Summer's End

I can't believe that summer is almost over.  Even with the late Labour Day, it has gone too fast. 


We have settled into our new digs in Beamsville.  Our circulation for July 2015 was almost the same as July 2014 after we first opened.  I think that is a great vote of confidence from the community that they like the new surroundings.  The Moses F. Rittenhouse Library has also held its own with higher circulation over the past twelve months.


In order to better serve our community, the Library Board and staff are embarking on the development of a new strategic plan.  We will creating a new direction for the library in this new digital age.


We need your help!  In the next few weeks, we will be making available a community survey asking you how you use the library and what you would like us to do in the future.  It will be posted on the website and paper copies will be available at each location.


The Lincoln Public Library is your community resource and we want to ensure that it meets your needs.


Have your say!

The library hotel, Japan's latest concept for tourists

       This combination image from the 'Book and Bed Hotel' shows a vast room divided by stacks of books.

• Relaxnews
  Published Tuesday, July 28, 2015 7:37AM EDT                                     

In Japan, the latest trend welcoming tourists is a library hotel without rooms. The concept is set to launch in September.


Have you always dreamed of staying in a library after hours? Japan has the solution: a library hotel, the "Book and Bed Hotel," will open this fall. The owners have partners with Shibuya Publishing & Booksellers, a publishing house that has agreed to provide all the books and other reading materials that will make up the walls of the hotel. In reality, the place will be a vast room divided by stacks of books. Don't expect to arrive and be given a key to your room, as there are no rooms. Guests will have to make do with cabins and bunks in little nooks between the books to get some rest. Intimacy is definitely not a priority at this concept hotel that is set to open in the commercial and entertainment district of Ikebukuro in the Toshima ward of Tokyo. There will however be curtains installed to offer tired guests a bit of peace.


Tourists can reserve for one night or even just spend some time catching up on reading during the day. The hotel has yet to announce its pricing options.


This isn't the first time Japan experiments with concept hotels. Earlier this month a robot-staffed hotel opened its doors where English-speaking travellers may, for example, be welcomed at reception by a robot dinosaur.

Little Free Library stolen in St Catharines - Let's Find It!

St. Catharines Standard August 9, 2015 4:50:02 EDT PM

Image: 1 of 4

Denise Stone had a sinking feeling in her stomach when she looked into her recycling box Thursday morning.

“As I pulled out, I glanced over and noticed all of these books in my recycle bin. And then I looked up and realized that the library was gone,” she said.

For the past year, a Little Free Library that was a replica of Stone’s South Dr. home, sat on her front lawn.

Last Thursday, the library was stolen.

The Little Free Library movement started in the United States and the idea has been growing in popularity throughout North America, including Niagara.

The outdoor libraries are usually no bigger than a birdhouse. The public is welcome to take whatever books they want or leave a book or books if they choose.

The goal is to promote reading and community involvement. Various homes in Niagara have also joined the movement.

“It was all one piece — they took the whole thing,” said Stone.

It was built by her brother, and she's hesitant to ask him to make her a new one.

“It was something that my brother had built for me and I had it just over a year in the front yard,” said Stone.

“I’m not going to ask him to build another one, because he paid so much attention to detail.”

The Little Library stayed out all year, despite snow or rain.

“I never took it down, because in the winter the snow would be packed down in front of it from people using it,” she said.

“It wasn’t unusual for me to put a book in one day and the next day I would look and someone would have borrowed it. People were always putting books back in as well. It was very much a community fixture for our neighbourhood.”

And, she said, the community has been there for her.

“One neighbour came over yesterday and offered, if I ever wanted to build another one he offered to purchase all the materials, which I thought was so incredibly kind,” said Stone.

“Another neighbour came over yesterday and offered to make a donation toward getting a new little library. It’s been amazing, the kindness that has come out of this.

"Even the organizers (of LittleFreeLibrary.org) in the States heard about it and offered to replace the charter. You register the house and you have a charter number. That sign was on the library with the charter, so they offered to give me a complimentary charter for the new house.”

Her daughter, Mallory Stone, has stepped up to the plate for her mother.

“My daughter has started to build me a new little library and we will put it back out,” said Stone.

“She’s never built anything like this before, but she is researching it and she has started it. It will take her awhile, but it will be back.”

Stone figures the thief may have been interested in the metal stand to sell for scrap.

She isn’t interested in laying charges, she just wants her little library back.

“They can drop it off at my house, no questions asked. If all I get back is the little library itself and not the stand, I am happy." she said.

"It was such a fixture in the neighbourhood. Everybody knew the little library."

Public libraries are becoming a one-stop shop for manufacturing in the digital age.

In the Chicago area, there’s a nearly exact replica of a 10-year-old boy’s head. It’s not an exact replica because, last year, he had a cranial defect. Doctors needed to perform craniofacial surgery on his skull to protect his brain. Operating on the brain or skull leaves little room for error. “If something goes wrong I can destroy that person's character ... forever,” said noted neurosurgeon Henry Marsh in the 2009 documentary The English Surgeon. It helps to make a model. A team of doctors at the Loyola University Medical Center wanted to do just that to assist the doctors performing the operation, but ordering a replica of the boy’s skull would have taken two to three weeks and cost about $4,000. Instead, they went to the Chicago Public Library as part of a trial study and printed out a replica of the boy’s skull using a 3-D printer. The model of  the skull was sanitized, and took just 12 hours to make. It cost $20 and the surgery was successful.

