 So I'm James King. I work at the National Institute of Health, the internal research library. And I was invited to talk about 3D printing. And we're both actually going to talk about 3D printing. So I'll let Kathleen invite and introduce herself. So let me start with a little bit about NIH. Probably know about NIH. But we are part of the Department of Health and Human Services, there are 27 institutes and centers. We're based primarily here in DC. So just up the road or up the metro from here. We are the principal funder of biomedical research. Our budget is roughly $32 billion. 80% of that goes back out the door to academia to promote research. 10% of it roughly goes to intramural research at NIH. And then remaining 10% covers everything else. Intramural research program at NIH includes 1,200 principal investigators and 4,000 post-doctorate fellows. The library, the internal NIH library, has 48 federal employees and about a dozen contract staff. They're organized as a major organization. So it means most of our stuff gets done through teams. Let's see. In addition to being the library for NIH, we also have partnership agreements with other parts of HHS. And we also collaborate with the other two large organizations within HHS, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. We're often confused for the National Library of Medicine, which is another very large library on our campus. But they focus on the country, we focus on NIH. So last year, our director challenged us to figure out what to do with this space that we opened up. What you see in the back there was where our reference collection was. So over the last couple of years, taking the main part of our library and removing all the books and putting them down on the lower level, compact shelving and stuff. And the last part to be moved was this reference collection. So then we had this big hole. So they challenged us to come up, well, what could we do at this and opened it up to all sorts of ideas. And what came out was an idea of a technology sandbox. So this sandbox had three zones. So the first was moving the information desk off to the left. And then the portion on the right are some higher end workstations to support bioinformatics analysis as well as data analysis. And then the middle part is the collaboration zone. So we put some pods in. Oh, and I guess there's another part. The, like an exhibit area, where we wanted to showcase new technologies on a temporary basis so that people could come in, try them out and see what it's like. And if it would be useful. So the first thing that we put into that space is a 3D printer. And you know how government funding works. We had end of year money, so we bought a 3D printer, tried it out, see how it would work. What we decided, since this was gonna be a prototype or a trial, we weren't gonna charge for it. But we were gonna require people that wanted to use it to come in and do a 30 minute orientation so that they know how to print, what hit falls to watch for. You know, you don't wanna push a virtual model to the printer that will come out this big when the printer's only this big and you end up with like a slice of it. So just walking them through what they have to do and how to do it. We then gave them access to our MakerBot printer and developed a campus guide to help orient people on how to do that. In those collaboration spaces, we had software loaded up so that people could either create a model or modify an existing model. We had a handheld 3D scanner so people could start with a physical object and modify. We found that it's very important to network. So one of the first things our team did is we networked out across NIH because NIH is 27 institutes, which means it's like herding cats. Each one is different, each one kinda does their own thing. NCI does what NCI wants to do and so forth. So there's lots of thousand flowers blooming across the campus. So there were already a lot of 3D printing operations starting up in various forms. We also have the advantage that we were right across the street from Walter Reed, Navy, Army Medical Center. They're doing incredible work with 3D printing. They've got large 3D printers that print titanium because they're scanning wounded warriors and creating specialized appendages for them. So incredible work that's happening over there. So we networked a lot and created a community of interest in effect of all the people that were doing some sort of 3D printing. And so we could work together, learn lessons. Here's what we have. So we started off with the 3D printer on the left, the MakerBot. This has a single extruder, so basically imagine having like a hot glue gun attaching it to one of those crane games and then just programming it so it would drop a piece of liquid plastic in one spot and then repeat and repeat and repeat and free. That's essentially what a 3D printer is. So the first one we got had a single point or extruder. The next one we got, we borrowed from one of those partnerships that we developed. It had two, so you could print two colors at once or you could go twice as fast. The one we just got is the coolest looking one. It's got blue LEDs around it. It looks really hot, but it hadn't worked so well because it's so new, so brand new. We just got it two months ago and we just put it out because we were finally able to get our first print, successful print out of it. Because we bought it so new that the print, the manufacturer hadn't really fully released it yet. But that gives you a little bit of sense of the differences. You'll notice that the first two deal with a specific type of material. So imagine a big spool of fishing wire and that's what gets melted and there's different specific types of material there. The third one, the reason we got it is because it could handle 18 different types of material. So we thought that that one was gonna be the most flexible for us. To date, we've had 130 successful models printed and I'll show you some pictures of what we've done. And we've provided 30 minute orientations over 200 people, so I thought that was pretty good. And I'm stressing successful