A young patron sits down to a recording session at the “creation station” of the Darien (CT) Library.
Photograph by Dru Nadler.

Andrew Carle, a technology educator at Flint High School in Northern Virginia, scurries about the classroom, rearranging desks and chairs, strategically sprinkling around wires, batteries, transistors, and clocks—all the while a video camera whirs in the background. A few seconds later, 10 seventh graders saunter in and the room becomes a hive of activity. Students cluster in shifting groups of twos and threes, occasionally checking in with Carle, testing wires, referencing books and Macbooks. In that hour, compressed into 140 inspiring seconds on YouTube, the middle school students become consultants, designers, and builders. Or, as Carle and thousands of others like to call them, makers.

The maker movement, known to past generations as “DIY” (do-it-yourself), encourages collaboration, invention, and radical participation with a single goal: to create new things. This maker ethos is gaining a serious foothold in education, both in practice and at the policy level. In 2012, the movement’s flagship event, Maker Faire, drew a total of 165,000 people to meetups in New York and San Francisco. In March 2013, Tom Kalil, the White House deputy director for technology and innovation, hosted a Google+ Hangout with a guest list that included Dale Dougherty, the founder of Maker Media, inventor and MacArthur fellow Saul Griffith, and 11-year-old Sylvia T. (better known to fans of her popular online maker show as “Super Awesome Sylvia”).

STEMming from a great idea. The White House’s embrace of the maker movement is hard-wired into President Barack Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign to improve STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. “I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering,” Obama said at the campaign’s launch in 2009. “Whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.”

As the maker movement evolves, so, too, does the demand for a new kind of participatory public arena, commonly known as a maker space. Here, budding makers mingle, share knowledge and resources, and collaborate on projects. Some leading maker machers—among them Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing—see librarians and makers as natural allies and think of libraries as a natural setting for creating a maker space.

Libraries should be “information dojos,” Doctorow says, “where communities come together to teach each other black-belt information literacy; where initiates work alongside novitiates to show them how to master the tools of the networked age from the bare metal up.” Now, librarians and their supporters in the nonprofit, academic, and policy worlds have taken up the gauntlet. Together, they’re designing best practices, securing funding, conducting research, and recruiting schools and teachers, cobbling together the gears and circuitry of a culture that they say has the potential to forever change the way children learn.

Getting schooled. During the White House Hangout, Dougherty discussed a recent Maker Media initiative called “Maker Education,” which aims to empower young people to become master tinkerers. Addressing the issue of scale, he asked: “What are the kinds of models we can build that other youth-serving organizations can follow to work with kids?”

A key focus of Maker Education is integrating maker spaces into existing educational programs nationwide, says AnnMarie Thomas, the founding executive director of Maker Education. To head the initiative, Thomas took a one-year sabbatical from her job as an engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas, where she had noticed that “more and more kids were coming into engineering with very little hands-on experience.” Maker Corps, a Maker Education program, aims to connect maker groups to one another and build a community that’s based on the core competencies of the maker movement.

Making, says AnnMarie Thomas, resonates with children in extraordinary ways: “Look at any of the literature on hands-on work, look at what’s happened at museums around the country. You really see a sense of interest and engagement among kids, see them taking ownership of their work.” As examples, she points to the children at Mt. Elliott Makerspace in Detroit, who demonstrate soldering lessons at the local farmer’s market, and an 11-year-old maker in Los Angeles who teaches community classes.

DIY gets F2F. Parker Thomas, Maker Media’s current director of educational initiatives, notes that, while the Internet creates opportunities to collaborate long-distance, cyberspace is no substitute for “meatspace.” Maker activity can create a force multiplier effect when it fosters cross-pollination between schools. To that end, during the last academic year, Thomas helped coordinate efforts among 15 public and private schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Some of our schools decided to partner so they could apply for grants together,” he says.

Launching the programs at some of these schools required a healthy dose of imagination and perseverance. “It’s easy to start a maker space if you’re a motorcycle fabricator in your spare time,” he says. “Less easy if you’re a Spanish teacher and have never made anything in your life.”

Some of the teachers were armed with “nothing but enthusiasm,” he says. To get these educators more maker savvy, sponsors and advocates offered resources, including personal development workshops and online info sessions, and created a playbook that advised on everything from safety standards to how to pitch maker spaces to school administrators.

Parker Thomas worked directly with interested teachers. “We helped enable them,” he says. “The administration then starts to see the results, and it’s easier to get into the rest of the schools.” But he acknowledges that “if we need to scale, we need to do this at the district level,” noting that the Santa Rosa High School District is a recent collaborator.

