 Hello, thank you for being here. This is the first session. We have a stiff competition. There are eight sessions out there. So thank you very much. It's one hour. So we have a panel here with distinguished speakers. We try to do it within 10 minutes each. And then we allow a few questions from the panel, so from myself, and then allow the audience to ask questions. OK. So why we're doing this event? Why are we talking about maker spaces, virtual reality, and so forth? I think Cliff Lynch mentioned that this is an important movement that we're trying as libraries and also community-based institution to position ourselves in terms of helping community and making things, creating things. And also, part of it is critical thinking. So this movement is old, so it's not that new. But what's new is that libraries now are in the middle of it. And what's important here is that the maker spaces, all of us except Brian. Brian is a veteran in terms of the maker movement. He will tell you briefly how this connects to the community. And the rest of us are from academic library side. And it's a natural habitat now for maker spaces to be in it. And I had a conversation with actually, let me introduce everyone. We have Brian Jepsen, acquisition editor from Aurelie Media and also author of many books from maker movement and also programming. He's known in the event. And actually, we met here, both from Providence, Rhode Island, and we met here face to face. It's amazing. And after that, Brian Matthews, associate dean, Virginia Tech, also known author. I'm sure you know Brian Matthews. And we have Carl Grant, associate dean, Oklahoma University Libraries. He has very interesting idea and stories to tell. And my team from University of Rhode Island, Debbie Mongeau and Angel Feria from Public Services, University of Rhode Island Libraries. It's really around stories here because we didn't want to bore you with technical details. It's really how these things connect to each other. And also what's important here is like we're trying to inject some of the library values. And it's important to talk about the values specifically because we're in the middle of a new political environment. And we have to really talk about our values like social justice, academic freedom, privacy, and so forth. So the makerspace has to be part of that new ecosystem within the libraries. So I would let Brian first start the conversation. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm Brian Jepsen. I am an editor with O'Reilly Media. I'm also the co-founder of the Rhode Island Mini Maker Fair for several years. Several years I was the publisher of books for maker media, who is the publisher of Make Magazine and they're the producer of the Maker Fair program. That's a worldwide program of events for makers to take things out of the makerspace and do a show and tell. And while I was working for Make back in 2009, we started the Rhode Island Mini Maker Fair, which was almost the first independent Maker Fair. This was before they had a Maker Fair licensing program. The relationship between Mini Maker Fairs and Maker Fairs is similar to the relationship between TEDx and TED. So we're sort of the smaller version of it, which actually works out to be appropriate given that Rhode Island is such a small state. But there are Mini Maker Fairs all over the world. And there's well over 100 every year worldwide. And they are a showcase for a lot of the sort of things that you might typically associate with makerspaces, such as digital fabrication, projects with 3D printing, CNC, vinyl cutter, laser cutters. But there's also a lot of traditional crafting and woodworking and all sorts of things that we can encompass that are encompassed by the term making. A couple of years ago, I got tired of doing the Mini Maker Fair as sort of a side project of my own. It still is a side, the Rhode Island Mini Maker Fair is still a side project of my own. But what I've done is artist maker space that I've been collaborating with for about almost 30 years now. They were an artist maker space well before we called things Maker Spaces. AS220 now is the official producer of record of the Rhode Island Mini Maker Fair. And we've been doing it with them for the past few years. And it's a really great relationship. AS220 itself is really interesting because we think about what do we mean by maker spaces. We also think about what we mean by spaces. And when I talk about AS220, there's not usually context for it in the news. But at the moment there is, AS220 is an artist space that started out in 1985, much in the same type of pattern that the ghost ship space started out, sort of very much under the radar, artists living together. And so for those of us who've been involved with AS220, it's very sobering to reflect on what can go wrong in an artist, in a maker space. And there's been a lot of conversation about how those of us who've been around a long time can offer leadership and education for those who are starting new spaces. There is a lot to be discussed there, but that's not the topic of that right now. But I'd be happy to talk about the process of going from an illegal to a very, very, very legal by the book space, if anybody wants to grab me later. So at the moment AS220 went from a bunch of artists living together, making things together, collaborating together, sharing rent under the radar to now owning three buildings that are up online, five buildings total. Two of them are kind of in progress right now. But one of them is the home to the AS220 industries, which includes print shop, silk screening, photos, photo work, digital arts, and also the Fab Lab, the Providence Fab Lab, which includes many of the tools you'd expect in a maker space, large format CNC, a couple of laser cutters, 3D printers, soldering