models because we've probably printed 300 different models and I'll show you some pictures of that too. So the first area of model printing was rapid prototyping. So people came in and they wanted to see whether something was possible. So maybe they took an existing component that they used with an instrument and they modified it for a different purpose. So you can see the lens dishes and a mouse operating chamber or a chin rest. So the first type of material that we were seeing or things that we saw created were rapid prototyping. Second are proteins and I'm not gonna pretend I'm more of a technology person than a medical person so you can read that. But I will point out that this has supports as part of it and I'll show you a screen but this stuff here, these vertical lines going down is not part of the final model, those will get taken off. That's just because you're printing 3D and you can't have it suspend in air, maybe in an actual space station where they did put a 3D printer up there. So this is what it looks like. So this is what it looks like when it comes off the printer and then after all the cleanup has been done. So this is where it gets beyond just getting a printer like a laser printer and there's so much other stuff that you have to deal with like putty knives and Pam spray and acetone baths and all this sort of interesting stuff. Things don't always work well so these are some epic failures. We came in, this one, I took this picture of, we were trying to print out something in a dual color and everything. It had run all weekend. It was like a 40 hour print job and this is what we came to. You can see there's a rat mess up here on the extruder and there's all this stringy stuff. It's not supposed to look like stringy stuff. So you can see there's lots of different ways that things can fail. If, remember, a 3D printer's got an X, Y and a Z. If one of those fail, then it's just churning or if the stuff doesn't stick to the base, it fails or if the base doesn't move down at the right speed, it fails. So there's lots of things that have to happen in the right pace. The person who's taken the lead for this, she is not a mechanical engineer. She's a librarian. But she's done this stuff. She's had to take apart the entire device, pull out the extruder, put in a different extruder. The manufacturer's sent in replacement parts and stuff. So other duties as assigned for 3D printing has gone way beyond what you would think of just plug and play. We're in the new frontier, I guess you'd say. So I mentioned earlier about partnership. So I wanted to highlight a little bit of that. Oh, and I forgot to mention with the malfunctioned loose belt and stuff like that. So partnerships was essential to the success that we've had so far. This was a six month effort. We're just wrapping up the initial six months right now. We created a 3D printing special interest group. So we've created an email list. We've created a website, pulled together some meetings of people that are in that space of managing 3D printing. We've shared information back and forth. We've shared back to practices, tips on what tools to use, whether you should put plastic wrap on top of the base or not, whether that helps, have a heated base, many things. We bought a handheld 3D scanner. And it's cool. We had to take your kids to work day or scanning faces and that sort of stuff. But if you wanna do something real and like scan this and have it reprinted, you gotta have a steadier hand than just doing that. So we worked with one of our groups and they created a table for us where you could put this 3D thing on and spin it around and be able to get a good solid effective scan. Sharing 3D printer supplies. We've shared licenses for some of the software that we've been promoting to help with creation of models and managing those models. We've cross promoted. So if somebody comes to our place, they find something they like and they want to print multiples, we could potentially send them off to one of these other groups if they want. Since we haven't been charging for this, we haven't hit this situation yet. But if somebody has a model and they're going to a board meeting or they're going to something and they want 10 copies of the exact same thing, right now I believe we're thinking that we would have them bring in a school of whatever material to help offset those costs. Because also we're government, we're not supposed to make money. We're also not supposed to lose, well, I won't go there. I'll see. Oh, and one of the things I added on here, one of the other things that we do is we're doing a lot with Drupal open source content management system. And because of that, we helped this group that got an HHS grant to build a 3D print exchange. So what they were saying is that the printer, as much problem as it can be to get going and keep going, that's commodity. What's really important is what you're putting into it. And if you want to be able to print out a influenza virus, you wanna make sure that what you're gonna study is an accurate representation of an influenza virus. So 3D print exchange develops some scripts to and pull together a website that has authoritative models, all sorts of medical images and so forth. They took things from NCBI and NLM and converted it into the 3D printer model formats that are common so that people can download those and trust that what they're printing out is accurate. So we helped collaborate with them to get that website up and running. So that definitely a resource. I encourage you if you're doing anything in biomedical space, check that out. Or you can also contact Dr. Heard and who's running it if you wanna reuse the scripts they use to convert. It could easily translate into other spaces. So where are we going next? On the broader technology sandbox, we're looking at data visualization. How can we encourage and foster that? We've got several different teams and all of them are saying data visualization, a key piece. So how do we figure that out? What do we do next with the 3D printing pilot? We just rolled out that new air wolf so we're gonna move that