Creating a Media Lab in Your Library from Scratch: Vision, Advocacy, and Outreach

How to get buy-in for making a creative technology space in your library

Posted on November 5, 2025 in Blog Posts

Media labs and makerspaces are crucial locations where libraries and technology intersect, enabling students to develop their research skills and express their creativity. In the past, we have covered how makerspaces can promote student innovation, but left unaddressed was a fundamental question for many libraries: How can we obtain the buy-in to create a makerspace, media lab, or other creative technology space in our library? A new book from ALA Editions, A Complete Guide to Creative Technology Spaces in Academic Libraries: Media Labs, Makerspaces, and More, guides readers through the full process of developing this space for your library, from advocacy to execution and policy.

Reprinted below with the publisher’s permission is the second chapter from this volume. The initial steps for starting a creative space involve developing a sense of the resources already available in the library and on campus and then identifying who your potential patrons may be. In this chapter, the authors outline how to communicate to others what you want your creative technology space to be.

📕 Learn more about A Complete Guide to Creative Technology Spaces in Academic Libraries: Media Labs, Makerspaces, and More.

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Vision, Advocacy, and Outreach

by Emily Thompson, Vanessa Rodriguez, Eric Johnson, Kelsey Sheaffer, and Oscar K. Keyes

Once you have developed a sense of the creative technology resources already available in your library and on campus, and who your potential patrons may be, you are ready to develop those ideas into a plan. This chapter will explore developing a vision for your space, how to make your case for a creative technology service point, and how to use outreach to bring users into your space.

Developing a Vision                                              

At some point, you will need to take all of your hopes, dreams, sketches, and spreadsheets and turn them into something coherent that tells the story of what you want to build. This can be extremely daunting, as you don’t know all the details yet. While the rest of the chapters in this book will fill out the details of how these spaces are actually built and run, you likely won’t need each of those line items for an initial push to get excitement and funding for your space.

One-Pager

One early focus should be drafting an initial project narrative. For a preliminary push, there is a lot of value in a one-page document that offers a high-level overview of the idea, which could include these components:

• Project summary: This is a sentence or two offering a big-picture summary of the project. See the following “Elevator Pitch” section for more ideas.
  
  
• Background research: Here’s where you include a review of the existing resources and gaps, as identified by your work in chapter 1.
  
  
• Space footprint and resources: There is more on this in part 2 of this book, but if you can provide mock-ups of the space you want to build, this will help give people a visual anchor point.
  
  
• Funding: Here’s where you detail your existing funding sources and what you need. (There is more on this in chapter 3, “Funding and Budget.”)
  
  
• Service model and philosophy: This includes your anticipated user groups and your goal numbers.
  
  
• Timeline: detail the timeline for the project.

Your department head and/or library director will eventually need a much more in-depth report on the future space, including a full account of service models and funding structures, but there is great value in a simple one-pager that can be disseminated and referenced by a range of stakeholders.

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Elevator Pitch

One of the things you will find yourself doing when talking about the potential of a creative lab is repeating a similar set of summary points: in other words, sharing with others the “elevator pitch” for your new center. Your elevator pitch is your efficient and consistent response to the question, “So, what is this space all about?”

It helps if you have thought through your response to this question ahead of time, so that you can touch on the highlights quickly and directly. Your pitch should quickly sum up three things: (1) what problems or opportunities you aim to address with your space (the purpose); (2) how you will do so (the mission); and (3) what the philosophy is that guides your space (the vision).

An example of an elevator pitch might be: “We noticed that students and faculty needed access to cameras and recording equipment, but they were not sure who to ask or where to go. A circulating collection at the library would be appreciated and would encourage even more creativity across campus.”

Another example might be: “Only music students have access to the recording booths on campus. If we had a recording space in the library, then non-music students who want to record audio for their classes and personal projects would have a place as well.”

Your elevator pitch will evolve over time as the spaces and services evolve. At first you might have pitched what the idea of the lab could do. Once the lab is open, your pitch will change into an explanatory statement that quickly summarizes what your space is and does. And as time goes on, your pitch will change further as the lab grows or as different user groups come in with different projects. New initiatives might offer entirely new things to pitch. Early on, you might emphasize campus access to technologies, whereas later, with more course-integrated projects, the emphasis might shift a bit to include mention of working closely with faculty.

Advocating Up

Once you have a documented vision, based on your assessments and research, it’s time for an advocacy campaign. You’ll need to get buy-in from as many power-figures as possible: the head of your department, the director of the library, campus administrators, and so on. These people will be the ones to supply you with funding (for more, see chapter 3) and space (for more, see chapter 5), in addition to other connections and resources. You’ll need administrators to grasp your vision from the start, and you’ll also need to sustain their enthusiasm.