irons, vacuum formers, and some bio equipment for some reason. Not quite sure what that's doing there. And in my day job, I work for O'Reilly Media, which is best known as a computer book publisher. But we do conferences. We do online training. We do lots of events. And we also have a kind of a fusion of high and low tech. And if you think about books, you've got these printed glued together things. Of course, we've made a strong transition to eBooks. And we have a huge number of things that aren't print books. But for our Maker Faire Bay Area exhibit, we did a combination of high tech and low tech, where we had a very low tech activity where kids could do coloring books, large prints of the animals that graced the cover of our books. But we also had a interactive computer vision project using a Raspberry Pi, where if somebody picked a book off the shelf, it would play a video related to the book. And that was an interesting problem to solve, because how do you know which book is being picked up? So you can see I just painted the tops of the books with a different color and used the Raspberry Pi and the computer vision algorithms to detect which book had been removed. But back to AS220 Labs, also known as the Providence FAB Lab, it is a type of maker space. This is a photo of one of our most popular outreach programs. It's the Learn to Sotter Workshop at the 2016 Robot Block Party held at Brown in Providence. And we had a huge crowd for that, set out, soldering irons, had some volunteers come in. And it's a great way of taking a maker space, hacker space, or FAB Lab program out into the community and making it very clear what it's all about. The simple act of attaching LED battery to something that could be snapped on and worn is a very powerful, very powerful tool. This year, open source hardware maker, Modern Device, they make sensors, they make Arduino-compatible boards. They joined the FAB Lab at AS220. Now we've taken, now we're one of the first maker spaces. I'm not going to say we're the first, because I have no idea that has an integrated manufacturing, ordering, fulfillment, research, and development program based around embedded sensors, internet of things. Most popular product is our wind sensor. It's a $17 wind sensor that everybody seems to love. And I keep saying hour with AS220. I did neglect to mention that I am a board member of AS220. And I also help out with the labs as much as possible, generally nagging the director of the labs to think about margins now that there's a manufacturing and fulfillment that's part of it. But of course that's always an interesting conversation when you're a non-profit. Wanted to leave you with this image. AS220 labs started, this is what we started with. It was maybe 2008. I don't really remember exactly what year the lab started, but it started with this vinyl cutter. And I know that by the time we started the Mini Maker Fair in 2009, we were already up to a laser cutter. And we've come a real long way going from this vinyl cutter now to manufacturing and shipping out circuit boards and beyond just our own commerce that we do with manufacturing. We've also enabled a lot of makers to build things and have their own cottage industry. So thanks. Thanks, Brian. And now we have another Brian, Brian Matthews. Maybe it's, all right everyone. I'm Brian Matthews. I'm from the, I work at the Virginia Tech Libraries. And I apologize for my voice. I was sick all weekend and it's very, very shredded right now. So we'll see how it goes. But I'm gonna tell you four stories today. Two of them, the graphics kind of weird up there. We'll go with it. It's kind of, anyway. Two of them are going to be about 3D printing. One about virtual reality and one about our tiptoeing into internet of things. But I wanted to offer this photo, I'll say as a prologue to kind of say that if we really want to build this type of culture and this type of skill set with our staff that we really need to have an environment where they can tinker, where they can co-learn, where they can experiment. And this is the kind of environment that we have in Virginia Tech. And I'm really excited about that because I think to do these types of things you need to have a physical space to do those things. But you also have to have a, it also serves as a symbolic space that's kind of saying not only do we encourage this but we kind of expect it a little bit for groups to come together to hack at it. And this is where we incubate and implement a lot of different types of interactive design, a lot of different services, and a lot of our sort of commons-based emerging technology. So yeah, I don't know why it's all messed up here. That's why we should have Windows, not Windows machines. So I'll just talk while we do this part. You know, when we opened our 3D lab, we really kind of took about a year to talk about that and we really built it on three core values, three core things. The first one is we wanted it to be free because we wanted to really reduce that barrier of expectation and really kind of make it as easy as possible for our students and faculty and community members to use our technologies. The second thing, we wanted to have a variety of different tools. We didn't want to just have one or two machines. We have six machines and often have two or three different versions of those. So that way, it builds to our third value, which is really learning and it's really kind of focused on what we're really trying to do is have, teach it as a prototyping and design, really as a literacy and that it's not just transactional where someone comes in and you give us your file and that's it, but you really get to kind of check out the machines, you really get to kind of learn about the process and it's part of that iteration. This is what that room looks