Starting a Tech Lab?

Just talking amongst ourselves in informal settings, as well as in actual meetings, the DFL staff has come up with a bunch of ideas for Makerspace programming and tools. I just wanted to start to share them.

Start a Tech Lab in the Reference Room:

We have a little extra corner of space in the Reference Department near our existing bank of computers, and we'd like to fill that in with some new hardware and software to be able to provide patrons access to some creative digital tools. Hopefully, our own staff and Duxbury community members will have expertise with these products that will enable us to provide classes.

Pie in the sky, here is what we would like to purchase and provide:

laptops (maybe 6)
color printer
Adobe Creative Suite (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Light Room, Muse, Acrobat XI Pro, etc)

White Board or Smart Board

We'd also like to have an audio component in the tech lab to offer a podcasting studio. I'm not sure that we have enough space to make a music studio- that would probably be too much noise for our little space in the library. But we already have some sound equipment: mics, tabletop mic stands, mic cables to attach to a laptop, and the program Audacity on a laptop. Ellen and Suzanne are going to start on a little podcast experiment in order familiarize ourselves with the process.

Although starting a Tech Lab would take some initial overhead, we think patrons will be interested in using these services. At the moment we are going to use what we already have in the library with the hope that it will grow in the future. What so you think?

We have many other ideas that I look forward to sharing!

Comments

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