About Us

While designed for school librarians, this project also has the potential to engage the larger library, museum, and education communities, including (1) youth services public librarians who want to create or enhance existing innovation spaces for young innovators within their libraries, (2) classroom teachers (particularly in STEM subjects) and home schooling parents who wish to integrate this content into the curriculum, (3) parents who wish to use them to stimulate curiosity and inspire innovation behaviors in their children, (4) innovation organizations (e.g., state invention conventions) for use with their thousands of young members nationwide, (5) museum instructors and educational directors wishing to design innovation programs for young children, and (6) potential young innovators who find these resources inspirational for stimulating their innovative ideas and insights into the innovation process. Success potential for this project is very high because it (1) brings together a strong project team , (2) will be hosted on a large-scale, freely-accessible, highly-used resource, S.O.S. for Information Literacy and (2) has strong dissemination and sustainability plans.

This project will create a broad network of innovative and freely available resources, for use by school librarians who want to transform their libraries into innovation spaces, create innovation-related programs and activities that stimulate curiosity and inquiry, and inspire and support students' innovative activities. The project complements the current makerspaces movement by bringing together an impressive team of University faculty who have directed dozens of innovative, funded projects, mentoring and innovation experts, school librarians, web designers, and award-winning young innovators to create a unique network of teaching/learning resources, including a collection of video interviews with young innovators (modeled after the highly successful Prendismo collection of adult innovator interview video clips), intended to inform and inspire young students to think and use their inquiry skills creatively to put their innovation ideas into action.

Our project team consists of:

• Dr. Ruth V. Small, Director
• Dr. Marilyn P. Arnone, Co-Director
• Thomas Hardy, Web Development
• Kristin Jeter, Research Assistant