Part of advocacy is knowing how to talk to the administrators in contexts that they understand and value. You’ll want to take your pitch (outlined earlier) and make it explicitly clear how that pitch fits into institutional priorities (both the library and the wider campus) and how it compares with peer institutions.

Institutional Priorities

Institutional ideas and goals can usually be found on your own institution’s website. All you have to do is figure out how your space supports what they already want to accomplish.

One useful place to look is your university’s strategic plan. This is essentially a free look at what is currently trendy in higher education, and you can inevitably find something that a creative space would support. The strategic plan is a literal list of goals that you can offer to help accomplish. Some examples that we often see in strategic plans that are relevant to creative technology spaces are the following ones:

• High-impact practices: These assignments are designed to encourage students to engage more deeply with the course material. They aim to reach the top section of Bloom’s taxonomy, which is the “Create” portion. Well-designed podcasts, documentaries, photo essays, and similar projects can have a high impact on student learning.
  
  
• Experiential learning: These assignments usually involve going out and working with community groups in order to gather new data and make connections. Incorporating interviews, infographics, and other creative projects can give shape to these experiences, and a space that offers help with this would be advantageous.
  
  
• Recruiting and/or retention: With an infamous “enrollment cliff ” looming, everyone at a university needs to find ways to attract new students and keep them through graduation. Creative spaces are, by their very nature, “sticky.” We offer myriad high-quality equipment and software that is only available if you are a student, and that fact can help pull through some of those students who are waffling in their junior year.
  
  
• Innovation: This goes hand-in-hand with any kind of rapid prototyping and engineering software. The support offered for creative projects can help innovation come from anywhere.
  
  
• Interdisciplinarity: If you have a cross-listed course, it tends to lend itself to some sort of creative project as part of a midterm. Because we’re open to all and because users tend to gravitate together over shared interests in our equipment, we are a great illustration of interdisciplinarity in action.
  
  
• Student success: This is the broad idea focusing on an institution’s ability to provide an environment that supports students in achieving their academic, personal, and professional goals. Creative technology spaces can promote all three.

You should also check your institution’s general education requirements. At the base of a university curriculum, every student takes certain courses as part of their general education requirements. There should be a website at your institution that explains the philosophy behind the categories and the skills the students are supposed to acquire through those classes. Look for phrases like “problem-solving,” “critical thinking,” and whether “communication” includes audiovisual skills in addition to writing. Even if the descriptions do not include audiovisual or multimedia language, you can still have your own ideas ready about how incorporating these types of assignments can help students acquire and hone the aforementioned skills. Creative projects can help build these skills, and incorporating the right project can make students more engaged in their classes. Having these types of ideas ready, and perhaps even examples of how they have been incorporated into the curricula at other schools (if you are starting a new lab from scratch), can be pitched not only to your own administration, but also to the liaison librarians at your library. They can be helpful advocates of the services you provide.

Looking to Other Institutions

Your institution likely also has a set of “aspirational peers,” which you should be able to find listed on an institutional website or by asking the administration. These are the schools your university uses as examples for setting its own goals and policies. Check the websites of the aspirational peers to find out whether they already have creative spaces in their libraries. If the peer institutions have a creative lab, this will be a great point in your favor when you are pitching your own lab. Look for creative labs not just in the library, but in any part of the peer institution. Most schools will have a creative studio or some other makerspace-type lab somewhere on their campus, even if it’s not in the library. The key here is availability. If their lab is not in the library, is it still available to all students or only those in that department? If a peer institution only has labs where most students are not allowed, having a lab that is accessible to all students is a good way to show the unique value of putting such a space in the library.

What are the cool stories coming out of your peers’ spaces? Take a look at their campus marketing materials, such as articles in their online magazine or on the library’s social media. You may have to read between the lines and notice what they might not be saying. If the articles, websites, and social

media do not answer your questions about how the creative space is actually operating, you might have to reach out and talk with the lab’s staff directly. Sometimes the marketing folks will focus on the students, rather than the nuts and bolts of how the project was accomplished.4

Most importantly, by looking at the educational trends your administration is already excited about, you can offer them a place that will provide the stories they need. These stories can garner outside press and impress alumni donors. If the creative space looks good, the whole university looks good. You can use your institution’s big ideas to put together a narrative of how your space will make the university better. Since the plan is to have a space for all, you can dream big. This is a way to hit many service points with one resource, if they will only support it.