more into production and try to push the envelope on that to see what it can do. To date we've been using that one material so since this new one can handle different types of material, see what it looks like, what it can do. But the point is to foster experimentation at NIH so we're trying to see where that goes. And then looking at more of where we can collaborate and figure out where NIH needs. I was joking before we started that we've had some staff run into robots at hospitals and stuff that help guide and direct and stuff. So I want a robot now. So we can put that in the sandbox. But so we have a Bioinformatics team. So the visualization in their mind is far different than the Bibliometrics team who's looking at how they visualize the author connectedness or impact of publications or so forth. And then you've got the data team again. So I guess the first thing we have to define is what do we mean by visualization? I mean, I'm building a website and we're putting the papers onto a global map. That's a way of visualization. For several of these, we've started teaching our classes, our and our studio classes for that data analysis piece. We have and our building expertise in Psy2 and those types of tools for the networking visualizations. So some of these are not expensive or free. We are also trying to look big and looking to see would there be any value in having some sort of wall, a visualization wall or some sort of interactive wall. Have to see where that goes and what that real value is or if that's just something to bring people in for people to play with. But this is a tech sandbox, so it is supposed to be a thing to come in and play with. Yeah, it's part of the broader technology sandbox. And you could say 3D printing is a way of visualization because I didn't mention it before that when people are printing out a virus and trying to figure out how to attack that virus, that number of people have said that they can look at things far differently by holding it and interacting it in their hand versus looking at it on the screen or so forth. So yes, 3D printing is a form of visualization. Well, off the top, one would be capacity because I imagine if you have them in an engineering school they're gonna be looking at it in one completely different way than a medical school would be looking at it. But there's commonalities between the two and there's lessons that you can learn from both. I've also been taking the approach with Drupal and with 3D printing and technology sandbox and stuff. And I think there's a role that we can play as the library and as an advocate for technology. We brought 3D printing in not because people reading down our door saying we need to know about 3D printing. We recognize that we know enough of their research to know that this could have an impact. And when you're dealing with a campus that's got 20,000 people not everybody knows what the other people were doing. So we learned by getting out there that there were these other shops. So we are facilitating and bringing all those independent islands together so that they know about each other because we interact with one group and they say hey you should check out this group and then from there we found out about two others and so forth. So I think that advocacy and networking is a key whether we're the technology or not. We even are confronting the question now should we loan the printer out? Because we had one person that wanted to use a different type of material and it was a toxic enough type of material that it should be printed in a hood. So it bypassed us and they went a different direction but theoretically we could slap a barcode on it and treat it like a book and lend it out too. We haven't said that specifically but we have an informationist program so embedded librarians and a portion of them are skills focused. So they focus on bioinformatics and they are as part of mining that genome they are looking at how can you visualize that. We also have a data services librarian who's working with the NIH, BD2K, Big Data to Knowledge Initiative and they're trying to figure out how do you visualize data and so forth. I think if we do things right all these different pieces will intersect. Visualization is one that's coming up that all these are seeing a commonality. I think 3D printing as a physical manifestation of that can also come out of that but we haven't specifically dealt with what you're asking. Yeah so you mentioned problems and breaking down and so forth and that's why I showed two MakerBots is because the MakerBot we had had a number of issues and while it was down and I think it got shipped back to the manufacturer we were borrowing another one. So there are gonna be issues. This is the beginning days of 3D printing or early days with it but really you've got a little controller and you've got some motors to move it back and forth and then the plate moves up and down. All of those have to work in precise sequence for everything to work correctly. Now they are doing things where they'll upgrade the control software and they can get improvements but again it's not like a laser printer right now it's not that brain dead reliable. The people that are coming in are designing the models. We have the library staff have basic expertise on using the software and we can help tweak or scale the model but we are not, as part of this free service we're not saying we'll build you a model but that's also why we worked with the 3D print exchange people that say you can go here and you can get a good trustworthy model to print out. It depends. The people that were doing the prototyping they were working on lab equipment appendages. I mean you can go online now and you can get a model to print out to affix your iPhone to a microscope so you can take pictures through the iPhone which is a lot cheaper than. We're basically a prototype printing service. Now with the collaboration zones we do have software in those and we can help people get started on those but we're not saying that we're gonna create a model for you. We'll help the troubleshoot it but that's also where the network