Across the US, libraries are setting up maker labs as they turn themselves into hubs for high-tech innovation and training
IN THE small town of Fayetteville in northern New York, you'll find the local library in an old furniture factory dating from the turn of the 20th century. The refurbished building retains hints of its industrial past: wooden floors, exposed beams, walls lined with carefully labelled tools.
But instead of quietly perusing stacks of books, many of the patrons are crowded around a suite of 3D printers. One machine is midway through a pink mobile phone case; another is finishing up a toy sword.
This is Fayetteville's maker lab – and it may very well be the future of libraries.
In 2011, Fayetteville became the first public library in the US to set up a maker lab. Besides 3D printers, the space features a laser cutter, electronics kits, workshop tools, Raspberry Pi computers and an array of sewing machines. It functions somewhere between a classroom and a start-up incubator – a place where people from all over the region can get involved with state-of-the-art technology.
Since the lab opened, similar spaces have been popping up across the country, including in cities like Sacramento, Pittsburgh, Denver and Detroit. According to the American Library Association, about 1 in 6 libraries now dedicates some of its space to maker tools and activities. The New York Public Library – one of the largest in the country – is watching these developments to inform its upcoming renovation.
The image of a library as a building filled with books, quiet readers and shushing librarians is fading fast as we get ever more of our information through the internet. Websites like Wikipedia and vast online databases have largely replaced physical copies of reference books and back issues of journals. Other books can be offered in digital form, or physical copies stored out of sight and called up via an automated retrieval system.
It so happened that these changes unfolded in parallel with a profound and lasting economic recession. With jobs hard to come by, librarians began to notice that their visitors were looking for more from their library than just a peaceful place to read. Increasingly, people were coming in search of information on how to switch careers or start their own businesses.
"Since 2008, when the bubble burst and everything started to fall apart, we've never been busier," says Sue Considine, director of the Fayetteville Free Library. "It has snowballed into this really exciting rebirth for public libraries in many ways, as places where entrepreneurship and invention and discovery can happen."
To make room for labs, some libraries are clearing out their print inventory. In Tennessee, nearly a third of the Chattanooga Public Library's print collection – encyclopedias, reference articles, unpopular novels – was sold at a public auction to turn an entire floor into a maker lab. An academic library at the University of Nevada, Reno, put more than half of its inventory into storage, freeing up 1700 square metres for maker tools and working space.
Starting a maker space isn't cheap – a standard 3D printer that uses melted plastic, for example, can cost several thousand dollars. But the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a US government agency, is supporting the growing movement. It has given out $2.6 million in grants so far for maker-space projects.
Such investment makes sense if libraries are to fulfil their mission in society, which Corinne Hill, director at Chattanooga, says extends far beyond books. "We've always delivered information to the public; we have done this for 3000 years. We're just doing it differently," she says. "I think that libraries are starting to see the light."
Though only a couple of years old, library maker spaces have already spun out a host of entrepreneurial successes (See "Stacks to start-ups"). At the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, patrons have developed prototypes for satellite trackers, dental hygiene instruments and guitar parts. Two graduate students used the Fayetteville library to produced a novel model of the brainstem, which they then licensed to a medical equipment manufacturing firm. A Nevada patron is currently negotiating the sale of an original board game with 3D-printed pieces. Others use the space to enhance existing small businesses. For example, a cheesemaker used a Chattanooga 3D-printer to make a logo to stamp onto his wheels of cheese.
The maker spaces have even attracted the interest of major tech businesses. Chicago's "pop-up" maker lab was intended to last for only six months last year. But the site was so successful – with more than 30,000 visitors – that the Google-owned tech firm Motorola Mobility offered to fund the space for at least another year. And Google itself later provided 500 Finch Robots, cute-looking devices that can be used to teach basic programming skills. Inventables, a hardware company based in Chicago, was similarly inspired and has donated 3D-carving machines around the country.
Brian Bannon, who is the Chicago public libraries commissioner, says that maker space is now part of the city's goal to become a major hub for advanced manufacturing over the next couple of decades. "Exposing people in a more experiential way to this technology might help them identify advanced manufacturing as something that can be a good fit for them," he says. The Harold Washington Library is running a programme that aims to draw more women into the traditionally male-dominated field. So far, just over half of the students enrolled in its classes, which include training in how to use laser cutters and 3D printers, have been female.
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