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I agree. These are basically the same reasons we built a Digital Design Studio in the Library last year. During the past year, the director of the DDS worked closely with several professors who incorporated multimedia assignments into their coursework. In addition to an instruction session for each class, there are student staff available to assist while they use the high-end multimedia design software on high-resolution screens. As usage expands, we expect that students will start coming to the studio on their own for projects they want to do. I think this may become a trend in academic libraries, moving from "where do I get information" to participating in the entire information life-cycle, from identifying and selecting information sources to integrating information together, presenting results, and creating new information. Steve McDonald Tufts University [log in to unmask] > -----Original Message----- > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of > Emily Lynema > Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 9:07 AM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Maker Spaces and Academic Libraries > > I find this conversation interesting, mostly because the "why do it" > reasons given parallel so closely what we are working on at NC State in our > new library building. Except it doesn't have anything to do with makerspaces! > > Our emphasis is on taking expensive visualization and high performance > computing capacity and making it available to students all across our campus. > Some would ask why we are building massive visualization walls and working > on creating a cloud computing environment where anyone can request > temporary access to high performance computing in order to build "stuff" to > render on the visualization walls. And it's just the same as the reason given > for doing makerspaces in academic libraries: while faculty on fancy grant > projects have access to high performance computing nodes, nowhere on > campus is this kind of computing and visualization openly available for > undergraduate students to creatively use. > > It's neat to see the different directions we go with the same underlying > reason. > > -emily