comes in that we've got other people that are doing this that we can point you to for advice. I hope that what I have to say will help some of your questions as well. I put this picture here although I kept thinking about it because I think many of you know this is the extrusion process for the most popular of these 3D printers but what I really should have had here were the people behind it because that's what's really I think from a library perspective what's really important about bringing this new technology into your library is what it does for the people who come in there and start using it. Just as was mentioned we have them in other places on our campus. We have 3D printers. Our local high school has a 3D printer but what's different about bringing it in as a service is that you have hours, lots of hours you encourage cross-disciplinary development of these items. You encourage what John Sealy Brown calls creative abrasion. You get engineers not just dealing with other engineers but dealing with the art students and the business students and they are all coming together around this common shared interest in technology and that's where I think the magic happens. Now this as a title I wanted to make it really long because this isn't precise enough for me but when I say 3D printing as a library service I should really say 3D printing as a do-it-yourself service. I was watching TV last night and that Home Depot ad came on. More saving, there's not really more saving but more doing, right? It's like duct tape. It's like this is like a duct tape Home Depot operation I'm gonna tell you about not like hiring a skilled contractor. Just keep that in mind. So the results are not what you would do if you sent this out to a professional organization but I'll tell you why we're doing that. So tiny bit of background. I'm from the University of Nevada, Reno which is a little north. We're about 20 minutes from the California border up in the mountains by Lake Tahoe, quite beautiful. We have about 20,000 students and the Matthewson IGT Knowledge Center was opened in 2008 and the whole idea behind it was to look at students as the knowledge workers of tomorrow. Remember that whole Thomas Friedman, the world is flat. They're competing on a global scale. We wanted to give them the tools and the experiences to be able to compete on kind of a world level which is really lofty and I'm sure we all want that. We have a statewide medical school that's both in Las Vegas and in Reno and we have a small BASC studies library. So the De La Mer Science and Engineering Library is the one I'm gonna talk about today. This is the one where we currently have this specific 3D printing service. So a couple years ago at CNI, two years ago exactly actually, I talked about starting this up as a startup and so a very quick recap, we had about seven or eight months of experience when I talked about it in December of 2012. It had been wildly popular. As I said, I'm not gonna go through all these but why we did it is because we saw this as an intersection. The library is an intersection for different disciplines. We had hours that no one else had and we were very interested in working with the students to make things happen. When it goes into a lab, what we found as we talked with the different units on campus is it was often purchased with one time money. Maybe into the year someone used it for a grant project and then it kind of sits there. It doesn't get maintained. Sometimes the person who had learned how to use it moves on and so then people, even if students, especially undergraduates, if they wanna use it, there's no opportunity for them to do so. So we wanted to make that possible. The whole idea of rapid prototyping, agile learning, failing faster, allowing them to experience that themselves. Also the cost has really dropped. So suddenly, even though 3D printing has been around for 30 years, the idea that you could bring it into an affordable atmosphere where people could do it themselves was really new. So two years ago, this is what we started with was a 3D touch. That's the MakerBot, you know, the little hobbyist under $5,000. We started with one of those. So we had a little hobbyist model and we had this Stratasys U-Print SE The plus means you can print in another color besides white. Now, that's a picture that I had there. They're kind of using it. That blue LED light must be a really cool thing because they keep doing that, right? You can't have a 3D printer without some blue LED light. Currently, this is our setup. You don't see the MakerBot. It just didn't work for it. It was too fussy and cranky and it just kept breaking down. And to tell you the truth, we just moved that over to the art department. So they wanted it. We also, as part of this, needed a scanner, handheld scanner such as James talked about. We kind of bought the whole program so they could scan something, then create the file and actually print it. And how did we pick the scanner two years ago? We just looked around and someone saw Jay Leno had one. So, of course, if he had one, then that must be the one to buy. So, we saw this as another printer. Students can print out a paper in black and white or color. Now they can print out an object and that it should be as relatively simple as that. The items that you're looking at here are all, again, that ABS plastic. And I brought, if you don't know what that is, yeah. This is another project that we did where they had to take stills. We printed 24 of these in different positions. And then they had to take those photographs and animate it so that we could combine our digital expertise that we have in the Knowledge Center with the hands-on learning that we provide in the De La Mer Library. So, if you wanna just see what that's like, you can, it's up here. Anyway, so we wanted to see it as just another service. We have large format printing. We have all kinds of technology services. We could just say, do you wanna print that paper or plastic? And they would be able to do so. We also were responding to, two years ago, was Chris Anderson stepped down as the editor of Wired