LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

Posted by our talented Simmons Graduate School intern, Tyler Kenney: 3D scanning has come to the library, and with it the ability to 3D print yourself.  By using an Xbox 360 Kinect and simply spinning in a chair, you can scan and print a bust of yourself. To get started, make sure the Kinect is plugged in (into the computer and into the wall) and launch Skanect, which should be located on the iMac's desktop.  With Skanect launched just click 'new' (the default settings will work fine), and then 'start' - shown below: After clicking 'start' it will bring you to this screen: Now is when you want to correctly position yourself.  The white box outline shows the area that will be recorded.  Grab the mouse (you will need it later) and position yourself accordingly.  With the mouse on your lap, click the record button (the red button with a black center).  Once it starts recording, stay as still as possible and slowly rotate the chair with...

With a collaborative grant writing effort from community members and library staff, we are proud to announce that we won 2 Cube 3D Printers from the Maker Lab Club in collaboration with the American Library Association, American Makes, and the Association of Science and Technology Centers. We cannot believe how easy these were to set up.  The first one took some extra time as we had to navigate around the new website to find the software, activate the printers, and calibrate it but we were able to figure it out in an hour. The 2nd printer took about 15 minutes! With the 25 free designs already preset for the Cube, we printed a chess piece Rook. It took an hour and a half to print. It even had a staircase inside, what great detail! The Cube has it's own software and design file name (not the standard .stl) so files designed elsewhere will have to go through their software before printing. Once it is ready, file transfer is done over a flash drive that is plugged in directly t...

We're very excited to announce that we were able to get remote Lynda access so that anyone with a Duxbury Free Library card can enjoy learning at their own pace from the comfort of their own home. What a great to beat the winter blues and get those new years resolutions started! Lynda is full of professional easy to understand video tutorials on a wide variety of topics. Learn about 3D printing, Adobe products, resume building, MS Office and more. The breadth of Lynda is amazing. I have watched a variety of photography classes and I cannot estimate that amount of money I have saved by learning from home with these free videos.  I am now proficient in Photoshop, introductory flash, and understanding exposure. What I love about Lynda is it not only teaches you a topic but it helps you with studying tips along the way. Check it out today!

This August will mark my grandfather's 90th birthday and I am fortunate to say that he is still in good health and sharp as a tack.  Now that I have a digital media lab at my fingertips, I decided it would be a good time to experiment with scanning his personal photographs and telling his story. Many friends this year have experienced personal loss and the one thing they all say is I wish I had more recordings of them: how they laughed or things they said (even with pets!). This has really stuck with me.  Not to mention,  I discovered that my mother lost my entire photograph album of growing up when I asked her for some "Throwback Thursday" Facebook photos. I should have scanned them long ago! How fragile a thing a photo album is! In the age before digital, especially the age of Polaroids that I grew up with, there aren't any back ups or iCloud servers. I started going through every album my grandfather had trying to pick out key people and moments that I thought ...

Sometimes people need an incentive to try something new or dig deeper into a familiar creative tool. That's what we hope will happen when we announce the 2015 Creative Graphics Challenge this winter. We challenge our teen and adult patrons to come up with a marketing package for the Duxbury Free Library's event during April, National Poetry Month. We are looking for original graphics: a brochure, a flyer, a web page mock up, some art that we can use on bookmarks, signs, etc. Use our Adobe Creative Cloud Suite in our new Digital Media Lab and let your imagination go wild! The deadline is February 28, 2015 so we can judge and start using the resulting winning graphics for our Poetry Campaign this winter!  What do you get?  You get the opportunity to put this competitive contest on your college brag sheet or work-related resumé. So start your creative juices flowing! Interested? Sign up at the Reference Desk of the Duxbury Free Library. You can download the in...

This fall we have been lucky to have the benefit of a Simmons School of Library and Information Science intern, Anne Lundregan, working with us on our Digital Media Lab Makerspace. Everyone wins: she gets academic credit for working with us and developing some programming on her own to test out on our patrons, and we get a commited 10 hours/week professional-in-training to help us develop our new initiative. Now we are planning to develop a structured volunteer program centered on our Digital Media Lab (DML). It's always tricky to figure out how to use volunteers and how to give them enough buy-in to make a reliable commitment. Our circulation volunteers are very reliable and seem to know they are much appreciated. They tend to be retired folks who have daytime hours to offer, which is so helpful. With Makerspaces, the expertise we are looking for may come in the form of working people whose availability is much more constrained. Though they may not work on Saturdays, who...