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Are Maker Spaces the Future of Public Libraries?

Posted by Soulskill on from the yes-please dept.

misterbarnacles writes "Shareable has an interview with librarian Lauren Britton Smedley from the Fayetteville Free Library, which is adding a Fab Lab to its community offerings. She said, 'I think that libraries are really centers for knowledge exchange, and a Fab Lab fits perfectly into something like that. This idea that libraries are a place where the books live, and you go to find a book, and that’s all it is, I think is really starting to shift. Libraries are a place for social transformation. They’re a place that you can go to get computer access, or access to technology that you can’t get anywhere else, and access to people. ... At the Fab Lab, the impetus behind the whole thing was to create a center for knowledge exchange where we’re not just offering Intro to Word or Intro to Excel — that we can offer Intro to Computer Programming, or Digital Fabrication — these skills that are really important in the STEM fields, and we can push that information out for free. And how do we do that? By getting people in the community who know that stuff to come in and share what they know.'"

4 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Money by masternerdguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not with the budget cuts.

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    To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
  2. Libraries at their core.... by ducomputergeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Libraries at their core are places where knowledge and learning could be shared. Why does that have to be limited to distribution via dead trees? I for one think this is a brilliant idea.

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    "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    1. Re:Libraries at their core.... by daath93 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You could easily have an excellent sci-fi collection of 54 books without having a single old, white male author among them.

      Yes, we should stop publishing white male authors until blacks and hispanics have decided they want to write sci-fi as much as white males. How far are we going to cary this farce of social injustice before we start to realize that blacks and hispanics are just interested in different crap than we are (on average)? Its not a CRIME to have different culteral priorities and interests.

  3. Fab Lab? by owlnation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm all for redefining what a library is. I've always felt that libraries are potentially much more useful spaces than they are currently used for. The problem being that they are ultimately run by civil servants who are far from the most creative people on the planet. (They may even be the most uncreative people on the planet).

    However, let us not -- ever -- call these wonderful institutions, "makers spaces", or "fab labs", or any similar kind of retarded buzzword bullshit.

    There's a current global trend to turn museums into dumb infotainment centers for kids. Can we please not also make libraries the information centers for the new Idiocracy.

    By all means expand the boundaries of what a library is, but call it a library. If you are too fucking dumb to know what a library is, you should not even be in one.