to work specifically with 3D technology, saying this is gonna change everything. And we were interested in that. We had hints that this really was something new, not just trendy, but new as in having legs. And we wanted to give our students a chance to be a part of that. So, let me just say, while I was coming in the Hemisphere in-flight magazine, Rise of the Minimakers, this is about 3D printing your own toys if you are a child. So, and then Make Magazine, which is if you're in this community where you like to make things yourself, they've been out to see us and De La Mer Library, I have to brag on them, is one of the top 10 most interesting makerspaces in America. Don't you wanna come to Reno now? Okay, so we wanted to provide this. Two years later, this is still what we have. It's ugly, I admit it. It is not pretty. It's pretty hacked together. It's been moved around a couple of times, but it doesn't matter because that's what they expect. This is very much a hands-on operation. It is, when we started it, we thought it would be about $4.50 a cubic inch like NIH. We need to charge back for consumables. We do not charge the students for the investment in the machine. That's stratus like this is about $20,000. We got an internal grant to do that, a gift actually. So we have them pay for the consumables, which the machine, as you submit the file, will give you an estimate of what that material will cost. It's gone up a little bit since then because we add in the support. There's the build material, then there's the support material and the extrusion heads. There's some maintenance. So it's about $7 per cubic inch of material that we charge back to the students. Since we've gotten this and it's been extremely popular, the other thing I love about the stratus is it ran literally 24 hours a day for months on end. You can queue up through the network. You can send those STL files through the network. The MakerBots you need to put them in, through a little flash drive and it's just fussier. This was really, it's a low-end production machine, but it's a production machine so you can do a lot more faster. We now have, it's got a friend. This is called the Z-Printer 450. This is a different kind of 3D printer. It uses a cornstarch product and then a binding agent afterwards to, and it has this sort of sandstone texture. The advantage to this, our faculty, some of our faculty got money and asked us to add this, which we did. The advantage is that it can print in color at the same time. It can do multicolor models and it's faster. So we did that and people like to play with it. So instead of saying, do not touch, isn't that clever that a student put this sign? And of course that's 3D printed. I think that's a message though that what is your purpose in starting the service? If it is to produce really high-end 3D models that are perfect, that's not what we're doing. We are trying to do that kind of academic library thing where we give students the chance to actually dig in and learn about it and they will make some mistakes and play with it rather than a service like document delivery where someone, I need this and then we go back here and we do a bunch of work and then we just hand it to you. It's not that. So the quality control is not there. Some of these products, as James was saying, I'll show you later, don't always work out. But that's not the primary point of the program. Here's a couple of things with ABS plastic. So this was the hand, it was actually for students working on a robotic hand. So they were doing a little art thing with it too, but they were actually working on something. This is a math student who was using different mathematical models to create art, which I thought was interesting. This is the Z printer that uses this different substance instead of a melted plastic. So this is what happens a lot, is that they're very fragile. And so the models can fall apart much easier than the ABS plastic, which is another reason that we're not really fond of it. However, you can see that, does anyone recognize this? Oh, come on, you guys. It's missing a piece, it's a lightsaber. It's not a functional model yet, people, but they're working on it. They just have that other piece to do and it'll be there. But the other top produced item, I have to tell you in the first year of offering this, who watches Dr. Who? Couple of you, the TARDIS, the most popular item printed, I have to tell you. TARDIS is everywhere. So here's what it can do. So you can see why some of the scientists, the reason they wanted this Z printer is because they want models. They want to be able to use the color and get it quickly and have a model. The problem with this is, again, I'm just being really practical, this is great to offer for people because they can do it so much faster, but so it does it out of cornstarch and it binds it, but then this particular printer requires a person, library person, to apply the, it's like a watered down super glue. It's the binding agent and you have to apply that. Well, sometimes you can put too much and then these things don't roll like they're supposed to. It's a little, and it's got this, I don't know. You can tell I like the other one better, but it's beautiful. I mean, it does, it has a certain function. They're a lot more expensive. The stratus, as I said, is about 20,000. This was a refurbished whatever, I think, and so it was about 30,000, but I think they're about 60 to $70,000. So what have we found? Who uses it? Everyone, and keep that in mind. I'll tell you a little more about that in a minute. In 2013, that stratus, I'm really just talking about the one machine, ran about six months of the year. If you were to take all those hours, it ran constantly. We could have easily used two. That's how much pent up interest and demand there was. I have another couple. To date, we printed over 2,000 items. If you were to average it out, it did four a day, but of course, you know, sometimes, it depends on how big they are, how complex, so I'm not sure that number is really that helpful. The average piece uses 3.3 cubic inches of material, the build