Outreach                                                    

Outreach is an essential component of front-end library work, but it has no single definition within the library community. In general, when we talk about outreach with regard to creative technology spaces in academic libraries, we are referring to our methods for spreading awareness of our services and resources to the campus community. Outreach looks different when you’re first starting a space—and you need to grow a user base—than when it’s more established. You might reach a point where you no longer need to do proactive outreach, and that is a success in and of itself. It also goes without saying that every institution will require different approaches. However, we have identified some common themes across creative technology outreach.

Supporting creative technologies across the university can be tricky: unlike subject librarians, we functional librarians do not have a specific academic department to connect to. With that in mind, a rule of thumb is to try to say yes to any opportunities, especially when you’re first starting out. This might mean a class in a new discipline, or tabling at an event you’ve never heard of, or partnering with a subject librarian. Of course, manage your own bandwidth, and acknowledge that there are essential tasks other than outreach that you need to reserve your time and energy for. But a friendly face and an agreement to pitch in can often mean invitations to future events. Beyond saying yes, try to be proactive. Find opportunities to get the word out to all of your possible user groups. Keep trying to meet new people.

Important components of outreach include marketing and design. Maintaining excellent, well-designed marketing materials, including short and long handouts and business cards, will help spread the word even when you’re not there in person. Offer these materials to other librarians and instructors who will bring them to their events and classes. But whenever possible, we recommend trying to attend events yourself. Shy students might feel more comfortable entering a creative technology space when they know who they will encounter, rather than facing the vast unknown.

Beyond these overarching outreach themes, the separate activities of curricular and co-curricular events, and individual student support, have their own considerations.

Curricular Outreach

Curricular integration is crucial to the initial and ongoing success of your creative technology space. For many institutional administrators, involvement in credit-bearing courses is the central motivator of a university resource, and for that reason, you’ll need to include into any advocacy efforts your plans for embedding in courses and your track record with this as the space matures. Aside from satisfying the administration, there are numerous other benefits to working with faculty and courses. With each class you work with, you grow your user base dramatically: with each such class, 10 to 30 (or even up to 100) students are immediately aware of your creative technology space and resources and can potentially become longtime users, or can at least share the word about your services with their friends. Additionally, you get access to students to (hopefully) stimulate their interest and enthusiasm in some aspect of creative technologies.

The key to integrating into courses is finding the faculty members who run those courses. Universities generally emphasize teaching with innovative pedagogical methods, and this can include creative technology projects. According to the Ithaka S+R 2024 Instructor Survey, 49 percent of social science instructors and 47 percent of humanities instructors assign students to create digital media projects. Additionally, 62 percent of faculty aged 22–34 would like to adopt new pedagogies or instructional approaches that take advantage of technology. Your job is to reach those faculty and find out if they need support or other resources. However, especially when you are starting out and just building support for your space, it can be hard to reach the right

faculty members and figure out a plan for integrating your resources into their courses. Think about outreach to faculty in terms of reaching both individual faculty members and groups of faculty.

When reaching individual faculty members, you’ll need to use a combination of proactive and reactive approaches. Proactive approaches involve seeking out faculty who would be potentially interested in having creative technology elements in their courses and might need some support. Ask your liaison librarian colleagues if there are faculty in their areas who are working with creative technology resources. While the content of a creative technology instruction session is quite different from a traditional library information literacy session, these instructional programs likely have many overlaps with each other, and your librarian colleagues are a great resource and sounding board. Inviting faculty members to have coffee and talk about their own needs and what gaps they perceive can go a long way toward establishing a strong relationship with them. You might be surprised by how receptive people are to cold emails, or even better, emails connecting two people from a trusted source like another librarian.

You might also look at the academic programs that are likely to take advantage of the resources you now offer, and then reach out to the department heads and coordinators. You should do this regardless of whether they have access to their own labs or equipment. Departments that are often involved with creative technology spaces include Communications, Art (especially the Foundations coordinator), Interior Design, Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, English (particularly rhetoric, as they also study multimodal communication), Film, and Music, though this list is not exhaustive.

Reactive approaches are easier: hopefully, you’ll be contacted by an instructor who wants to coordinate a class or resource visit. We have seen huge improvements in outcomes if you are able to meet with the faculty member in advance of the class session. Meeting them gives you a chance to agree on learning outcomes, learn more about and potentially help sculpt the project assignment, and could lead to connections with other faculty.

You could also consider outreach to various faculty groups. Especially at the beginning of the semester, you might be able to secure an invitation to speak about your space and resources at a department or college meeting. Consider the gathering points for faculty, including your institution’s Teaching and Learning Center, and orientations for new faculty. You likely will be asked to

serve on various institutional committees, which can be a great opportunity to highlight your creative technology space. In general, remember to say yes—as much as your bandwidth allows.