The surgery is an example of how people are using public libraries in new and important ways. Public libraries are becoming a one-stop shop for manufacturing in the digital age. Because libraries are investing in machines like 3-D printers, someday soon everyone with access to a public library could become an inventor or create something.

Did a car part break? Use a 3-D scanner to digitize the part and create an exact replica of it. Need to make a cheap prototype of your invention? You can work with a library specialist to design it. Want to make your own custom jewelry? Use a 3-D printer and sell it on Etsy.

“It is about making knowledge available and initiating the public to make knowledge themselves,” says Jeroen de Boer, co-author of the upcoming book Makerspaces in Libraries. “Makerspaces are the places where knowledge exchange happens in new ways.” Libraries are increasingly inviting places for these areas, which are essentially DIY spaces where people can go to access resources and exchange ideas in order to create and invent things.          

          

With new technology, libraries are not necessarily doing a different job—they are doing the same job, just better. Public libraries in the United States, dating back to the 19th century, have always given people greater access to ideas. Before the Internet, those ideas could be found back in the stacks among the books. They were a collection of past knowledge, available free of charge to anyone with a library card, as Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting explained succinctly to an over-privileged grad student: “You dropped a 150 grand on a [expletive] education you could have gotten for a $1.50 in late charges at the public library.”

What’s different about this new trend is how it incorporates a focus on inspiring the future. Libraries that invest in commercial manufacturing technology give patrons access to past and future ideas. An inventor doesn’t have to spend thousands of dollars and wait weeks for a prototype–they can go to a public library and make a prototype for a few cents. Many inventors who work in libraries use a website called Thingiverse.com, a repository of 3-D designs for anyone to upload or download. Just like book collections, it is free to access, and the only cost to library users is for materials.

In 2013, around 109 libraries in the U.S. offered makerspaces—also called maker labs or hackspaces—but that number is on the rise and likely much higher today. Some makerspaces consist only of a single 3-D printer, like how the Chattanooga Public Library in Tennessee started, and operate on a shoestring (3-D printers cost around $2,500, not including materials). Other makerspaces can cost $250,000 or more, like the one at the Chicago Public Library. The maker lab there has digital design software, 3-D printers, laser cutters, milling machines, and vinyl cutters.

Most of this equipment at public libraries is purchased through a combination of local, federal, and grant donations. The Portsmouth Public Library in New Hampshire, for example, used internal funds to buy a MakerBot Replicator 3-D Printer Replicator, and showed it off at a local fair. Britta Shepard and her husband saw the 3-D printer there and knew that it could take their invention from an idea to a product. They had a patent for a back-up assistant to help vehicles with trailers on the back navigate, but couldn't afford to create a prototype—it could have cost them close to $15,000. Instead they drove 15 minutes away to the Portsmouth Public Library to create a prototype for 15 cents.

Libraries that invest in commercial manufacturing technology give patrons access to past and future ideas.

“America wants to innovate, they want to get out there, but they don’t have the money or time to buy a 3-D printer and to calibrate it, so the library is perfect. Anyone can use it,” Shepard said, and she knows from experience.

Neither she nor her husband is a designer, but they used Google Sketchup, free 3-D printing software, to create the prototypes on the computer. Their design is a bit more complicated now and their costs have tripled—to 45 cents. Shepard’s goal is to raise between $100,000 and $200,000 during their planned Kickstarter campaign next month.

“Libraries are about more than collections—they are about information. Making things is a way for information engagement,”says  Joseph Koivisto, a librarian at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. The MLK library opened its own makerspace, called “The Fab Lab,” just this May, making it one of the newest in the country. While the Portsmouth Public Library that the Shepard’s used was just a single 3-D printer, the Fab Lab in D.C. looks like Willy Wonka took over a high school art classroom. Tall, black tables at the center of the room are covered with some of the most advanced commercial modeling technology available. A row of MakerBot 3-D printers line the outside of one of the walls, and, when I visited, one was creating an object at the end. It was early to tell what its final form would be—it just looked like a cluster of connected silver hinges. Whether that object becomes a patented prototype or something else entirely, it still symbolizes everything a library has to offer—books that inspire, 3-D printing that creates, and library staff that is a resource.        

           

Right now, the staff at the MLK library is being trained to operate the new machinery and they are practicing by creating products as complicated as replica swords to laser cut signs.

“Warning,” reads a laser-cut block of wood created by one staff member. “This device emits potentially harmful levels of awesome.”

This post originally appeared in New America’s digital magazine, The Weekly Wonk, a Pacific Standard partner site. Sign up to get The Weekly Wonk delivered to your inbox, and follow @NewAmerica on Twitter.