material, and less than a cubic inch of the support material. As James says, it has to be able to build up so it has this material that you then dissolve away so that the only thing that's left is what you actually want when you're done. The average cost was about $13.48 for the students. So that's just to the student for the consumables. Who's using it? This is based on a partial and self-identified pop group. We took about 109 print jobs during a busy time and just asked people where they were from. So as you can see, not surprising in an engineering and science library, 46% are from mechanical engineering and they are doing actual coursework assignments or senior projects or whatever. This is actually very related to their schoolwork, not just printing tartices. What I think is interesting over here is that you see art is 11%. This is nowhere near the art department and the art department already had a MakerBot replicator but it wasn't working, so that's why we gave them another one so they can have two that don't work. No, it's fine, I'm sure. They really love this. We have a book arts program and because they've been coming down to use the 3D printer, we now have a laser cutter which I'll tell you about in a minute. And so they're coming into the science and engineering library in ways that they did not do before, which was one of our goals. So we're very, very pleased about that. Professor Kang is a chemist. He was one of the ones that was most excited about getting this. This goes with what James said too. He's been studying this molecule for years and kind of hit a dead point as he did 2D modeling. He said, you know, this should work. This work I'm doing with this molecule, why won't it work? It's when he printed it out in a three dimensional model that he had an insight that within a couple of minutes as he looked at it and rotated it, he said, ah, you know, these two are closer than I thought these two atoms, maybe that's why it didn't work. He said it actually saved him. He figures a year or two of additional work because he was able to handle this model and look at it in three dimensions instead of just two. This is a student who is not an engineer. He's a marketing and psychology major. He loves paintball. He works at a paintball place and he found that a lot of the paintballs don't explode after their shot and they're kind of expensive and they want to reuse them. And so he has a patent pending for something that he kept doing, prototypes for that would wash these paintballs. Don't talk about it because he gets really nervous if I say anything because you know, he thinks he's gonna make millions and he just might because apparently there's a big market for this if you're in paintball. This is a student who's in education and she, this is a cosine dish. So she liked having three dimensional models that she could use with her students that they could elementary and high school students that they could actually handle and she could explain a mathematical principle and maybe that would aid their understanding. So 3D printing, one of the down things I suppose is that no 3D printer will do it all. For example, I'm saying that we're kind of the home depot do it yourself place and we do get people who they've heard about it and they want to do something that's maybe way beyond our skill level and so it maybe they need something in titanium. Don't come to Delamere. We're not gonna be able to print that titanium jaw for that surgery or something. And the color, so you are educating your population at the same time that you're providing this service that there are very kind of specific ways in which it can be used. So if you are thinking about this at your library you can talk with your users. What is it that you would like to do? Is ABS plastic, that seems to be the most popular. It's dropable meaning you can drop this and it won't shatter whereas the corn starchy one those are gonna break so they're not useful. It's drillable, it's sandable, you can machine it. You can use it as gears. You can make functioning parts from it and so that was a big thing for our science and engineering library. You can create interconnected assemblies. We have a working little piston engine so things will work like that. So those are the kinds of questions that you wanna ask before you invest in this. You wanna find out if there's health and safety concerns. We have, as I said, what you're doing is dissolving away the support material when you're using the ABS plastic and you have to have a soak tank. And so working with your health and human safety it is like a diluted drain hole. I mean, it's not like terribly, horribly awful but you need to tell your folks because they got a little alarmed with us and then they tested it. And this is actually in the library. We have a little room. They didn't make us take it over into a wet lab but working with them ahead of time then helps them not become so alarmed that you're doing something involving chemicals. So what makes this really work? Two and a half years later what do we think that we have learned? I think one of the primary things are what James alluded to and that is the students and their STL files. So this is the file, the most common file program that they're creating their product and sending it to the printer. Those are, this is still a new technology and they have a lot of errors. There's a high error rate. If you wanna reduce the mistakes at the output we learned very quickly, there's a free program and there's a commercial one but it will essentially check your file. So we run it as part of our workflow we would have the students run that through the check and say, ooh, there's still some problems this isn't gonna print, help them fix it and then it can run back through. So little things like that can make a big difference. It's checking for errors ahead of time, having a workflow, your staff do have to be involved because otherwise there's gonna be a lot of errors. But it's not really about efficiency. You try to be as efficient as you can. It's really about engagement. Putting a 3D printer and having things come