LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

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...

While primarily being a resource for individuals to do their projects, we also plan to run group sessions using Lynda.com as a great teaching tool for groups as well as individuals. We did a soft launch over the summer for our new Digital Media Lab with well-attended sessions on Windows 8 and how to buy and sell of Ebay. We had advertised in the traditional way: in the building, on Facebook, on the web site, in the local newspaper. Now, with the start of school year, we are eager to reach out beyond the usual library patrons and people who read the local newspaper to find new patrons of the library who may not realize we have something they might need. Hence, having paid for an initial 6 month Meetup membership to try it out and using it for an Adult Board Game Meetup group and a Crafting group, we thought creating a Duxbury Adobe Explorers Meetup group might be a good idea. Almost as soon as we posted our first Meetup for last night, we got 19 members. Eight of them came to ou...

As we adjust our print reference collection to suit the needs of the community, monies open up that we can spend on resources our patrons are excited to use - specifically ten seats in our building for Lynda.com and the full Adobe Creative Suite in our new Digital Media Lab. Our patrons are looking for services too expensive to purchase in a home setting and the skills to use creative digital products. We have discovered another service we can provide. David Murphy was able to give a practical class on buying and selling on Ebay last night using our subscription to Lynda.com as well as the Digital Media Lab and his own experience on Ebay. Suzanne Gunnerson held a similar class in July on mastering the Windows 8 operating system. By using video classes, we can learn together, stop the video, answer questions, restart, jump ahead, or re-watch an exercise we might not have fully understood. We find that our patrons enjoy getting an overview togther with others and THEN coming back ...