because not all young people are familiar
with the digital tools that professors and employers expect they know how to
use. From how I see it, this is profoundly true for first-generation students
like myself who did not have the time or the resources to learn these tools
during childhood or adolescence. Therefore, Emily makes it her goal to reach
out to students at whatever skill level they show up with, which, in a
makerspace, is critical for making people feel that they deserve to be there.
Through
this interview, I gained a lot of insight on what it takes to not only run a
makerspace in an academic library, but what it takes for the makerspace to be
seen as a model of excellence that is indispensable for a community. By
grounding an academic library makerspace in the core concepts of instruction,
innovation, and inclusion, that success, demonstrated through the creativity
and progress of student projects, can be achieved. Most importantly, as Emily
says, the ability to provide a space where it is safe and nonjudgmental enough to make mistakes is so important for
all us in our development as lifelong learners.
Here
are some brief excerpts from the interview:
So I see
you have a wide variety of tools in the Studio, from A/V equipment to
prototyping devices. How do you decide to bring in a new tool?
Emily: I really see it as a
collection development exercise. We of course get students requesting things,
so we listen to what they're after and we decide whether it's something we can
support. A lot of it is based on something that we needed, so the first two
years we had what we called a hybrid camera -- the Panasonic GH4 -- and they
were incredibly popular, but they got a bit of a learning curve to them. We got
6 or 7 of the Panasonic Lumixes, which still have full manual control, but have
much lower entry, so we decided to get those because we had students who wanted
to do photography but they weren't quite ready for interchangeable lenses.
Also, the nice thing about them is we only have three of the hybrid kits, so if
we're out, we're out. So this gave us the nice option to be able to give to
people and say, "I swear it's just as good. We call it a point and
shoot, but we're lying." And you can use it as a point and shoot, but it's
very, very nice. And so...we kinda had to choose something that was a little
bit less expensive that would provide more opportunities for people. We try to
get things at all levels. Some of it's just what people are interested in,
that's why we got all the synths and the beat-makers because we got
Ableton as a software and we wanted to give people controllers that would really
work well with Ableton and be able to connect to it through their
keyboard. Sometimes it's buy stuff and see what will fly. Sometimes it's
an obvious need. I consider it very much old-fashioned collection development.
It's the same way you'd pick what book you decide to buy.
What
successful or unique uses of the tools have you seen over your time there?
E: One of my favorites was an
interior design student who came in and she had her interior design class talk
about making windows or whatever using Sketchup. And she comes in and she's
holding her lipstick. And she's like, "this is my favorite color lipstick
and I lost the case. Or she stepped on the case or something like that. And so
she wanted to 3D print a replacement. So I set her up on Tinkercad because
Sketchup is annoying for stuff like this...and within a two rounds of
prototypes and about 60 times worth of printing and now she has that thing for
her favorite brand of lipstick.
How is
studio currently marketed? Is it well-known on campus?
E: It is extremely well-known on campus and it is not
really marketed at all. Part of that is that we have the good fortune to be
located in a new building, so the first semester we were open, everyone was
coming in to see the new library. Then, word got out that there was media space
on the third floor, so people we're coming in to see what Studio was up to. And
like the first couple of days we had giant open houses. We had a big grand
opening and we had all of the stuff out there. Every year, there's always an
open house and we have cake and all of the different library departments have
their own table. We go down there and we got a camcorder and we record people
doing stupid stuff and try to put it together in a video...that then goes out
on the library social media. But most of it is really word of mouth. We do
teach 12-15 workshops every semester on a lot of basics: Intro to Capturing
Audio, Intro to Manual Photography, Into to Video Editing, etc. We teach those
workshops and those are just advertised on the library's home page. The biggest
thing has been getting professors to bring their classes in, so I think the
last I heard, we had over a hundred classes this year and after that we got
another 15 scheduled. We're teaching a lot of stuff and those professors will
hear from their friends, 'Hey, I had this great experience. You should talk to
the Studio and help them get you to design us an assignment. And once they come
in once, they'll come back. We see probably 25% of the English 1010s and English
1020s, the early English classes (and that's a made-up number), but if you can
get them as freshmen, they'll come back later. And they'll tell their
friends.
What do
you hope is the overall outcome of Studio on campus and beyond?
E: Oh
my. Umm. I hope that it is seen as...we think of ourselves as the
collaborative, creation space on campus and I really hope that other people see
us as that too. A place where students and faculty can come and kind of learn
how to do something new in a safe and friendly place where it's not important
that you be an expert before you show up. It's just important that you're
willing to learn. We've been so busy that I haven't necessarily thought about
next steps 'cause like I said, we just had our second anniversary. We are in
our third year of existence and we're already up at a 100 classes and hundreds
of one-on-one appointments and all kinds of craziness. So we're just starting
to think about what's next. I hope that they see we are helping students to
kind of think in new ways and think beyond what traditional scholarship is
supposed to be and think into the next idea of what scholarship is supposed to
be.
