” Media labs are not uncommon at public libraries nowadays; many people have done great work in this area. All of these wonderful facilities and curricula considered, I’m most excited by librarylab.org because it is modular, portable, flexible, open source and creative commons licensed, all of which are values I believe to be important to promote and uphold in public libraries. There’s a tension between what it means to be local versus what it means to be web-scale, and there are advantages to both. The original vision for librarylab.org was connected to the Digital Public Library of America beta sprint; it was to be a networked physical architecture acting as a gateway for contribution to a national digital library. In that sense, it was a web-scale idea. At the same time, because the plans are open source and hackable, the various modules could be customized, tweaked, and branded for almost any imaginable local use. In that sense, it is a local concept. As public libraries move toward knowledge production as a core piece of their mission, I see great value in some agreement on standards, principles, and even talking points around these media lab type facilities, while never losing sight of the things that make every community unique. Currently, librarylab.org only exists as a set of conceptual drawings. If you are interested in supporting prototyping of the librarylab modules so that sound construction plans can be made available to all, contact the folks at Noll & Tam Architecture and Planning.”
From Nate Hill’s post on the PLA Blog, A two part plan to make your library a local publisher