The reaction from children has been deeply gratifying, he adds. At Independence High School in San Francisco—which Thomas describes as “kind of like your last speed bump before you drop out”—students have to be in school only 45 minutes per week. When students worked maker projects, however, they stayed voluntarily, sometimes several hours a day. Says Parker, “We seem to spark a sense of curiosity, of wonder.”

At the June Jordan School for Equity, also in San Francisco, Thomas attended a mini maker fair at the end of the first semester of the maker class. “I saw a bulletin board with iPad speakers acting like an amp and a box with a lid that had LEDs on top,” he says. “A kid didn’t have a desk at home, so he built one.” And the progress was evident. “You could see that they learned to iterate. The joints got better on each leg.”

The level of craftsmanship and personal initiative seen at these schools seems limitless. Thomas cites the Oakland-based Lighthouse Community Charter School, which has had a maker program for the past five years: “Three 18-year-old seniors wanted to build an electric car. They found a Ford Ranger and pulled the motor out. They’re trying to find batteries for it and they ran a Kickstarter campaign to do it.” That kind of project, he says, rewards students with a host of skills, including engineering, storytelling, and managing an online fundraising campaign.

Most importantly, he says, making empowers children with a mindset. “You’re not held hostage to what you can find. If you can dream it, you can make it, and you can shape the world around you.”

Media as making. Gwyneth Jones, known to Internet fans as “The Daring Librarian,” vividly recalls a recent trip to Nashville, where the city’s public library administrators spoke about their under-construction, hands-on learning space: “It’s the size of an airport lounge,” Jones says, “with a 3-D printer, woodworking, and sinks with experiments. And it’s just for teens—grown-ups are there on sufferance.”

Jones says she has always implemented maker tenets into her work at her Murray Hill Middle School library in Laurel, MD. “We’ve been doing animation and moviemaking from the get-go,” she says. Her students use programs such as GoAnimate to create openings for the school’s TV studio and Comic Life to build their own graphic novels—and then reach wider audiences by licensing their work through Creative Commons or selling their publications. Using such technology in a school setting, she says, also helps bridge the digital divide, much as the YOUmedia initiative has done in public libraries.

Such activities can expand a child’s idea of what a product is, she says. “They can create something that shows what they learned. My kids are visual learners. If they can make something with their hands, they’re going to write a PSA and maybe create an animation to go with it. They get to choose how to show what they learned and how much they learned, and didn’t necessarily need to write a 10-page essay.”

When Kiera Parrott first established a “creation station” at Darien Library in Connecticut, the tools at students’ disposal were Mac computers, Flip cameras, and voice recorders. Integrated devices such as the iPad freed students to follow their imaginations. They now use iPads to create stop-motion animation with LEGO figures, video book reviews, and whatever else captures their fancy. Parrott contrasts these activities with the regular school curriculum. “Even if it’s a wonderful school with fabulous teachers, there’s still a hierarchy, it’s still prescriptive.” In a maker space, she says, “it’s all about them and their experience.”

Making a maker space. “Today’s tinkerers work in vast, distributed communities where information sharing is the norm, where the ethics and practices of the free/open source software movement have gone physical,” Doctorow says. To cater to kids’ needs, librarians and school administrators will be forced to challenge traditional constructs of physical space, teamwork, and information architecture.

Flint High School’s Andrew Carle calls for a space that evokes wonder, something that can attract students’ attention, “slow down traffic in the hallway and pull them through the door….Every pinball machine, every arcade cabinet, was designed to capture [the] fleeting fascination of passing teenagers,” Carle says. “3-D printers can do the same work.” A well-designed maker space, he notes, will leave a trail of breadcrumbs throughout the school and reinforce the maker mindset of “discovering ways that you can tweak, hack, or create new things that exist in and interact with the wider world.”

Yet Carle also stresses the importance of a supportive space, one that titillates but never intimidates newcomers, with ample signage and instructions, and where “no one (has to) go in alone.”

“If you’re a kid you can’t do anything wrong,” says Parrott. “There’s no such thing at this point. We’re not telling you what you need to make. We’re going to give you the tools, physical and digital, and then let you go. We’ll provide some guidance to shape those skills, but it’s really about the exploration and discovery.”

A short list of these tools includes “Arduino [programming language and circuits], papier-mâché, LEGOs, cardboard, robots, rockets, welding machines, gears, circuit boards, computer-assisted drawing software, string, vinyl cutters, LED lights, the command line, string, rubber bands, wire, duct tape, Play-Doh, steamworks, sensors, hot glue guns, scissors, Raspberry Pis, gyroscopes, Tesla coils, musical instruments, fire, water cannons, plastic, wood, motors, solar power, wearable computers, and 3D printers,” according to education writer Audrey Watters. Due to constraints of both money and room, school libraries looking to establish maker spaces will have to prioritize what to purchase, especially if the spaces are being funded at the district or state levels.