like here. The values there, thank you. The Mac will do it there. So I'll introduce you, first of four stories here. The first one is this gentleman named Lowell and he came to us with a problem. He's a geochemist, spends most of his time looking into a microscope. And the problem that he kind of ran into was that there was a lot of proprietary systems that are just really cumbersome and difficult to use and kind of almost specific to certain machines. And what he wanted to do is just use the power of his phone or tablet or other devices to be able to take pictures, take video and be able to kind of narrate what he is seeing in there. And so he came to us, came to our studio and within, I think it was two days, we were able to kind of get him up and running. We got this off Thingiverse, modified it a little bit and he's become really a big advocate for us. And you can kind of see, I mean it comes with really high quality photos that he's able to take and he is both a teaching assistant and a researcher. And so he met with him, went and visited his lab. What he really talked about that was exciting for him was that he could set up an experiment and talk through it and then let the students kind of mimic that if they're setting up something. But he can also have his students then use their phones or their devices and kind of replicate what he did and kind of send it in. And they could just have all these different conversations looking visibly at the same things. He's also able to kind of been able to use this for scholarship in terms of his print publications and conference presentations and poster sessions and things like that. So just the simple act of being able to hook up his phone to his microscope was really dramatic for him. So this is Joyce, second story of 3D and she works in our library cafe. She's like a, she's a triple major where she does like biology, econ and fashion. And we do have a fashion school at Virginia Tech. But she came to us with a challenge that she had where she was I guess creating garments for lights now. She's creating, there was a competition that she was entering in. And one of the things they had to do was use some unusual materials. And so she wanted to, she got this idea of like what if I 3D printed a dress? That's kind of how it started. And the short version of it was she came to us with these, this design that she had drawn, worked with our lab and we printed about 40 of these for her. And this is kind of the final kind of product. And it was kind of cool where she could use like a hairdryer to kind of mold the plastic and do some really interesting things. But she ended up winning her competition. And it wasn't just because of this particular garment, it was her whole collection. But she got a lot of attention from 3D printing, a top of a dress at least. And so that's really, you know, what we kind of find what's cool with the 3D printing with that is that there's a lot of assignments, homework that come in. There's a lot of just interesting things that people are doing. But these kind of examples too of like a, here's a scientist that's trying to improve what he's augmenting his lab. Here's a designer who's using 3D to push her craft. You know, we're moving into two other kind of areas. And the first one's a virtual reality. And I know that we're gonna hear a little bit more about virtual reality tomorrow as well. But this summer we purchased a handful of headsets and we're using it in our incubation space to kind of learn about the pros and cons of them and get a sense of what we wanna do with this. And in the fall semester here, we were able to kind of take that to the road. We, like tailgates, there's like family areas. So we have a lot of kids and adults that come out and check that out. This is at a science festival. We're able to open that up. And there's always long lines. And what we kind of found out right now for the year ahead, 2017, is that while we have a handful of researchers using like Oculus and other things for like really high end visualizations, there's not a lot of entry level access to these kind of materials. And so we're creating up a little sandbox, if you will, a little space for people to come in and just kind of try it out to kind of have a virtual world, a virtual environment experience. And it's again, it's that sense of that literacy where before we can even get into and now you can produce stuff for these kind of devices, just giving people a sense of what this is, how does it work and so on. So that's where we are with that. And then the last piece here is, again, I mentioned we're kind of tiptoeing into a smart commons is what we're calling it or not quite internet of things, but it's getting there. This summer we bought about $500 worth of different types of sensors. And I have a handout with all our technology at the end, if you want that, it'll be in the slides as well. And this is an accelerometer. And what we're really kind of doing is hooking it up to a lot of our flexible furniture and trying to see how it gets used and trying to have data with that. And we're able to do that now with like photos and notes and everything. But we really wanted to kind of have a very, just see what the data could reveal. This was us just kind of playing around with the chair to kind of see the type of readings that we can get. But there's a series of questions that we're really excited about. Is it really, how is our space and furniture being used? Is it different at day? Is it different at night? Is it different in the early part of the semester, later part of the semester? What does finals look like? You know, we have some, we have older building and there's kind of micro climates in there. So could we kind of monitor temperature and things like that? We see when someone's studying