Starting soon! A Roundtable Discussion Series that you don’t want to miss!

It’s a challenge to build authentic engagement and design outreach that deepens understanding of local needs, fosters and grows inclusive participation, and intentionally elevates the creativity and skills already present within the community.

Let’s talk! Bring your best ideas about outreach and engagement for library makerspaces! We will discuss what is most challenging and seek input on how to successfully bring in new audiences and invite authentic engagement.

It’s not easy to communicate a clear, evidence-based narrative that describes the value and impact of your maker program, while also addressing the ongoing challenge of identifying and securing the resources needed to sustain high-quality services.

We will offer some ideas we recently collected from the field, and then we will want to hear from you about how your library is addressing this challenge and advocating for your maker program.

Designing makerspaces/programs that intentionally remove cultural, socio-economic, developmental, and physical barriers so all community members can fully participate and feel a sense of belonging is a challenging goal, but so important! How are you finding ways to do it at your library?

What’s happening at your library? Are you working to increase accessibility? How do people know that they are truly welcome in your spaces? We will talk about the most challenging things you deal with to provide programs for audiences of different abilities and backgrounds, and seek input from participants about how to successfully offer a program that community members can fully participate and feel a sense of belonging.

It is no small task to develop resilient maker services that can evolve with community needs. This often involves strengthening the financial, operational and structural systems required for long-term stability. But library people are creative and resourceful and at this event we will share a few great approaches we have discovered!

Bring your best ideas about sustainability strategies for library makerspaces and we will compare notes on how different libraries are keeping their systems up to date and be ready for what comes next. Share you input about what works, and what you might have tried that didn’t work, too.

Having the capacity to invest in staff through recruitment, comprehensive training, and ongoing professional development. Ideally, staff would be empowered as a knowledgeable and confident workforce ready to meet changing community needs and advancing technologies.

We want to hear how your library handles recruiting, developing, and retaining staff in library makerspaces! Come and listen to get some new strategies, too. Attend this roundtable to discuss how libraries might create a culture where staff can grow in their skills and become leaders in the field of maker services.

In case you missed it…

Check out the recording of our December 10 event:

Making It Work: Defining Our Shared Library Makerspace Challenges

Library Makers has been digging into the real-world challenges - or “Problems of Practice” - that many libraries encounter when running maker programs or operating makerspaces. At the same time, our partners from the National Library Makerspace Forum have been gathering insights from across the country to better understand the shared values, vision, priorities, and resources that can strengthen the library makerspace movement.

In this webinar recording, we share highlights and key takeaways from the Forum’s research, reflect on what we’ve learned together so far, and introduce the five core Problems of Practice that we are inviting the library community to help tackle in the months ahead.

Presenters in this recording include:

Rebecca Teasdale, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago
Kyungwon Koh, Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director, Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab
Emilie N. Butt, Fab Lab Instruction an Engagement Coordinator, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Cindi Place, Chair, Library Makers Leadership Team

Lisa Regalla, Library Makers Leadership Team
Pamela Van Halsema, Library Makers Leadership Team