Armed with a little planning and a basic toolkit consisting of laser cutters, a set of hand tools, and a single computer, Saul Griffith, who has received a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grant to aid him in his efforts, is confident that the maker movement could become a permanent fixture of school education. “It’s very reasonable to imagine that we could outfit every high school and every middle school. I actually think we should be targeting down to every elementary school in the country with a reasonably capable set of tools so all children in the country become part of this manufacturing and design revolution,” he says.

The big picture. “One of the impacts of building your own computing devices is that it forces you to confront the architecture and systems that underlie your own information consumption,” Doctorow says.

Opening the wonders of maker culture to vast new audiences can have a liberating effect on education. Scholars, including the University of Indiana’s Kylie Peppler and the University of California’s Mimi Ito, have written several papers on topics such as learning about circuitry through e-textiles, introducing computation into arts education, and developing participatory competencies in media production.

In her 2009 book The Computer Clubhouse, Peppler and her co-authors reference MIT mathematician Seymour Papert’s concept of “objects-to-think-with.” The term, according to Papert, helps illustrate how both digital and physical objects such as robots, games, and programs can “become objects in the mind that help to construct, examine, and revise connections between old and new knowledge.” Indeed, objects in a maker space can assume this role, according to the authors, “allowing members to engage with technology, problem-solving, and artistic expression in profound ways.”

Scholars are being careful, however, to not define the movement’s constraints too tightly, in order to preserve the improvisational feel that makes maker spaces so appealing. The goal, in a sense, is a rough map rather than a GPS device. Structure and setting still matter. “We would never want maker spaces to look like schools,” Peppler says. “But you do need to get a sense of how they work.”

With great power (tools) comes great responsibility. When power saws and drill presses replace traditional learning materials, the library inevitably becomes a riskier environment, something acknowledged by leading proponents of maker spaces. “There could be liability issues” stemming from use of tools and machinery, says Susan Hildreth, director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). “But those could be addressed.” Hardware is a potential issue, but the bigger practical concern is the space itself. “If you’re going to have a space that could be noisy and could create smoke, you need to consider where the space is placed, and how it is vented.”

Indeed, some have pushed for a more rigorous approach to safety standards in maker spaces. At a February workshop in Somerville, MA, titled “How to Make a Makerspace,” Dougherty pushed makers to design best practices for building and operating spaces. William Gurstelle, noted science writer and the author of Backyard Ballistics and The Practical Pyromaniac, has written a safety guide that addresses the usage of tools such as sewing machines, table saws, and heat guns.

Money makers. Hildreth, whom President Barack Obama tapped in 2011 to be director of IMLS, says her curiosity about maker spaces was piqued by her insight that simple content mastery would no longer cut it. “Information and knowledge changes so quickly nowadays,” she says. Now IMLS’s emphasis is on supporting libraries to help students attain what she dubs “21st-century skills, skills such as being creative, collaborative, analytical, and learning how to parse and organize information.”

A maker space, she says, serves as an active breeding ground for such skills, a place where swarms of inquisitive young people can come together and absorb new learning paradigms. The library world’s shift from analogue to digital materials is helping to free up space that could be reconfigured to become a maker space, she adds. “If you think of the library as the learning center, you need to adapt to the demands of your community,” she says.

The movement is yet in its infancy, Hildreth believes, but it’s shown enough promise to warrant some IMLS funding, such as a $444,296 research grant to study the effects of maker spaces given to the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

The museum also received a further $150,000 grant to help it establish an in-house maker space with the cooperation of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Other IMLS grants funding maker activity include $250,000 to the Chicago Public Library to create a new maker space; $100,000 to the New York Hall of Science (NYHS) for a “Digital Making program” within the NYHS’s maker space; an additional grant to NYHS to engage racially diverse communities in making; and a $99,443 grant to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR, to develop a community maker space. More maker funding will likely be a priority for 2014, Hildreth adds.

Funding is also flowing into the movement from elsewhere, according to Marsha Semmel, the IMLS’ director of strategic partnerships. She noted in particular the Cognizant Foundation—which has given major grants to the Detroit Public Library and NYHS—and DARPA, which aims to establish making practices in 1,000 schools by 2016. The MacArthur Foundation also supports the Maker Education intitiative, partnering with IMLS to launch well-funded museum and library spaces, modeled after the YOUmedia program at the Chicago Public Library, that offer state-of-the-art digital media tools.