alone or by themselves, like how long are they doing that kind of a thing? And then other things, can we detect patterns? Can we be predictive? Can we look at the data and say, this is what it looks like when a group is collaborating, this is what it looks like when people are just kind of sitting together and doing their own thing and just seeing what we can find with that, anticipating these. But I think the last two questions are the things that we're probably, I'm probably most excited about is, can we open this data up? Can we give it to our students to create real-time dashboards to see what space is available? Can we give it to classes to look at longitudinally? How is the library being used and so on? And then can we create a bundle of sensors so that people can borrow those, take it out for a week, a month, a year, whatever, whether it's a class assignment or not, but just to kind of get to learn about that internet of things and these sensors and the algorithms and that kind of thing. So that's kind of where we are with that. I'll end on this and just kind of say that, you know, I think really the value and the beauty and brilliance of libraries has always been that we are open to everyone to use different materials, different resources. It doesn't matter what your major is or what you're interested in, that you can find technical papers, you can find scientific material, art and so on. And I don't know, I kind of cut off here, but we're trying to apply that same concept to these types of technologies where it's kind of like, can we take the tools and the expertise and the thinking from one discipline, put it in the hands of another person, a different discipline and see what they can create. So again, you take a scientist and he can 3D print something that augments his microscope. You take a designer and she can 3D print something that pushes her art form. You can take a historian and let him or her sort of explore virtual scenarios or let architects and engineers really kind of dissect a building by looking at how it's really being used. So those are the kind of things that we're excited about and that I'll just kind of encourage as you think about makerspaces and these things, how do we make it very sort of open and inclusive to all disciplines in that manner. So again, I have this handout if you're really, we're not talking about technical stuff today, but this is the stories, but if you want to know what we're using, drop by after and I think the slides will be online as well. So thank you. Let me switch out of here. Oops, I'm going to get, well it would help if I got back on the first slide here. Okay, University of Oklahoma where we have two of these kinds of spaces. We have the Innovation at the Edge and the Innovation Hub. So let me give you a little bit of background on both of those to set up some context here for what I'll talk about. Innovation at the Edge was the first facility opened and it is in Bazelle Memorial Library right in the heart of the campus, which I think was kind of important because we intend to serve the entire campus. It's a combination of Makerspace, FabLab, Startup, it's designed to be an applied workspace. I think one of the things we do that's a little different than a lot of places is we really focus on knowledge creation. That is really the way we see it and we see these tools as a new way of expressing knowledge. So we've taken a slightly different tack than many places in doing that. We try to create a culture that is really all around that and we do that in lots of different ways. We do a lot of training. We set up a lot of workshops where they can come in and try things out. We have clubs and events that we host and we really work towards an interdisciplinary culture. We really want people coming together from all over the campus in these spaces and bouncing off of each other to refine their ideas. So that's the Innovation at the Edge. We also later in the year, and I'll give you dates here in a moment, we open what's called the Innovation Hub. This is a much higher end facility and it's located down in our research part. So it's about two miles south of the campus, but it's got all the cutting tools and it has exhaust systems and all of the things that you need for some of the more traditional maker activities. It's about 20,000 square feet, very high end costly equipment in it, including all the woodworking equipment. Staffing we share. We actually use some of the same people in the Innovation Hub that we use at the Innovation Edge. So we keep the expertise flowing between the facilities. It's open to all. These are public facilities. Anybody can walk in off the street and use them. They're peer innovators. So what, again, what we're trying to do is get all these people together talking about what they're trying to do and working through solutions, be they staff, faculty, students, they can all bounce off of each other. We have experts available. I have one of them here with me. It's from my own team, but they're available to help advise and guide, but we're trying not to get into a service mode. We want people to understand this is for you to come in and use. We'll show you how to use it. We'll give you a lot of advice. We'll teach you how to use it, but it's yours and you use it. So we really focus on that. We're focusing on collaborative learning. All these spaces are really set up to be collaborative workspaces where they come together and do things together and in collaborative ways. When I give tours to donors and corporations and employers, I hear this all the time. We want to bring in workers that can work together in teams. That's really important. So we're trying throughout our innovation facilities to foster that kind of thinking. And we're really trying to develop new methods of