• a recently retired man interested in starting up his own website
• an equine photographer interested in digitizing her negatives so she can sell her photographs online
• a football player interested in editing video footage to create a highlight reel for college recruiters
• a father interested in digitizing and editing some old home videos
• four of our top six finishers in our recent teen photography contest who came in for a scheduled interview to talk about their interest and inspiration in photography

When I think about the future of libraries, I can’t help but think that educating our users in technology (including digital media creation) has to be a huge part of the equation. That’s why I was so impressed with the Helsinki Library 10 and Meeting Point, recently featured on Walking Paper! These libraries look like what would happen if you took our single-room DML and just kept expanding its space and services.

Check out these great slides as well:

That’s why I was happy to see that Mashable, hands-down the best source for news and commentary on social media imho, recently picked YouTube as the top social media innovation of the decade. In the article explaining this choice, editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow writes:

In a decade that saw social media move from the fringes to the mainstream, YouTube is the innovation that touched the most lives, became a driving force for change around the world, and ultimately ends the decade with an opportunity to be as disruptive in the next 10 years as it was in the past four. That’s why YouTube is our choice for social media innovation of the decade.

It’ll definitely be interesting to see how YouTube changes over the next few years! Take a look at the Mashable article. It’s worth reading.

• What is the Digital Media Lab?
• Why did we create it? What were our goals and what did we identify as the need?
• How did we pull it off? What went into the planning process?
• What was and is the result? How has the public responded and used the lab so far?
• What are our plans for it? What are some possible programs and services that will come out of the lab?
• What can you do? What are some tips to help you empower your own community to work with digital media?

I hope more libraries in the area will consider doing something to help their users work with digital media and one of the points I’ll make is that it can start with just one Mac mini if you want to ease into it. We’ll see how the response is today!

Here are my presentation slides (large pdf file!) in case you’re interested:

Our community will be able to do all kinds of cool things in this lab, including the following:

• Shooting, editing, and sharing videos
• Creating, recording, and sharing digital music
• Designing posters, brochures, websites, etc.
• Digitizing photographs, documents, etc.
• Editing photographs and other images
• Shoot photographs and videos against the green screen painted wall
• Work on presentations using iWork’s Keynote
• Talk to friends and family using Skype or iChat and the built-in webcams
• Check out digital cameras, Flip video camcorders, 250G portable hard drives, and tripods overnight

The long list of software loaded onto these computers includes:

• iLife 09
• iWork 09
• Final Cut Studio
• Logic Express
• Adobe CS 4
• MacTubes
• Safari and Firefox
• Scanning software
• Skype

Having been open just one week now, we’re still in the soft-opening stage during which we’re trying to create a welcoming environment for people who are curious about the lab. Soon, we’ll publicize it more and hopefully people will come rushing in to use the lab. I was thrilled to hear that someone made use of the green wall this past Saturday! And I’ve had some really positive conversations with people who really sound excited about this new lab. [Edit: More information about this lab can be found on our Library website.]

Here’s a photoset that’ll give you an idea of what this space looks like:

Update: Here’s more information I posted on the Radar,  my library’s technology blog.