The money, Semmel says, would help to bridge the void left by the disappearance of traditional maker activities—home economics, shop, chemistry labs—from the traditional school curriculum. “My grandfather was a house painter and my grandma was a milliner, so I sewed and made mosaics,” she says. “Those things have been pushed out of people’s lives. But the urge to create and design is universal, and it remains.”

SOMETHING IN COMMON Pacific University (top) includes links to the Digital Commons Network alongside commercial databases.
A Digital Commons journal (below) from Purdue University

Visitors to the new Digital Commons Network (DCN) portal recently launched by bepress are greeted with a clean layout featuring one prominent, ornate graphic—a large, three-layered, color-coded wheel encircling a simple invitation: “Explore 691,431 works from 275 institutions.”

As the new portal to content produced and stored using bepress’s widely used Digital Commons publishing and institutional repository platform, those numbers will continue to grow, but two key qualities of this resource are expected to remain constant. These works will all be full text, and they will all be open access.

“From the reader’s perspective, we wanted no dead ends,” explains bepress president and CEO Jean-Gabriel Bankier. “We wanted their experience to be that when they browse, they would always find a PDF. So if you’re in the network, you will never find only metadata. And you’ll also never find any restricted content. So every reader experience will end at a PDF. And when they’re in the PDF, they can click a link to take them back to the network. The whole thing is integrated.”

Founded in 1999 by University of California, Berkeley professors Robert Cooter, Aaron Edlin, and Ben Hermalin, bepress began as a suite of online editorial management tools for producing peer-reviewed journals. In addition to the Digital Commons, the for-profit company has also produced the research announcement tool SelectedWorks.

Given libraries’ institutional mission to provide broad access to works across a wide variety of disciplines, an online portal promising perpetual, free access to hundreds of thousands of full-text, peer-reviewed articles, Ph.D. dissertations, master’s theses, conference proceedings, research data, and other content sounds like a logical next step in terms of cross-institutional collaboration. Indeed, bepress views DCN as a natural extension of the mission behind its Digital Commons software service, which enables institutions to publish their own professional quality, peer-reviewed journals, create landing pages for their faculty to highlight research published elsewhere, and build institutional repositories in a way that consolidates a university’s intellectual output. In each case, the primary goal of the Digital Commons platform is raising the visibility of an institution and its research. DCN helps achieve that goal by making it easy for users to search all Digital Commons repositories at once.

And while institutional repositories are typically indexed by search engines, the portal makes it very easy to access a large collection of open access (OA) materials that are specific to a discipline, notes David Scherer, scholarly repository specialist for the Purdue University e-Pubs Repository, IN.

“With a lot of open access materials, depending where you place them—whether it’s a public website or a private faculty web page—they can be hard to find,” he says. “If I’m trying to find items on civil engineering, am I going to know to look [in the repositories] of institutions x, y, and z? This is a database that I can use as a resource, just like any other library-based resource or tool, to find these kinds of materials.”

Color wheel

The starburst wheel graphic on the portal’s network.bepress.com homepage helps illustrate this concept to newcomers. The wheel features ten color-coded disciplines: law, social and behavioral sciences, arts and humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, education, engineering, medicine and health sciences, business, and architecture. The size of each color-coded area reflects the size of each discipline’s collection relative to the rest of DCN.

Two additional layers radiate out from this central “discipline wheel.” The first narrows down the discipline into a selection of subdisciplines, while the second allows users to pick from subjects within that subdiscipline. For example, hover a mouse pointer over the innermost, purple segment of the discipline wheel, and a visitor is encouraged to “Explore Medicine and Health Sciences.” Move the mouse to the second purple layer and the wheel will advise users to “Explore Medical Specialties” or “Explore Public Health.” Or users can mouse out one additional layer beyond the “Medical Specialties” subdiscipline to browse a selection of subjects including neurology, pediatrics, or radiology.

At any point, users can click on any segment of any layer of the wheel, and the wheel will begin a brief animation, with the selected discipline, subdiscipline, or subject swallowing up the rest of the wheel and navigating users to their chosen commons area where they can then proceed to a list of full-text PDFs.

To be clear, typing a couple of keywords into the “Search Entire Network” box, also located on the homepage, might be a more efficient method than mousing around on this graphical browsing element. But from a design perspective, this colorful wheel plays an important role in communicating the vision and purpose of DCN and the institutional repositories served by Digital Commons.

“We wanted for each repository to be able to show visitors who came there, visually, what’s in it,” Bankier says. “It’s a way for them to describe, graphically, what are their areas of strength? What are their areas of expertise? Each of the repositories in Digital Commons has its own graph, its own discipline wheel.”

For individual faculty members and researchers, DCN also helps illustrate that a contribution to an institutional repository is a contribution to its discipline, Bankier adds.

