As part of our strategic planning process, we asked people
to fill out a community survey. One of
the questions was: “What kind of services do you think Collingwood Public Library
should offer?” When we tabulated the
results, “Maker spaces” ranked last with our respondents.
A maker space is another name for a community workshop where
tools are shared, especially expensive tools that individuals could not afford
to purchase on their own. In the public mind, maker spaces have become
identified with 3-D printers (a good 3-D printer will cost $10,000.00 or more),
and that is perhaps unfortunate. The
roots of the maker space movement go back to the do-it-yourself movement of the
60s and 70s, as Laura Elizabeth Pinto writes:
“[T]he DIY (do-it-yourself) activist movement (or DIY ethic)[was] established with the lofty goal of getting “off the grid,” by recycling, repairing, gardening, sewing, building, making music and preserving food as an act of anti-consumerism. DIY in this form began to emerge in North America in the late 1960s and early 1970s,grounded in social and environmental movements of the day. Rather than buying new things, the DIY ethic dictated that individuals should create, repair and fix for sustainability, and to lessen, or even eliminate, their reliance on corporations.”
But whereas these early DIY practitioners were independent
creators, the current maker movement stresses “collaboration for social
learning.” This is why public libraries
have embraced the movement. Public
libraries are places where the community gathers and shares knowledge, so they
are obvious places to create a shared work space. Thus the term “maker space” has come to mean
“a place where individuals come together to create.”
The problem, as I see it, is that the maker movement, which
began as an anti-consumer, pro-environmental movement, has been co-opted by the
very corporations it set out to oppose.
You can buy “maker” kits now from “maker” magazines. Even the phrase “Maker Faire” is a registered
trademark. The term “maker” has become so widely used, that it has become
meaningless.
And many libraries seem to have forgotten the philosophy
that launched the maker space movement in the first place. Library maker spaces
have become another programming space where you hold extremely expensive craft programs. You see events where you can register to
learn how to design your own monogrammed key fob on a Mac computer and have it
printed on a 3-D printer. Libraries
explain that they need to offer these entry level craft programs to introduce
the technology to the community. The
idea being that, once people see the potential of this new technology, they
will return again and again to create their own projects. But the opposite seems to happen. Once people realize just how slow the process
is and how expensive the materials are—a small chess piece can take hours to
print, and, depending upon the size, can cost upwards of ten dollars in
material costs—they lose interest. As
library guru R. David Lankes said in his keynote address at the 2016 Ontario
Library Association Super Conference: “A 3-D printer isn’t an answer for
anything.”
I am not opposed to the maker space ethic, indeed it warms
the cockles of my socialist heart, but I don’t believe that wasting valuable
library floor space on little-used and expensive equipment is the way to go. Too many libraries create maker spaces
because they feel obligated to, because everyone else is doing it, without
thinking through whether or not it is actually needed or wanted in their
communities. Collingwood library users
clearly don’t want us to spend our limited resources on a 3-D printer—that
message was loud and clear in our survey results. On the other hand, many people expressed a desire
for more learning opportunities. Now we
just need to discover what sorts of learning opportunities they desire. We’ve offered writing workshops, digital
film-making workshops, and have a regular ongoing series of technology
talks. We even had a tea expert in the
library recently, teaching us about the different varieties of tea and their
properties.
If you have any ideas for interesting library learning opportunities, please let us know your thoughts. Learning needn't be expensive. It may just be a matter of creating the right social connections.
--Ken Haigh