Co-curricular Outreach

Co-curricular outreach efforts include any workshops or events that are not linked to a specific class or course. This encompasses events that your space runs and those that you work on with campus or community partners. These events are great ways to bring new users into your space who might not otherwise come into contact with your resources. They are also a way for you to brand your space on a larger scale: you can choose workshops and events that are fun and goofy, or particularly mechanical, and so on. (Workshops are covered more broadly in chapter 11, “Instruction.”)

You should also consider co-curricular events that might not necessarily be oriented around learning new skills. These fun events might still have learning objectives, but the focus is on getting new people into the space and feeling comfortable. Examples include technology petting zoos, holiday gatherings, supporting school events, and student exhibitions.

A technology petting zoo is a common event framed around circulating equipment. Bring out as much of your collection as possible and let patrons play around with it while asking questions. This has the double opportunity of showcasing the items that your lab has, while also demystifying the equipment for participants. They can explore with someone to guide them and possibly brainstorm ideas. Student exhibitions showcasing the work of students is a great way to decorate your space while boosting the visibility of the work that is possible with your services. You can also host exhibition opening events and invite the entire community. The student artist gets something great to add to their artistic résumé, and the lab and the library get another way to promote themselves. You could also display work from courses that had especially good project outcomes.

You might also coordinate with other groups on campus, or loop into existing campus events. School events such as sports games, homecoming, and new student orientation are great opportunities to leverage for co-curricular events. If your library is involved in new student orientation or other such events where the library has a booth to promote its services, ask if you can

also be on hand or have flyers on hand. If you can set up your own booth, bring items that will make your booth stand out, such as a button-maker, a green-screen photo booth, or small 3D prints to give away. You could also have an event to make posters for a football game or help make floats for homecoming. Additionally, consider whether there are any student clubs that want to collaborate or host an event in your space. Undergraduate student groups like a fashion club or theater costume makers might have ideas; or you can consider training opportunities for graduate students.

When it comes to the work of getting people to your events, lean into the existing marketing structures in your library and institution. Advertising and marketing for these events can consume a huge amount of time and labor, so try to identify the most effective methods that are used at your institution. Each institution varies widely in terms of how to reach different user groups, but never underestimate the power of a simple paper poster. You could also look for existing campus email lists and university calendars, and of course, there is always word of mouth. Many spaces and departments have their own email list to distribute information. Consider creating an email list for your technology space to keep users updated on your space’s future events and services. Use outreach events to get users to sign up for the email list.

The Enthusiast, the Curious, and the Skeptic

Finally, consider how you will welcome individual students, outside of curricular or co-curricular events, into your space. There are a few common groupings that we often see among users of creative technology spaces, including the enthusiasts, the curious, and the skeptics.

The enthusiasts are the users who will actively seek out your space and its resources. Often, they are already knowledgeable about at least one type of technology and are interested in advancing that knowledge. If only all students had the same drive! This group might only need support in the form of mirrored enthusiasm or help in scaffolding their projects. They are champions of the space and can make great student staff members. However, this is often a relatively small group.

The curious users might be generally receptive to the creative technology space but lack enthusiasm or the drive to start. Often, they stumble in with friends or perhaps have an existing interest in some element of creativity. You might also be able to reach this group at outreach events across the university, like orientation or campus clubs. This group often does well when they are provided with examples of the types of things that might be created in the space.

Any creative technology space also has its skeptics. These users might be required to complete a digital media project in a field in which that feels unfamiliar. Some of these users just need patience and support to gain confidence in the technology. And others will continue to resist the whole way and never become regular users of the space, but that is okay. There will always be a population that doesn’t “get it.” Maybe they will in the future.

The Work Never Stops                                                   

As is the case for any new initiative in an academic library, part of the initial process will always involve gaining the support of the institutional administration. A creative technology space is never truly finished, and like any other library service, you will always need to be able to talk about the value it brings to your campus community. This undertaking can feel like a daunting task. Fortunately, with strong networking, you will have colleagues from across campus to advocate on your behalf. Keeping track of all the good work you have accomplished will help as well. Before you know it, your space will have become enough of a campus institution that dismantling it will arouse howls of protest from across campus.

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📕 Learn more about A Complete Guide to Creative Technology Spaces in Academic Libraries: Media Labs, Makerspaces, and More.

This excerpt from “A Complete Guide to Creative Technology Spaces in Academic Libraries: Media Labs, Makerspaces, and More” used with permission from the American Library Association.

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