“One of our goals, from the perspective of the authors, was to address the ‘island problem,’ ” he says. “They saw their own institutional repository as an island, and they didn’t see how it connected with their discipline. And authors care first about themselves, then they care about their discipline, and only then care about their institution. We wanted [to illustrate] that a contribution to their repository was a meaningful contribution to their discipline as well.”

Isaac Gilman, an assistant professor and scholarly communications and research services librarian for Pacific University, OR, agrees with Bankier’s assessment.

“Having all of the repository content from a variety of institutions accessible through one portal and one place makes it a lot easier to have the conversation with students and faculty about how, when they’re contributing to our institutional repository, they’re contributing their work to a broader disciplinary conversation,” Gilman says. “Within the [DCN] portal or platform, they can see their work right next to work from people within their discipline…. That’s really valuable in helping to emphasize that what you put in our repository doesn’t just stay at Pacific and isn’t just going to be related to other work at ­Pacific, but it’s going to be related to other work across the country and across the world.”

Friendly competition

Each commons area page also features lots of top-level, at-a-glance statistics, including the number of articles, authors, and downloads, and a short list of institutions and authors who have contributed the most downloaded papers. Users can also click on a link to a pie chart that illustrates which institutions have contributed the most content to a specific commons.

One librarian has already found this pie chart to be a great motivational tool. In theory, most faculty will quickly understand the benefits of a repository and the ways it can help them raise the profile of their work and their institution. But encouraging faculty to contribute articles and data regularly can still pose a challenge. Figuring out which of their articles can be legally contributed to an OA repository and then uploading their work take time. If there’s no momentum behind the repository concept in their department or in their field, contributing can get pushed far down an individual researcher’s list of priorities.

So, at Iowa State University, digital repository coordinator Harrison Inefuku used DCN’s institution pie chart to stoke a spirit of competition. Iowa State launched its Digital Commons repository in April 2012, and when Inefuku began efforts to engage faculty, the university’s agricultural and biosystems engineering department was the first to buy in to the concept as a group.

“After bepress launched the Digital Commons Network, I was looking at it, trying to see if it could help me try to reach these faculty and try to get them to participate,” Inefuku says. Opening the institution pie chart in the Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons area, he discovered that Iowa State had already become the second-largest contributor in this subject. It illustrated how much the repository had already grown, while giving the agriculture and biosystems engineering department faculty another goal to shoot for—the number of repository items contributed by their peers at the University of Nebraska.

“[Nebraska] has had its repository for a long time…the number of items in every subject are a lot higher than ours just starting out,” Inefuku said. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to show them ‘this is where we are, this is where Nebraska is, and I would really like us to pass Nebraska.’ ”

It worked. He presented his challenge to the department in December 2012, and by March 2013, Iowa State was responsible for over half of the content contributed to the Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons.

Open for access

Aside from showcasing a university’s research capital or encouraging faculty to contribute to their institutional repository, DCN has its own merits as a full-text database that any library can encourage patrons to try.

Pacific University has already taken direct links to the different disciplinary commons areas and included them in the list of online databases to which the university offers access. A student searching biology-related databases, for example, will find a link to the Life Sciences Commons on the same page as resources from Gale, ProQuest, EBSCO, and Springer.

“I really do see it as a resource that is just as valuable as a [commercial] database aggregator’s product,” Gilman says. “And we want to try to make students aware of the wide variety of scholarly content that’s out there, because repositories do have a wide variety of really useful content, ranging from formal publications all the way to gray literature. And we’re encouraging students and faculty to recognize the value in this variety of scholarly products.”

“It drives users to our repositories,” says Purdue’s Scherer. “We’re always trying to increase the visibility of our open access repositories and our content, and we’re doing this in a mechanism that users are most familiar with—having a database. Compare it to how journals and the indexing databases work: you have a journal, and it has a web presence, but then, it’s enhanced tremendously by [inclusion in] a database.”

Inefuku agreed, noting that while the open access movement has created new opportunities in academic publishing, there have also been unfortunate side effects, including the rise of predatory journals. As a network of repositories that have been vetted by their respective institutions, DCN offers a reliable starting point for students and researchers seeking open access content.

“When it comes to searching for information online, especially [at] an academic institution, we still have to do our part with information literacy, telling our researchers and students how to find quality websites, how to find quality information,” Inefuku says. “With the open access movement, it’s creating a lot of opportunities to get scholarship out there. But…there’s a flip side to that as well.”

In its first year, DCN already appears to be having a significant impact on downloads from Digital Commons repositories. Six months after launching in November 2012, total full-text downloads from the approximately 300 repositories that Digital Commons serves had reached 130 million—up 85 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to Bankier. And well-used institutional repositories could give university administrators additional motivation to support open access, he says.

