Maker Interview: Emily Thompson

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.