 Welcome to the lightning round sessions of Big Talk from Small Libraries 2018. I am Krista Porter, your host here at the Nebraska Library Commission for our lunchtime. Lunchtime for us in central time. It is noon, just hit noon. We have five quick presentations we're going to go through this noon time hour. First up is creativity in a box. Karen Fassum Power, did I pronounce that correctly? I didn't even, all right. Perfect. And she is joining us from Portal Arizona, the Portal Murdoch Craft Library in Arizona. And she's going to talk about their Maker Project, Maker Focus Project here. So go ahead and take it away, Karen. Great, thanks so much. So again, my name is Karen Fassum Power and I am a volunteer and a sometimes project coordinator with the Portal Murdoch Craft Library here in Arizona. And this is our library. We have a very tiny library and we have a small community. There are, we're on, we're in the extreme southeast corner of Arizona, right on the New Mexico border. So we have patrons from New Mexico as well. And we're about 50 miles north of the Mexican border. So that's our location. Our community is small. This is the inside of our library. We have about 500 people within maybe a 10-mile radius of our library. Our community is primarily retirees, but we also do have some children and a couple schools spread out, but in our community. As far as staff, we have one half-time librarian and lots of great volunteers who make our library work. We are also part of a county library district and we get tremendous services and support from that. The project that I'm going to talk about today is called Creativity in a Box. And the genesis of this project was my own experience working with Maker Education primarily in schools. And I know there've been other sessions today on Maker Education. So it's all about creating things. And Maker Education can really be everything from more traditional things like crafts or cooking to things like robotics and circuitry. And I had had great experience doing Maker projects both in schools and at community events. And I really wanted to bring that to our broader community. And we had an opportunity through the Library Services and Technology Act, or LISTA, a competitive grant that came up. And so this project was supported by the Arizona State Library Archives and Public Records, which is a division of the Secretary of State and uses federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And we were just so appreciative for that opportunity to do this work. And that was a one-year grant. So in this project, we created 10, what we call Creativity in a Box kits. And again, our library is very small. So we didn't really have any space to think about doing a makerspace. But we created these boxes, which can be checked out by patrons that have instructions and all the materials that a person would need to do various Maker projects. In addition to these kits that could be checked out, we also conducted 18 Maker days or other events. Most of them were held at our library. Some of them were held at partner libraries, schools, and other community centers. All of our activities are cross-age. And that's really, because we have such a small population, that's a requirement of everything we do. And we had people participate in this project from ages two years old up to, we had somebody who was 99 years old. So that was pretty fun. The third component of the program was an online site that we created, makingandsharing.com. And I'll give the URL for that again later. This was a place where people who were making things could upload pictures and stories about what they were doing. These are the topics for the 10 kits that we did. And you'll see they range from everything to, again, more traditional things like paper crafts was making greeting cards and scrapbooking, growing microgreens, which are similar to sprouts, but you grow them in dirt. And then some of them were more STEM related like paper circuitry and robots. We did some digital movie making and storytelling and digital photography projects as well. I wanna talk about one particular project and just hit some of the highlights of things that we learned in this project. And this is an oral history project that we did. And the lesson we learned from this was, one, just to try a lot of things and see what would work. So we surveyed our community about what kinds of activities they would like and oral storytelling was something that was of interest. So we created this kit with a basic audio recorder and we also did a workshop to talk about what this might look like. And we had one person come to this workshop, his name was Bob Downs, who got very, very excited about this work. And he said, I don't wanna just do audio, but I wanna do video and I wanna do a lot of this. So another lesson was be flexible. We were able to reallocate our budget and buy some video recording equipment that we had not previously planned to support what our community wanted. And through this project, we have recorded a whole series of lengthy interviews with particularly older members of our community and then edit those down into smaller segments as well. And this has been an ongoing project that has kept going since the grant ended. And another lesson I would say is, think about sustainability upfront and really how you're going to continue the work. And we were able to do that. We're now in our second year past the end of the grant and much of this work is still ongoing. So you can see some pictures here of different things that we did as a part of this project just to highlight some of the other lessons we learned. I would say the maker movement is all about encouraging fun and a sense of play. And we really tried to make