“Open access is kind of like preservation. It doesn’t have funding behind it,” Bankier says. “I would argue that this is a sustainable model, because the work that the library is doing directly connects to the mission and goals of the institution. Demonstrating value and strengthening reputation are things that all universities care about and are willing to fund…. This is a win, win, win. The university wins because it gets more visibility by sharing its research, the library wins because it gets to save [database subscription fees], and the public wins because they get free access to scholarship that they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.”

Matt Enis (menis@mediasourceinc.com is Associate Editor, Technology, LJ

My very first training trip had me joining a group of trainees who had already been at if for several days. All I saw was crashing and burning. This culminated when a trainee blew it and our boat came up against a razor-sharp rock (the rapid is called “Razorback” if that gives you any idea). Our trainer, an experienced guide, made the mistake of putting his hand out to push off the rock. He cut his hand, and became so disgusted with his boatload of newbies that he told us to put our paddles down.

For the entire rest of the trip (basically half of the river’s length), he took the boat down the river himself. We sat there immobile and ashamed. Seven people in a paddle boat and he guided the boat himself with a hand he couldn’t use. This was indelibly etched on my memory.

I learned a lot that day.

First, all I had seen to that point had been garbage. No one knew what they were doing except our trainer. This made me feel better. Second, I understood that it was possible for a single person to take a boat down that river by him or her self. I vowed that I would be able to do that one day. Soon, I could. Third, I understood that this would not be easy. Little did I know at the time how difficult it would be in the end.

I’ll skip over the difficulties to later that year when I got my chance to prove myself. I had been trained to guide a paddle boat (six passengers all with a paddle) and the boat I was given for my test was an oar boat (the guide rows with long oars and the passengers just ride). Rowing an oar boat is very different than guiding a paddle boat. Did I say anything about this error? Of course not. Even back then I wasn’t that stupid. Once I had done it, I said to myself, they could never say I couldn’t.

So after getting down the Stanislaus River in that oar boat moderately well I was approved to be a commercial whitewater river guide. It was also my 21st birthday. My boating friend and I jumped in my beat-up Sunbeam Alpine convertible and drove to Yosemite to celebrate.

That was just the beginning of my learning process, and I will be sharing those lessons in a series of posts that I hope you will find relevant or at least interesting.

The HathiTrust Digital Library will partner with the recently launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust’s public domain and other openly available content.

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“HathiTrust’s joining the Digital Public Library of America more than doubles the size of our unified collection, and—as so many have asked for—fills it with millions of books. We couldn’t be more delighted. Over the last five years, HathiTrust has built an incredible digital infrastructure to store the scanned holdings of its many university and library partners, and we in turn look forward to providing a large general audience for these valuable works, and new pathways into them,” said Dan Cohen, DPLA’s Executive Director.

According to HathiTrust Executive Director John Wilkin, the partnership reflects the complementary nature of the two organizations. “The first priority of HathiTrust has always been preservation,” he said. “But to fulfill the preservation mission, we must provide access: content that can’t be found and used risks being forgotten.” Wilkin stressed that HathiTrust will continue to enhance its own discovery and access platform, first launched in 2008. But DPLA puts HathiTrust’s collection before a broader audience, alongside innovative search and use tools, including timelines, maps, and a growing number of apps.

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Of HathiTrust’s nearly 11 million volumes, the metadata records associated with the almost 3.5 million that are freely available will be accessible on the web at dp.la, and through the DPLA application programming interface (API), making HathiTrust a DPLA “content hub.” (The digitized volumes themselves will continue to reside in HathiTrust.) The partnership makes HathiTrust the single largest DPLA content hub, in the company of institutions such as the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the New York Public Library, and many others.

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[Our emphasis] The partnership officially begins today, June 18, 2013, and the data is in the process of being transferred from HathiTrust to the Digital Public Library of America. DPLA will be working to add a special interface for books to supplement its novel map and timeline browsing interfaces, but the HathiTrust content will be available through the current site as soon as the data is loaded.

Read the Complete Announcement

In other HT News…John Wilkin Named Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Will Leave Exec Director Position at HathiTrust

According to the Flipped Learning Network, “flipped learning is simply moving an instructor’s focus from the direct classroom instruction model to an individual learning environment model. This allows teachers to use precious class time for facilitating active problem solving and small group interaction among students instead of lecturing.”

Randal Heise Mackin president and conference sponsor will present How to “Be the Change” in a Flipped Environment with Shannon Miller, teacher librarian from Van Meter, IA, and moderator of SLJ’s “Be the Change: Take the Lead on Standards” webcasts.

