Normally I'm not paid to read (a common public misconception about librarians) except that I do host a monthly book club at Small Town Library, so I am paid to read one book per month and come up with discussion questions about it. I spent the first 90 minutes or so of my morning doing that, plus 30 minutes or so of catching up on emails, dealing with things that I found in my mailbox, etc.
Then I came down for a quiet shift on the reference desk, where I spent the first hour designing a sign holder in a neat program called Tinkercad. My library recently acquired a 3D printer, and my boss got the idea that we could use it to print replacement sign holders for the end of each row of shelves. We essentially have something like this:
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| Picture source: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-15772/Magnetic-Labels/C-Channel-Magnetic-Warehouse-Card-Holders-2-x-4?pricode=WY675&gadtype=pla&id=S-15772&gclid=CJqrtJmdkNMCFQYPaQodBVQIhA&gclsrc=aw.ds |
I started on Thingiverse, which is a collection of designs for CAD objects, trying to find one that someone else had made and shared which I could use as a starting point (the 3D printing community is very big on sharing their work). Either there wasn't one out there or I didn't know what words to use to find it, so I built one from scratch. After a lot of experimenting, I created this:
Nothing too fancy, but an accomplishment for an amateur like me (it can be stretched vertically to make it the right width if this segment turns out to fit our signs okay). Now to either find time to fire up the printer and test it out, or, even better, lean on a colleague to try it using the set of step-by-step instructions I wrote for printing and find out of they are easy to follow.
I still have an hour left on my shift. Maybe I'll actually get to answer some reference questions today! I do seem to be on a roll.
Very cool. Did you make it? Or get someone to?
ReplyDeleteNot yet. I'll try to update once I have and let you know how it turned out!
DeleteWe keep talking about 3D printers but our tech-phobic staff is kicking and screaming
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear that! They are pretty fun. Kind of pointless if you don't have someone who is willing to invest time to make them actually useful, but fun.
DeleteI want your job! And I want to know if it is cheaper to print these for yourself or to buy them from Uline.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably cheaper to buy them from Uline (if you include the cost of staff time for designing and printing--the material is really cheap), but it's one of those silly situations where we've already spent money on the printer and printer filament (plus I was doing my designing while I was on the ref desk) so printing it ourselves uses money we have already spent or committed to spending, but buying it from Uline would require committing NEW money (and we can't have that!).
DeleteWait, so how will the signs stay in? Won't they slip out?
ReplyDeleteSorry, I should have rotated that 2nd picture 90 degrees before posting it. Imagine it as a small vertical slice of the sign in the first picture. It will work the same way as the sign in the first picture, it's just really narrow right now.
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