pedagogy, research, and creativity. So we reach out a lot, and I'll give you more on this tomorrow, and try to touch faculty and say, hey, we think this can move your research or your pedagogy forward. So let me give you a few of the results of those efforts. And we opened the Innovation Hub in September. We opened the Innovation Edge in January. So not a long time. They've been running, they're fairly new. And the Innovation Edge is about 250 square feet. And this is, like I said, 20,000 square feet. But here's some stories that I think I personally find as I monitor what's going on in these areas. Just moving, touching, helping me believe this technology is really transformative. Here's one that I really just happened last week, transforming a child's life. So we have a medical school, and we have a professor up there that's working with a young child who has a hand that doesn't have digits on it or has small nubs. And he was looking for a way to help this child out. And he, you know, saw the cartoon with a mechanical hand that got him thinking about it. And he went looking on the web to see if he could find one. And sure enough, there's out there this raptor device and he found it and he knew we were doing 3D printing in our lab. And he called us up and he said, guys, do you think you could do this? Could you print this for him? Cause I'd really like to help this kid out if I could. And so our team went to work and I was really very proud of him. This is them putting the hand together. They printed out all the pieces on our 3D printers. That's one of our team members sitting there putting it together. This was the finished product. So we actually come up with a working hand for this youngster. Here's his hand in that mechanical hand. But the picture that I think tells the story here is this one, of course, they have to block out his face, but you can see his smile. That to me was worth everything we did. That child could put on his own hat with his own two hands and he was thrilled. That's remarkable. That's the kind of stuff you can do with this technology. It isn't about printing coasters. It isn't about printing paraphernalia. It's about changing lives. It's about doing things that really can have an impact. Reshaping pedagogy. So this is our architecture professor. And she was a very willing participant when we approached her and said, we'd like to work with you on this. We think we've got a good application. And here's what she said. And I just think it's worth, it's a lot of words, but it's really worth reading it. Finally, having some time to watch the videos and reflect, because we filmed this episode for her. She said, I'm deeply moved. I have been trying to teach my students about spatial skills for 10 years now. I've gone from chalk and cardboard refrigerator boxes in our Lloyd Noble parking lot, which is our big sporting arena. In my first trials, to now working with you in the Oval platform, the impact on the students this week was immense and immeasurable and the impact on me is profound. She has become one of our greatest supporters in the library and she is steadily bringing and expanding the use of VR in the architecture school. So the kids can now walk through their buildings. They design them, they can walk through it. If they put a pipe too low, they'll find out. They'll walk right into it. Or if they didn't put a handrail, let's see it. And so it's really, really remarkable what this done. So she's reshaping her entire course to use this kind of technology in it. Here was another one. And this one involves kids, great school kids, or secondary school kids, I guess it was. Our art museum, which is right next door to the library, it's like one building away, wanted to start an art at the edge program. And so they reached out and it was done for in conjunction with Fred Jones Museum OU Library. So we partnered with them and the Museum of Art and School of Visual Arts and we developed a class project. And so here are the kids at various steps in the lab. They went over to the art museum, and they took a scanner. We have scanners that you can use iPads or your phone, mobile phone, and we gave them a way to walk around and scan. And I think they scanned horses was what they were focused on. So they scanned a horse and they came back over to our printing lab and printed a bunch of these. And then they started building a city around it. And we also loaded them inside virtual reality so they could work with the objects in virtual reality, come up with designs or rotate them around. You know, if you go to the museum, you can't touch the objects, right? But if you scan them and load them inside VR, you can flip them around, you can look at them, you can do all kinds of things with them. And so the kids were quite excited about that. Here is the, again, the million dollar quote on this. The teacher told us, I literally smiled so many times hearing my students squeal with delight, sigh with wonder, and literally say out loud, this is the best day of school I've ever had. I don't know about you folks, that makes it worthwhile for me. That's when I'm going, this technology matters. This can change pedagogy. This can change education. It has a real future. Well then our law school, we brought in the dean of the law school one day and wanted to show him our lab and said, hey, sit down. We're gonna try this virtual reality out on you. Well, we did. And he got out of the chair and said, I must have one of these, because, and he pointed out to us to help us understand why the movie Veni, which you may or may not remember, but it's a great scene in the courtroom at the end where she is explaining why what they said couldn't be true. And so it's all about reproducing the crime scene. And the dean of law school climbed out of that chair and