For more information on flipping the classroom (and the library) see also:

Flipping the Classroom: A revolutionary approach to learning presents some pros and cons
By Karen Springen

The flipping librarian | NeverEnding Search
By Joyce Valenza

Tech Tidbits from the Guybrarian: Are You Flipping?
By Phil Goerner

Computers in Libraries Conference Supports Student Learning
By Sarah Ludwig

Library For All

Former construction industry executive Rebecca McDonald got the idea for the ebook platform after moving to Haiti in 2010 to help the country rebuild in the aftermath of that year’s devastating earthquake. Noticing a conspicuous shortage of textbooks at a Haitian school, and realizing that the rapid growth of the mobile telecom sector in Haiti and throughout the developing world could make ebook distribution simple and inexpensive, McDonald worked with Tanyella Evans to found Library For All in 2011. Evans is now Chief Operating Officer. With a minimal staff and an advisory board that includes Peter Balis, director of digital strategic partnerships and business development for John Wiley & Sons and Lisa Sharkey, senior VP and director of creative development at HarperCollins, the team has spent the past year planning the platform and negotiating with several major publishers.

Developed in partnership with Thoughtworks, the platform will manage publisher-donated, DRM-protected content with a one-user, one-book model, along with a curated collection of open educational resources (OER) in a cloud-based environment that will not require a local server. Wireless routers designed to work with mobile networks (similar to the BRCK router developed by Kenya-based tech nonprofit Ushahidi) will then distribute ebooks and other materials anywhere there is mobile reception, Evans told LJ. The platform is designed to be device agnostic, with content optimized for inexpensive tablets such as Datawind’s Aakash line.

With the pilot test at the Respire School, Library For All plans to prove the platform’s viability and assure publishers that it can manage donated digital content securely in a single school environment with 500 students. If they can prove that the model works, the pilot will expand within Haiti and will be introduced into two new countries in 2014 via partnerships with local ministries of education and NGOs.

In an effort to boost pledges from small donors, Library For All on Monday launched a “10 Friends x $10 x 10 days” social media campaign, encouraging Facebook users to pledge $10 and tell 10 of their friends about the project from June 10 through June 20.

A recent white paper, which Springer researched in conjunction with librarians from Wellesley College and Boston University, reported a very high rate of ebook usage among faculty and undergraduates at small colleges. At Wellesley, 71 percent of students and faculty said that they used ebooks in 2011. That total included non-academic and leisure reading, but more than half of these ebook users also said that they had downloaded ebooks from the Wellesley College Library collection. By comparison, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a more comprehensive survey of all U.S. adults in April 2012, which indicated that only about 21 percent of U.S. adults had read an ebook in 2011.

Historically, Springer has worked primarily with large research universities, but about three years ago, account managers began noticing a growing number of ebook inquiries from smaller institutions. Unfortunately, the publisher’s tiered pricing system “was well above what these schools could afford,” said David Celano, Springer’s vice president of library sales. Librarians at smaller institutions also tended to believe that only a small portion of Springer’s collection of mostly STEM-field titles would appeal to undergraduates, Celano added.

“We spent a lot of time researching what the best price point would be based on the size of the institution,” he said. “If you’re a community college, the price for the 2013 complete Springer ebook collection—I believe we’re going to have about 5,800 titles in it—is along the lines of about $6,500.”

Continued Growth

Ebooks are continuing to gain acceptance among students and faculty, the white paper indicates. While only about 12 percent of students and faculty said that they preferred ebooks to print, 35 percent said that they view ebooks as an acceptable alternative to print. Almost 40 percent said that they use ebooks, but prefer print books, and about 10 percent said that they do not want to use ebooks, but sometimes have no choice.

Presumably, adoption and acceptance of ebooks will continue to increase as the popularity of tablets, smartphones, and dedicated ebook readers continues to grow. The white paper notes that “device owners in general show a much higher level of acceptance of ebooks than people who do not own devices. Respondents who do not own and do not plan to purchase a mobile device show a much higher preference for print. The data does not provide a clear cause and effect.”

For libraries, however, the pricing of the collection enables a college to offer access to a much larger selection of content than would be possible if using the same funds for print titles, said Maura Diamond, senior account manager for Springer Science+Business Media.

Content from several Springer imprints could have cross-disciplinary appeal, Diamond said. Technical publisher Apress Media, for example, offers titles on designing apps or programming in JavaScript, while Island Press features titles on popular topics such as sustainability and environmental science. And even in the most complex titles, undergraduates or their professors may find introductory chapters helpful.

“We’ll have a 1,200 page book that covers a really advanced topic in let’s say, artificial intelligence, but the first three chapters give you the breakdown you needed to get into the basic idea,” Diamond said. “It’s perfect for an undergraduate student.”

