It's not just any small to medium sized public library in the U.S. that can claim to have been the cover story on a national magazine. We're not just any library. And our name isn't actually on the cover of the February issue of School Library Journal (except for the mailing label on the copy that came to us). But we are most definitely the subject of the cover story, specifically our MakerSpace. Karen Jensen's article, "Small Tech, Big Impact: Designing My Maker Space," has put us in the national spotlight. Karen is our teen services librarian and the creator of the Teen Librarian Toolbox, a blog which is also nationally known and within recent memory was elevated to prominence as one of School Library Journal's regular online features. One of Karen's specialties is Big Ideas, one of which was the conversion of our young adult area into our MakerSpace, a place where teens and adults and sometimes even pre-teens with the right supervision can dabble in all kinds of things, such as digital photo editing, stop-motion animation, button-making, cutting out letters and shapes on paper or vinyl with our Silhouette Cameo machine, Lego creations and making robotic and electronic gizmos with Raspberry Pi and Makey Makey. Yes, I don't really know that much about any of these things, but that's the point: You come to the library to learn about them, and our talented, dedicated staff will guide you along the way. So, check out Karen's article (click the title above--it's a hyperlink) and her Teen Librarian Toolbox (ditto), and come on in to the library to check out our MakerSpace. We're not the first to have done it, nor the biggest and probably not even the best-equipped (yet), but we are definitely the only library MakerSpace in the world to have been conceived and established by the creator of Teen Librarian Toolbox. In my book, that's something worth a moment of national notoriety.
The diminutive but useful green screen in our MakerSpace makes stop-motion animation come to life.
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