16th Century Technology meets 21st Century Pedagogy: Building a Book Arts Lab establishes the library as an active partner in Experiential Learning

At Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, a new government-funding model requires that all students have at least one experiential learning experience during their degree. This provided an opportunity for the library to take a more central role in teaching and learning by collaborating with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to develop an active learning classroom in the library in the form of a Book Arts Laboratory. A Book Arts Lab is a unique, well-equipped studio for learning typography, letterpress printing, bookbinding, and decorated papers techniques. The lab will support credit based classes and extracurricular workshops in English and History as well as community events. Printing is a traditional proficiency that is not an emerging technology (those coming into development over the next 5 years) but is more accurately described as a converging technology, making the old new again. This paper will explore the planning that has gone into the development of the Book Arts Laboratory, both the how and the why. The library, will balance teaching and learning in the newly constructed space that will include a variety of printing presses to facilitate course content including medieval to modern, papermaking and marbling, bookbinding, and the history of the book. The planning of a lab required lengthy research. For the past 2 years, working with faculty and a master printer, the library has systematically developed a successful proposal for this build by engaging with stakeholders across campus and outside the library. The proposal provided an experiential learning opportunity for students in an Industrial Design course, who studied the lab. The students met with focus groups that included community experts, faculty, university members and upper administration they presented their findings and ideas as their final project. This student research subsequently informed the library’s planning, and the plan for the lab. The Book Arts Lab will bring together community members, faculty, and librarians to provide and develop expertise and course content and embeds the library in the University’s expanding experiential learning activities.