Increasingly, less really is more. That said, we need strategies for presenting meaningful choices to our clients. In a recent TED talk, Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar shed light on how choice overload impacts our ability to make productive decisions. She also offered valuable tips on streamlining the information choices we present. Librarians can learn a lot from what she had to say.

Iyengar described an experiment she conducted involving different numbers of jam samples offered at a grocery store tasting. When there were 24 jams available for sampling, 20 percent more people stopped to sample than when only six jams were offered. But sampling is different from buying. Only three percent of people purchased a jam from the 24-jam sample test, while 30 percent bought a jar when presented with six choices.

Let’s pretend the jam jars are data that librarians are presenting to teachers. While teachers might be drawn in to a workshop that lets them sample from 24 databases, they are more likely to buy in to a database when offered just a few options.

Iyengar identified four ways to fight choice overload. These methods will help teachers make more effective use of your library.

1) Cut. Weeding your digital collection is as critical as weeding your physical books. Just because you can offer three or four controversial topic databases doesn’t mean you should. Evaluate the choices and pick one. Then spend time going deep into a single resource.

2) Concretize. We know that selecting a resource is more meaningful when we teach about it at the point of need. But this isn’t always realistic for librarians who are stretched thin. You can still make things concrete by creating short screen capture movies using free CamStudio software on Windows or the built in QuickTime Player in Mac OS.

3) Categorize. According to Iyengar, people felt they had more choices when presented with 400 options divided into 20 categories as opposed to 600 options spread across 10. Don’t make teachers or students guess what a resource is for. Separate them into specific subjects or use case groupings.

4) Start simple. Present users with smaller sets of options first and then work up to larger sets. In my training sessions, I start with a single broad reference resource and then show a few more choices for specific use scenarios (science resources, pro/con papers, etc). To focus on quality over quantity, consider adopting a single broad informational resource and then pick more selections targeted to specific projects, courses, or subjects.

Don’t overwhelm teachers by showing them everything. Remember, less really is more.

“Brother Mike” Hawkins (at left) and YOUmedia’s Spoken Word team at the
“Louder Than a Bomb” poetry competition in Chicago, March 2013.
Photo courtesy of “Brother Mike” Hawkins.

Taylor Bayless, a librarian with the Chicago Public Library’s YOUmedia youth learning space, runs a podcasting program for teens. Since Bayless had no previous experience with podcasts, she was “muddling through” the learning process along with the kids, teaching herself as she was teaching them. “Someone working with youth has to have the capacity and desire to learn new technology,” says Bayless.

That was one message that came out of an hour-long chat on using social media in libraries, part of a month-long discussion series focusing on teens and the future of school and public libraries.

Sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) and Connected Learning, an online learning network, the five programs that ran in May were all about how to engage that most fickle of consumers: teens. During the online discussions, media specialists and librarians who work with young people in new media offered their insight and best practices on how to successfully engage teens and tweens.

Participants were encouraged to comment using the #futureoflibraries Twitter hashtag, watch through Connected Learning’s Google+ Page, and chat over Livestream, where the conversations were archived. Speakers included “Brother Mike” Hawkins, associate director and lead mentor at YOUmedia’s Digital Youth Network.

Getting involved with students early on—and supporting their creative efforts while providing guidance about privacy and fair use—is good policy, says YALSA president-elect Chris Shoemaker, the incoming director of the Rye (NY) Free Reading Room. He recommends talking with teens about the content they produce, such as who may view their posts, the identity they’re projecting online, and what information can be traced back to them. Shoemaker works with students to revise their material before they publish. “I would never want a teenager to pull down content after it’s posted,” he says.

At DYN, Hawkins monitors teens’ social media use rather than polices. That strategy has motivated his young patrons to take ownership and think critically about what they post. When the content is inappropriate, Hawkins and other DYN staff are careful to express their concern in such a way that encourages kids and keeps them engaged—and helps them make good decisions. “I won’t say, ‘Take that down,’” says Hawkins. “But I may say, ‘You want to play this on the radio—but I can’t share this with anyone.’ So you can shape things.”

Ultimately it’s the teens themselves who determine how successfully libraries integrate social media. The real acid test? Whether or not they invite their friends into the branches.

Hawkins says, “We have students coming to the [YOUmedia] studio and taking pictures” who then share the images, attracting the attention of other kids, who ask, “Where you at?” The teens’ own posts can be very effective in promoting the library as a cool place, he adds.

Particularly for libraries lacking a marketing budget, this kind of public relations can work wonders. “If [students] see something cool, and they see a place where adults care about them,” says Hawkins, “they’re going to promote it more than we ever could.”