basically said to us, we can use this to walk jurors through crime scenes. We can take what they said. We can recreate it in here. And they can walk through it and see if the story holds. He's also got a number of other uses, but that's where we've started out. So he took our design and up to the version two. So these are the VR stations in the law school and they're beautiful. He spent some serious money on these, but they're fabulous. And so they're using them for crime scene reproduction work in the law school. Here's another story, cancer research. I don't know about you. I've had too many friends in my life that I've lost to breast cancer and or nearly lost to breast cancer. This professor does research in breast cancer. And so he had us actually build a measuring device. We've scanned images of tumors and loaded them inside virtual reality. And we can now have the students go in and they can measure the precise size of a tumor. I think it's six decimal point measuring device we gave them because part of the issue in cancer is always how much tissue do you cut out? Where's the cancer? Where's the normal tissue? We can literally take them and tour the tumor and then we can give them the dimensions of the tumor and they can hand that to a surgeon and have them go in and cut it out. It's remarkable stuff. The professor there, Dr. Hong Lee said, your session provides students an opportunity to visualize the future development in the technical area and to evaluate potential clinical applications for new display methods. Both your introduction and the lab session were very well received by the students. Your medical image database is wonderful. Students are happy to be able to touch the lung tumor displayed in virtual 3D. We were using a lung tumor in that case. Again, very, very powerful stuff. So that's just some. I mean, that's not all of our stories. We got more, but Karim told me I could only have 10 minutes. So let me give you some of the lessons we've learned from just those experiences. One, the community needs to experience virtual reality to understand it. You've got to get them under the hood to experience it. And we've done that and we'll talk a little bit about how we've done that. For instance, I'll talk more about this in my session tomorrow, but we started out with the deans. Like I said, we'd bring the deans in and we'd say, we want to show you our new lab and what we can do in here. So 3D printing, virtual reality and microcontrollers. We showed them how we could do that. Then we moved to the associate dean. Then we moved to the department chairs. And then we started working towards the faculty because by then they were getting pressure from above and then we give it to the students and they get pressure from below. Hey, professor, have you seen what they can do in the library? Works really good. So we had a lot of people showing up to get tours. We also focused on those who had track records for adopting change. If those are good folks to start working with. And so we did and we also went after the faculty that was coming in that was brand new because they need to make a name for themselves. And we said, hey, let's show you what we can do over here. And we did. I think that a lot of libraries that have started out with virtual reality jump into gaming and I wouldn't stay there long. I think gaming is okay to introduce the technology but you've got to move on rather quickly to what your core mission is. Pedagogy, research, teaching, that's what you're doing. And that's where we focus. So we very quickly, I mean, we use the game just to learn the technology and then we move past it. And I think that's important because it shows that you really are trying to deliver on the mission of the institution. There are skills that come from gaming but if they can learn those skills in the pedagogy and the course and the research, they still got it. So we did that. We really, as I said, focused on those two aspects. We learned very quickly. We started out with Oculus Rift and we got beta sets so we were some of the early users of it. We realized pretty quickly, this is exploding. And so you need to be able to support multiple platforms, particularly Google Cardboard. We had the journalism school come in and say, we want all of our kids to have an experience. And we said, okay, great, how many? 350, okay. So then we had to start backing our models up and putting them on Google Cardboard, which meant reducing some of the functionality but we could do it and we did do it. And then we try not to charge for any supplies in our maker spaces. We were trying not to create any walls to adoption. The other thing that I really want to encourage you to do is reach out to the student groups, particularly women and minority groups and find out how to get them to come into these spaces. They tend to be a white male dominated and so we reached out to them and got some advice on things we could do, policies we might need to post, got a lot of valuable feedback. We haven't implemented all of it yet but we've done it and I think it's been very successful. And I also think it's important to remember long term, we've got to preserve what we're creating here, folks. This is becoming part of the research record. We're going to have to show people in the future where we started, how we got there and how some of the research data sets we've produced are a direct result of the work we did. Okay, that's what we're doing. Thank you, Carl. Is it doing it better this way? Yeah, you don't see it. You don't see it, okay. There we go. Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's good. Let's show you your taskbar for some reason. Ooh, okay. Okay, I don't know, battling cancer and making sure justice is served where it's kind of a hard act to follow. I'm Debbie Mongeau. I'm the Chair of Public Services at URI and behind me is Angel Feria, who's the curator of the Makerspace. Technology, as important as it is, really Makerspaces are all about people, creativity and the innovation. And we're going to talk about our efforts to reach out and bring in the university community. I'm going to concentrate on the faculty and Angel will talk about our efforts with the students. Just a little bit of background is we underwent some renovations on the main floor of our, in the library. Oops, I'm gonna, is this it? Yes, there it is. And we ended up with a space that we thought would make a nice Makerspace. It was essentially located, but at only 1,200 square feet, we had to make sure that every square foot was accounted for and every square foot count was really had to work very hard. So we felt that curriculum-based use of this space as a Makerspace would probably be the most productive. So we started to reach out to the faculty and we did this before we even started any planning of our own. First thing that we did was we conducted a survey of the university community and of the 100 responses, 50 were from the faculty. We heard from faculty in film studies, engineering, chemistry, communication studies, nursing, human and family development and art. So it was cut a pretty wide swath across the curriculum. We met informally, we contacted those who gave us their contact information, met with them informally, what would this Makerspace, how would it be utilized in their courses, what the assignments would be and so on. And on the basis of this, we started to draw a floor plan. And this underwent many, many revisions as we met with more and more faculty. On the basis with a nice floor plan, a nice visual and the support and the encouragement of these faculty, we decided we would go for a grant. There is Enron Island, the Champlain Foundation, which is a statewide foundation that awards grants and technology for libraries and higher education. It's, they're awarded annually and they're in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $150,000. So it's a very big deal. Because of the size and popularity of these grants, the university has a pretty rigorous internal vetting process so that before we can even submit it to the foundation. So we made the first cut, but then at that time, there were several others who proposals were rejected and we were encouraged to meet with those faculty and try to incorporate what they wanted in with our proposal. And after reading the proposals, we thought some of them were pretty far-fetched, but especially one of them was the robotic arm. I said, what does that have to do with a makerspace? But after meeting with the faculty member, we realized that this could serve not only engineering, but also art. There would be many, many disciplines that this would serve. So we incorporated in our proposal. The same thing happened to us with the proposal for virtual reality. In them, unfortunately, we didn't make the second cut, but the university provost was very interested and he offered to fund our space. However, with the condition that we had to spend the money by the end of the fiscal year, and if you work in a state institution, you know what that involves. It was a very intense bidding and purchasing process. In the meantime, the faculty were reaching out to us and they were asking could they bring in their students to work in a classroom. At that time, we thought, oh, well, this would be more of a space where the students would work on their own outside of class, but after meeting with these faculty, we realized that our expectations needed to be modified and everyone concluded that a mixture of use would be the best use of this space, both inside and outside of the classroom. Okay, the space opened in September, but we did continue to meet with the faculty. One thing we did was we were meeting with faculty advisors of student clubs and this is a visualization created by the faculty advisor for the Entrepreneurship Club and he was really excited about how we use this space and how it can be utilized by the students. We also met with the Dean of Engineering and the head of the School of Communication Studies because they were undergoing renovations and we wanted to meet with them and to find out how our space could be incorporated with what they had in mind in their renovations. So this is all ongoing. We've only been open for a few months. The outcome of these efforts is that we had to do very little informal PR. The faculty were enthusiastic about the space and they got the word out for us. So here we have, this is the Dean of Pharmacy having fun in our VR section. So this wide faculty support that we were able to create across the curriculum enabled us to get the attention of the university administration and their support and ultimately funding. So this was another good outcome. And then one surprise that we ran into was that the faculty learned from us, they learned that we were able to reinforce basic library concepts that were open many hours, we're conveniently located, we staffed with expert help and last but not least that it's open to all and all are able to use it. So having the faculty on board was a great plus for us in the planning and implementation but of course the ultimate goal is student success. So now Angel is going to talk about bringing the students in. Okay, so this is the space as it is right now except a lot cleaner because this is before we opened and our format. We have six public use stations that have a lot of software on them. We have four laptops, the space fits around 40 people, maybe 25 with, well 25 comfortably at 40, I don't know what we would do. So this is our software and our hardware. I kind of, you never have as many 3D printers as you think