A.K.A: Generikat gets thrown to the DIY wolves
Once a year the board comes to each library branch in our district and our manager must present a board report. It's kind of like a Power Point presentation on the state of our library and what we did for the community over the past year since the last board report. I have a new manager, and this was her first presentation to the board. To make things more fun, Youth Services at the mother ship branch scheduled a teen maker craft program to take place during the board report time, and on top of that bit of over-scheduled joy we found out the repair guy was coming at the same time to fix our broken handicap access doors. Yay!
Makerspaces have been a big buzz word in the library realm for the last few years, and today's maker craft extravaganza for teens reflected that focus on providing patrons with tools, supplies, and space so that they might create. I'm totally cool with the concept, and had no issues with the steampunk jewelry craft, turning old t-shirts into bags, and feeding youth chili cream cheese dip and tortilla chips. Great fun.
A library makerspace is an area and/or service that offers library patrons an opportunity to create intellectual and physical materials using resources such as computers, 3-D printers, audio and video capture and editing tools, and traditional arts and crafts supplies.
The soldering kits however were a bit more challenging. We were supposed to let the teens make cell-phone chargers constructed out of Altoid boxes, a 9V battery, a circuit, and a USB cell phone plug. It actually could have been a cool project, certainly not something that I would recommend plugging a $600 dollar phone into, but even beyond that hang up there was one big glaring problem. Not one of us had soldered a thing ever. So here we were, thirty minutes before program commencement and my manager comes to me and says,
I walk back to the teenage volunteer that was manning the station. She looked about as overwhelmed as a minnow in a shark tank and just handed the solder iron to me in silence.
"You are supposed to attach this piece here and this piece there." She replied in a fair amount of exasperation.
"Hmm," I replied, "It probably would have been better to have a class on how to solder before actually trying to make a project doing so, huh?"
In a couple of minutes I had attached the wires and had a complete circuit that was lighting up, but I wasn't feeling to great about turning over the station to a bunch of young people. Our Youth Services person felt the same. While I was doing a crash course on soldering, she had looked up the actual project that we were supposed to do. There were over three thousand comments warning of the potential dangers of that particular homemade cell phone charging project.
However, I really liked the soldering iron, and think that we should totally have a class at the library on how to use one properly. There is something fulfilling about attaching metal to metal with fusible alloy and watching your completed circuit light up. It would just be nice to somewhat know what we are doing before we actually are required to show others how to do so.
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