It's Academic

Seton Hill Library Director, David H. Stanley, was interviewed last week for an article about the future of academic libraries, along with Jennifer Bates, president of the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association, Kornelia Tancheva, Director of the University of Pittsburgh Library System, and Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries at Carnegie-Mellon University.   Check out this link to TribLive.com, the online version of the Tribune-Review:  Libraries adjust to new chapter

Definition of iteration:

1: the action or a process of iterating or repeating: such as

a : a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result

b : the repetition of a sequence of computer instructions a specified number of times or until a condition is met — compare recursion

2: one execution of a sequence of operations or instructions in iteration

3: version, incarnation

·         the latest iteration of the operating system

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/iteration

3D printers give us an opportunity to exam intersectional librarianship and the concept of lifelong learning.  Public libraries are viewed as early literacy centers and places to read the New York Times bestsellers; however, they are also advocates for lifelong learning, which can be academic in nature.

3D printers allow anyone to take an idea, turn it into a file, and then print it out in reality.  At the first program where we encouraged patrons to create ornaments to 3D print for Christmas, I had an elementary school boy create a 3 x 3 inch city.  It failed to print the first time, but he came back and revised it and this time it printed a glorious blob.  Learning new skills involves a great degree of failure, and there are a limited number of places where people are allowed to fail.  Robert Rodriguez said that consistently failing better is what taught him to be a director.  Iteration is quintessential to the excelling process.

“The idea is speed.  We build a concept, test it, try it out, make mistakes, do corrections, and are always pushing to go even faster.” Rick DeVos, senior consulting engineer at GE FirstBuild

The fast turn-around that 3D printing enables allows patrons to draft an idea and iterate multiple times in the same day until they generate a working prototype.  Practical purposes include fixing dated appliances where replacement parts are hard to find, teaching basic mechanical principals and design, and creating functional and ornamental objects (https://lifehacker.com/5894289/replicate-broken-appliance-parts-with-a-3d-printer), but 3D printing goes beyond the basic and has disrupted exclusive industries such as prosthetics.  Many public libraries use their 3D printers to make cheap and light-weight prosthetics for individuals who cannot afford the process (https://3dprint.nih.gov/collections/prosthetics).

“3D printing turns digital files into physical objects by building them up layer-by-layer…  It gives everyday consumers the power of manufacturing.”  Kyle Chayka

This is where academic learning intersects with public library patrons to create an environment of lifelong learning.  Patrons gain the opportunity to learn and master high level engineering but go beyond scholarly pursuits by empowering blue collar work.

“Even when they progress beyond the initial ‘wow’ factor of the infinite creative potential these devices provide, they discover additional layers to learn.” Brad Smith, Mount Paran Christian School

Washington & Jefferson College is holding its first Symposium on Democracy next week, February 12-16, 2018.   The events are free and open to the public, so please share with faculty, staff, or students at your institution who might be interested in attending.

Please find below a list of the displays the U. Grant Miller Library is contributing to the Symposium on Democracy.

The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America by Gary Nash
W&J Catalog | WorldCat 

Jeffersonian Legacies by Peter Onuf
W&J Catalog | WorldCat

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
W&J Catalog | WorldCat

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis
W&J Catalog | WorldCat

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph Ellis
W&J Catalog | WorldCat

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon Wood
W&J Catalog | WorldCat

If you’re coming and want to visit the library as well, contact Samantha Martin Research & Collections Librarian, U. Grant Miller Library. Her phone number is (724) 503-1001 x3127. They would love to have visitors. She is also available to answer any additional questions you might have.

“Thinking accomplishes the relation of being to the essence of the human being.” M. Heidegger, Letter on “Humanism” in Pathmarks (Cambridge, 1998) 239.

A library is not a static environment into which the user enters like an explorer imbued with a sense of entitlement to master whatever or whosoever is “discovered.” That mode of thinking is a response to the challenge of enframed existence which conceals as much as, if not more than, it reveals. It makes the library a place where resources including the librarians are simply a standing reserve “inventory to be ordered and conscripted” by tools that are ready-to-hand (See: Mark Blitz, “Understanding Heidegger on Technology,” The New Atlantis, Winter 2014, 68). Something electronic communication, data provision and digital technology all do very well in cyberspace, and the world of “our library” should not be a dehumanizing video game simulation. Futurists at library conferences pronounced a decade ago, libraries should not try to compete with Google because they will lose. “Our library” must not care to even try. Not because it is a fool’s errand, or folly for a library to be thought of differently, counter-culturally or even perhaps anarchically. It is because human interactions with ideas, histories, arts, sciences, cultures, technologies, other realities and other people dissolve the false dichotomy of a subject to objects relationship. A library ought to be a shared environment of “others” where this freely occurs. A library certainly can be a place for exploration and discovery. Stewardship of a world, however, means empowering each human being in it to realize all the “things” and everybody there, including themselves, are indigenous. This is significant for determining: “What kind of “world” is a library?”

“All ways of thinking, more or less perceptively, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary.” M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Garland, 1977) 3.

Since world-forming our library must be real and not just a theoretical mental exercise, and administrators are often far too risk averse to shepherd an open and candid “blue-sky” discussion, librarians need to foment the dialogue about how our library admits the essence of the human being, i.e., ek-sistence. “World-forming” because human beings have a creative ek-sistence, within which each one dwells poetically. “Real” in the sense that we can inhabit ek-sistence not just fantasize about it. “Ek-sistence,” to use Heidegger’s neologism, because human beings do not merely exist. They are “destined to think” what it means ‘to be’ (Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, Pathmarks, 247). Libraries are relevant, not when they do reactive technology-chasing or even proactive agenda-setting, but when librarians cultivate thinking, provide paths for creative interactions, and make clearings for language. This last statement is offered as a step toward answering: “What kind of “world” is a library?”

All our heart’s courage is the
echoing response to the
first call of Being which
gathers our thinking into the
play of the world.

In thinking all things
become solitary and slow.

Patience nurtures magnanimity.

He who thinks greatly must
err greatly.

M. Heidegger, The Thinker as Poet, in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper, 1971) 9.