sure we had activities that we're going to be engaging, things that our community members wanted to do and that would really be a lot of fun. And through that fun, people also learn skills and collaboration and a lot of different things, but it really starts with having activities that people want to participate in. Another lesson we learned that was very successful is tapping into partners. We had a number of partners, including schools, other libraries, community members and community organizations that were really important to this work. We spent a lot of time focusing on marketing and making sure that people in our community knew about these activities and felt welcomed and invited to participate in our community and I think in a lot of small rural communities, marketing can be things like word of mouth, make sure people are talking this up. We did a lot of color flyers on our post office bulletin boards because that's how people get the word out around here. Also social media and a website and again, tapping into our partners like the schools. Another lesson that I would just highlight is if you're doing a big project like this and you have a small staff like we do and limited resources, it's worth thinking about how to do that without loading the work on your staff that's already tasked with so much to do. And our librarian I mentioned is Halftime, she is absolutely fabulous, but we didn't wanna pile all this extra work on top of her so we were able to, through the grant, fund additional people to help with this and primarily that was me and I think that really helped make the project successful for everybody. And I mentioned already thinking about sustainability up front. That was something that was a requirement of this grant but something that we spent a lot of time on. So by having these kits and making sure we had a plan to keep doing this work after the grant was over, we've had good success with it continuing on. Our next steps for this project, we're looking at expanding it. So we are looking at expanding it throughout our county and possibly making it available beyond that as well. And since a lot of the initial work was developing these materials and now they're really a set of boxes that we can distribute at a much lower cost because all the development work has been done, we're excited about the opportunity to move it forward. So that's kind of in the lightning fast way, an overview of the project and my contact information and the making and sharing website which also has all of those oral histories which I just think is one of the most fabulous parts of this project and I would love to hear it from people. I think we might have time for a couple of questions but definitely email me. I love to talk about this stuff and I would love to see this work spread. Yeah, those video, those storytelling is amazing. Yeah, so there's the website. Definitely go and look at that to see everything they've done. We do have a question. We're gonna do some quick questions here during our lightning rounds, just a few as we do have to get through all of them. Do you include consumables in the creativity kits? How does that work? That is a great question and everyone always has that. We do include consumables and not all of our kits have consumable items. So things like the microgreens, the consumables are, there are little Ziploc bags full of seeds and then there's a bag of dirt and there are trays that you grow them in. Some of the things like audio storytelling or some of the electronic things, there aren't consumables. I would say there's consumables in maybe a little less than half of the kits. We do include them in the box and we were able, so that was a sustainability issue. We were able through the grant to purchase a pretty large supply of additional consumable items so that we could continue doing that. I would say we really focused on things that weren't expensive. Probably the most expensive one is the paper circuitry and still it's a few dollars, it's not a lot but we also have support and one of our partners was our friends in the library group and they've committed that if at some point we need support with the consumables that that's something they would be interested in funding. So that's kind of how we've handled consumables, yeah. Yeah. All right. This actually your session and I didn't plan this when I was doing the schedule. It actually is nice that it follows right after Craig's session talking about the little people having a lot of questions, the cost. And once again, he talked about grants. You talked about grants. I think there's a theme here. Look for grants. But then for the space and having the ability to do these, the boxes that you can send out, you don't have to have a whole room where you set these things up on a regular basis and everything is there for everyone to use. Right. Those are very compact boxes you had there, not taking up much space in those. Take it out somewhere else, use it and you're still doing the same, find the same service. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the only space when we did events, that would require a little bit bigger space. Some of them, and you saw our library, it's pretty tiny. Some of them we did outside, like tie-dying. Some of them we did at partner organizations. So we did some things at schools. We did one event at a community center that's not too far away, but definitely space is a big consideration for us. And there's no, is there any charge for any of the materials or anything to the patrons to use these? No, there's no charge. It's completely free. They get checked out just like they check out a book. Just checks out like an item, all right. Great, awesome. All right, thank you very much, Karen.