out that they can see only conceptually and then make a physical model of is absolutely fascinating to young people and old. We take it out on the road. The status is small enough that we have actually taken out. You know, I always think of, you know, the gnome that goes around the world and people take photographs of it. We're gonna do that with, I mean, it goes everywhere. We go, this was a Reno event hack for Reno. This is encouraging girls in school to get interested in STEM disciplines. We take it out. We take it out so they can see it and handle it and see that it's not scary. It's not beyond their ability. It's something they could actually engage with. It sparks a lot of interest. This is one of our librarians with a group of high school students and she's scanning his face so they could see it on the computer. We don't have time to print it all out, but showing again the possibilities. These students are fascinated and they often will come in on their own or bring a parent. We've had them bring their parents in. So it's sometimes sparks interest that you never ever thought possible. Remember I said everyone likes 3D printers. This, Marianne here is a alumna of the University of Nevada, Reno. She saw a story about the 3D printing in Delamere Library. This is not a live iguana. This is a frozen iguana. This is a frozen iguana that is a pet of hers that died and she bought it on the airplane in a styrofoam cooler to Reno because she wanted us to 3D print a model that she had. It's a lovely thought. So Babe the frozen iguana gave us one of our first real life projects and we got students on it and the first one we did some handheld scanning. We did the photo capture where you take photos at all kinds of places and then you stitch it together in CAD. Guess what? That iguana has a high level of detail and it was just beyond us. That post-processing work is a lot of work sometimes for very complex objects and it was just beyond our skill level. So this is like a year and a half later. This is our librarian Eric Perper. This is Marianne you can see but right next to her is Crystal and that's another aspect I wanted to tell you about when you as a library service. Crystal is a 3D wrangler. She is a student assistant. We have two or I think we have three now who we hire to specifically help other students with the 3D software, with working out the problems, with consulting you can make an appointment but she learned from the ground up. She was not an engineering student at all. She learned about it through her work assignment and then can help others do it. So Crystal was there when Eric learned about creating through reconstruct me as a software and an X-Bot connect and you make a round table in it we'll move it just like you were saying James you can spin it and rotate it and make a better scan. That's what they were doing. They were trying it again based on some newer technology and their knowledge level they were able to do it. It's still they produced a little tiny one but they haven't done the big one yet. I'll keep you posted on that. Okay, so where are we now? More things happen when you do this. Now we have a laser cutter because there was so much interest and it's again just like a printer. It uses all different kinds of material. It has made the library again. Oh, a library is a place where you can put technologies that everybody can use and they'll help you with it and they have lots of hours and they don't say, well, you're not part of this department or college you can come and use it. So the Helix laser printer, here's a student who won an award. He makes sunglasses out of old skateboards. Very cool, look at wasted eyewear. And I thought this would be bigger but it was, he was saying Julian wandered in, he's a business student. He wandered in a day I was down there at the beginning of the semester and goes, hey, you have a laser cutter? Well, yeah, you wanna use it? He goes, I just hacked one together in my garage but I don't have a hood and I like come in and use this and that's what this is. He was telling his social media followers that he just found another one that's really great in the Delamere library that he's gonna be using. Here's a group of students using various pieces of what we offer as part of our maker space, we call it. So they use the 3D printer to make parts. They use our laser cutter to cut out of styrofoam and they use our Arduino quits and they created a functional hovercraft, I saw. It went off the table about that far but it went off. So they gather around, they use all these tools to make something happen that they would not have been able to before. Again, it's about engagement. This is a connect that we have in the Knowledge Center that students will suddenly realize it's tracking their movements and they'll engage with it. The laser cutter, it's also playful. Don't be afraid of the plane. This says, we have just engraved marshmallows in the laser cutter and they're delicious. We engraved pumpkins for Halloween. You can take an image and carve it onto the pumpkin. We do all kinds of things to get people to see it as not scary, not terribly, horribly serious. If you let them play, it'll turn into more serious products. So it takes a culture shift in the library. It takes people who are not afraid to dive in and say to the students, I hear this, I don't know, let's find out. It's not a perfect service. It's a shared learning opportunity. It's shared engagement and I am so lucky to have the kind of people who will dive right in and make that happen and don't get upset when they have all the failures. The box of disappointment is a hot item. It's not nearly big enough. There's the box of disappointment and we just make that clear. Hey, yeah, it didn't work. Let's try it again. Don't get so discouraged that you won't try it. Let's try it again. So the box of disappointment is important. Okay, I think I finished that. The end, I encourage all of you who haven't done this to give it a try. So we have a couple of things just like James does. So we have a library, a lib guide. We have lynda.com. We have a page that says go