This week’s featured Fab Lab is the Fayetteville Free Library in upstate New York, which recently received $250,000 from the New York State Library Construction Grant to build out its facility. Senator Dave Valesky announced the funding at the library. Syracuse.com covered this announcement:

The lab and center will provide the community with access to technologies that are not currently available to the general public, and also will provide an “incubator” for individuals and small businesses.

Entrepreneurs will be able to work together, find resources to help develop ideas and get professional assistance.

A Fab Lab is a collection of machines linked by software that allows users to make things. In Fayetteville’s Fab Lab, it means using something called a Makerbot, or 3D printer that fits on a desktop.

Fayetteville Free Library’s website describes the motivation of the center:

The Fayetteville Free Library is excited to announce the addition of a new public service—the FFL Fab Lab. What exactly is a fab lab? According to Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and author of Fab: the Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, a fab lab is “a collection of commercially available machines and parts linked by software and processes developed formaking things (Gershenfeld, 12).” At the foundation of the FFL’s Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, made available to the library through a generous donation from Express Computer Services.

Via Syracuse.com.