Washington University supports UCPL's Public Library Transformation grant from MOREnet

The University City Public Library would like to thank Washington University for their generous donation of $5,000 as a match for our MOREnet Public Library transformation grant.  The MOREnet grant, along with Wash U’s donation, will help the University City Public Library offer area residents a chance  to explore, create, invent, and learn, using our 3D printer and scanner, a variety of audio / video editing software, and a suite of online training videos from Lynda.com.

We’re grateful for the support and excited about the future.

We visited the HORNETS in Fulton

Patrick, Suzanne, Christa & Bill

We made a quick trip to Fulton High School today to visit their fab lab and got to see all of the cool equipment they are using in their engineering, physics and other classes.  Suzanne Hull and Jim Hall were so nice to have us visit and answered many questions.  They also gave us these samples.

I know fab lab stands for fabrication but to us it also stands for fabulous. GO HORNETS!

Our Fulton FAB LAB Visit!

On Monday, February 24^th, Patrick, Christa, and I had the pleasure to meet Assistant Superintendent Dr. Suzanne Hull and Science and Engineering teacher Mr. Jim Hall of the Fulton Public School district.  The purpose?  Just last week, they unveiled Missouri’s first K-12 school Fabrication Lab (http://www.fulton58.org/vnews/display.v/ART/53078ffa3da7f).   Congratulations to Fulton on their historic achievement!

We toured the classroom where the MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printers, MakerBot 3D scanner, and Roland vinyl cutter are located.  The printer was in the middle of creating a white golf ball.  Jim shared his experiences with the equipment and gave us some good tips on expectations, handling, and operations.  For example, when asked about length of time to print, a standard golf ball at 100% fill takes almost 3 hours to print!   Tinkercad (http://tinkercad.com/) is the 3D CAD software of choice, and as a side note, Tinkercad also works with Google Chromebooks.

In the shop area resides many other pieces of fabulous equipment, but of specific interest is the Epilog Laser Cutter.  This unit requires a dedicated 110V circuit, external ventilation, and air assist.  They use a dedicated PC with CorelDraw installed.  When running, the ventilation system generated sound one would expect to hear in a shop environment.  One piece of equipment we hadn’t considered before is a Heat Press for heat transfer projects, i.e. transferring content generated from the vinyl cutter to t-shirts! 

We thanked Suzanne and Jim for their time in showing us around the lab, the demonstration, and for some of the samples we were given to take back.  Last, Jim offered his and his student’s services to help us with the establishment of our makerspace and training.

ThinkStations Are Coming!

One of the first steps in building an environment where patrons and entrepreneurs can work with video content involves purchasing hardware.  For the PC requirements, we looked at the following recommended software titles for manipulating video: AVID Media Composer, Sony Vegas Pro, and Adobe Premier.  Collectively, we wanted the PC hardware to meet or exceed the following specifications:

OS:       Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 (64-bit) (or higher)

CPU:    Intel Quad Core i7 or Quad Core Xeon processor

RAM:  16 GB RAM

GPU:    NVIDIA Quadro family

HDD:   Minimum 250 GB 7200 rpm SATA drive

At UCPL, we’ve had a good track record using Lenovo equipment.  Continuing that relationship, our focus landed on the Lenovo ThinkStation class workstations.  The model specifically selected became the Lenovo ThinkStation C30.  Building on the base model, we added a 6-core Xeon processor, 1 TB SATA drive, and chose the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 graphics card.  Our hope is that the equipment selected will give our users a rich and fast video processing environment.

To get the machines ready for public use, we will build them with Microsoft Windows 7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Microsoft Office 2013, and a host of other library-centric software.  For system protection, we use Centurion SmartShield to ensure the same user experience each time a patron finishes their session.  If no issues with the build and configuration, these workstations will be in service starting next week, and then follow-up with the video editing software at a later date.

Exciting news on collaboration with CALOP!

I attended the monthly board meeting for the Commission on Access and Local Original Programming (CALOP) on Thursday, January 23 (luckily for me they met right here in the Library). We're really excited about working with them on both programming here at the Library, and on video training and the possiblity of video contests related to our MOREnet grant.

Marketing lynda.com

Now that we have this great resource, we need to get the word out to our patrons.  This will be an ongoing effort.  Our first step was to train staff.  They are the best at marking our services to people who already use the library.

During our training sessions, we told them what lynda.com is - high quality training videos concentrating on technology, business and education. Our agenda was simple:

• What is lynda.com?
• Who can us it? When, where?
• Why do we have this?
• Demonstration
• Other - including time out feature, browser compatibility/equipment requirements 
• Questions?

We talked about our setup in the library - who can use this resources and how. We have a shortcut on our public computers that take users directly to lynda.com but we don't think we can do the same with our Chromebooks.  What you see on the Chromebook depends on who is logged in.  There doesn't seem to be a way to do a lynda.com shortcut for all users.  We showed staff a demo and talked about the great features offered by lynda.com including the indexing that allows you to go directly to a topic in a video and watch only the parts that you need.  During our three sessions, staff made many suggestions and had great questions.

We made small business card sized handouts for all our service desks to pass on to people interested in lynda.com. Here is what the handout looks like:

We have many more ideas to continue our marketing efforts and lynda.com also has a robust resource center to help with our efforts. 

What we’ve learned with implementing lynda.com at UCPL

We offer three main access options for lynda.com: 1) public PCs, 2) Google Chromebooks, and 3) BYOD utilizing the wireless network. 

Prior to signing with lynda.com, we participated in a one week service trial.  The goal was to validate the library infrastructure and determine if our existing equipment would work without issue on the site.  For lyndaKiosk, we requested our entire public IP scope to be allowed access, instead of limiting to specific addresses.  For the library environment, and for ease of administration, we determined it best to allow the entire scope.

Our public workstations are Lenovo ThinkCentre M58e desktops running Microsoft Windows XP SP3 and browsers Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome.  We had trouble with Adobe Flash player on IE and Chrome, but it worked perfectly on Firefox.   We created a custom icon with the lynda.com logo and placed on each public user desktop.  When launched, Firefox automatically directs the patron to the lyndaKiosk environment via a specific website provided by lynda.com. 

Each time a connection is made to lyndaKiosk, a single license is used.  Each connection has a 30 minute session timeout. If a user does not click “Log out” or simply closes the browser window, the session still remains active on lynda.com. The timeout period cannot be changed at this time.  If all licenses are currently in-use, the user will receive a message indicating such.  We would like to know dates/times for how often this occurs, and would be a determining factor if additional licenses are needed.  The current reporting options don’t provide those figures today.  Last, when signing into lyndaKiosk, the welcome note at the top of the website says “Hi, IP user”.   The message cannot be changed at this time, but again, could be made customizable in a future lynda.com update.

Although we’ve only had the service offering for a short while now, we’ve received nothing but positive feedback on the quality of the video and site navigation.   Our most common feedback is request for lynda.com to provide more content on a broader range of categories.