you have because one is always going to refuse to work and two are only going to work when certain people choose to use them. So I found that they require a lot of babysitting. At the bottom of the list you'll see that we will adopt technology from other places when we decide that nobody is using it. So I'm actually trying for that a bit more now. When we first started, I didn't have very many people. So this is August, this was this August, I put out the job posting. This was just a little bit of the job posting. We got four responses, two were really of the, I'm just going to apply to anything, I didn't even read it, the other two were pretty good. So we actually hired them. So come September, we opened trying to cover all of our hours with three students and myself, one student who had essentially assembled all of the equipment and two who were pretty much just hired the week before. So that was a lot of fun, we're doing better now. I switched to taking students who would come in as they came in and they asked if printing was free and it currently is free and we're thinking it will stay free but we're still working on that. So of course I'd answer yes, they'd print their little toy or whatever, as I said, we're very new, we don't have any rules on any of that and then they would wander out. However, the students who would come back again and again and they'd switch from downloading to Thingiverse to actually starting to design their stuff, I would ask them if they'd want a job and that works a lot better. These are my employees now and then down at the bottom are a few that actually work other places on campus and can't work more than 20 hours so they're not my employees, they're just there and kind of act like they are. So my demographics, I have mostly seniors which was on purpose because I was hoping for some experience to help me get up and running and then mostly engineers which was not on purpose and I can't quite figure out why I have so many engineers. So I am trying to work on that. This is kind of the space now with the students in it after around 10, 30, 11 o'clock when they finally wake up it gets to looking like this. In this picture there are three people that actually do work in the makerspace. Currently only one is working. The other one's just hanging out there which led me to a discovery I didn't really think of and that's the students love the space a lot. They are constantly in there. There's a core group that are just really wonderful. This is the view from my desk pretty much every day and it doesn't look like there's too many people but we're also missing the 3D printers and the laser cutter on the left there and all these laptops and coats and everything you see off to the sides. Those, there's people somewhere. Either they're getting a coffee or I don't know where they are right now but they belong there. As they kind of adopt the space as their own I walk into stuff like this all the time. They take my plexiglass bins and they, not plexiglass but they take my bins and they decide they're theirs. I walk into boxes with projects that are labeled with please do not throw away and random bits in them. This one would contain a robotic arm. My students have started to drag stuff into the space working under the basis that if we stick our name on it it belongs to us and so far that seems to be working so I'm hoping we can really explore that option. However, just like my employees, my users currently happen to be of the engineering bend. We're trying to draw in more students from other courses since we've only been open since September. These were like the forerunners. Now we're starting to get into the arts. They really, really like the laser cutter. So this is an art course that came and we're using virtual reality headsets. This was awesome because this is the tilt brush and this was the first time anybody had seen anyone able to draw with a tilt brush. So we didn't know that you actually could draw. We thought you could just make light squiggles. As we get more diverse users, we're starting to get different groups collecting. So the art and then engineering students and I'm really liking and enjoying that aspect of it. This is on the arts class engineering side. This is an internal project that we started in the makerspace. We took that drawing that Deb showed that the engineering person, I'm sorry, the business person put together. We put it through a vinyl cutter. We attached it to plexiglass and then my lovely engineering students designed a base for it that we are going to attempt to print come winter break because it's going to take a very long time. We do have a very big printer. Okay, so as Deb mentioned, we do have the robotic arm and the laser cutter. These are working to grab people from other majors. The robotic arm was requested by robotics. However, biology is starting to get very into it, which I was thrilled with. Luckily for me, the PDF is online. So once a month, somebody comes in and asks for the instruction booklet for it and I can just tell them what it is and they can find it online. The other one is the laser cutter, which I'm surprised. Art is so interested in the laser cutter. I did not see that coming. We also have a lot of engineering who want to use our laser cutter because it's better than theirs. So we're getting them. These are the schools slash groups we are working with. We are the slightly bigger star in the middle and then the other ones are off to the side, which is engineering, fine arts, archeology, the Harrington School, which is covering communications. So as we continue to grow and especially next semester, we're planning to get much more busy in these other colleges. So we're really hoping that we can grow this into another space and more services. Thank you. Thank you very much.