through these tutorials, if you will, because we do expect, again, sort of the DIY, hey, if you're interested in this, you've got to apply yourself to, but these 3D wranglers, those students, the consults with them are really important because they often feel much more comfortable with a student anyway. And the student who has just learned it themselves, they help each other do it. So it's sort of peer-based learning. So sometimes, yeah, there may not be a student on staff, so then they will have to book an appointment with that student, but it's not usually very hard to do. I mean, we had it all checked out. Todd Colgrove has written an article that's come out in EDUCAUSE review online that gives you a little more detail about some of these aspects if you're interested. Todd is the head of the D. LaMaire Science and Engineering Library. We don't have any, the ABS plastic, we use a kind that is not toxic, so we didn't have, it's the bath, we had health and human safety, that's what I mean, it's over there, it's like, these are not toxic things. The laser cutter, we did bring a air exchange piece into it so that that's not a problem either, but we do watch what they carve in there. We're lucky, Todd Colgrove is a PhD astrophysicist in his first career, and then he came to librarianship late. So I do think that helped in that he's comfortable in that sphere, although most of our hands on work is with undergraduates and some graduate students, because it's primarily an undergraduate library, the research being done out in the labs. Now what has happened that we wanted is we wanna bring faculty into that space because there are machines there and their students are there so that there's more interaction between faculty and students, and that has happened. I really like that we had a PhD that was able to help launch this. I don't think it's essential. All of those other librarians that you saw, the three others have no background whatsoever, and they're very comfortable now talking with faculty and students, and it hasn't been a hindrance, but they knew what they were getting into, and that is huge, that's why I said it's a culture shift. I have other librarians who want nothing to do with this because it's so, there's so many unknowns. You have to be willing to be vulnerable and say, ooh, I don't really know, let's find out, and that's hard for some librarians. Think Home Depot and sort of duct tape, and that's sort of how we did it. If I were building it from scratch, it would look different than what we did. We basically just use the space that we had, and we've moved it a couple of times. We like it kind of in the front because of the engagement piece. We like people to come in and see that blue LED light and go, what is that? And then they'll see it working and they'll ask questions. The laser cutter also right out in front because we notice that if you get one or two people there watching it, all of a sudden you'll get a crowd. They won't do it if no one else is there, but if you get a crowd, then you have the chance to engage with the students. So I would say putting it front and center is really important for us. It's not huge, like we really just hacked this together. I have to tell you, there was taught as a librarian, and there were three staff members when we started because this was a very underutilized librarian. I have to tell you as the dean, my plan, because this was back in 2011, we'd been hit with budget cuts again, honestly, I was gonna say, you know what, we're gonna need to close that because it's just not worth it and we're gonna move all the material. We have an ASRS big and we'll just move the material into the Knowledge Center and we'll move all their services in. And instead, what Todd started was there is no way we can close that down. It is just bustling all the time. And I have a larger thing, this is just about 3D printing, but part of it is the space itself has to invite people in. We have whiteboard walls everywhere. It is very much an inviting hands-on environment. It's not just the 3D printer, it's a whole learning space that invites them in. We had a janitor's closet. We thought at one time, I'll tell you this, again, telling tales. When we first put it up, we knew that the bath, this solution that dissolves the support material, we knew we needed to do that and we had no solution yet because we hadn't gotten any approval and we didn't wanna, I was really nervous. I don't want anything around students that hasn't been approved. So Todd had the bath at home in his garage and every night he would take the projects that had come out of the machine and take them home and put them in the soak tank and in the morning, rinse them off and bring them back. And that's what I mean about you gotta have champions on your staff. They have to be willing to say, all right, we're not fully there but I'm gonna work with this to make it happen and then we got a solution. We have a, you know, it's right on site now but that took a few months to get that going. Oh my gosh, very carefully. Oh, it's the binder. So one is the plastic and you don't need the glue. The other is this cornstarch material and because that's who we have, that's what I mean. Because they'll ruin it and I know that's bad like we should just let them ruin it but the box of disappointment isn't big enough for all those projects if they ruin it. Primarily those that you saw are faculty. The students are not as interested in that particular one because of the way it is and it's so fragile and so as we've been learning it, that is brand new. It's a few months old. We have to learn it first and then I'm sure we will figure out the 3D Wranglers or somebody will be doing that work. Absolutely. I know it's time. I'll be glad to answer more questions but if you have to run, I don't want people to have to stay. We're still working on it. Like I said, it's not my favorite. Yeah. Anyway, thank you. Thanks very much and if you wanna. These are examples of the laser cut. You know, you can do plastic, you can do wood, you can do cardboard if you want to just see. This has been a great item.