Big Huge Labs & Valentine’s Day – Bag of Tricks

Valentine’s Day, LOVE, or as the quote in the movie Princess Bride goes, “tweasure your wuv”. While the Children’s Librarian has probably already accumulated lots of red construction paper and doilies for handmade cards, you may also have some adults or older teens looking to make a card or some sort of holiday specialness.

One of the tools I have in my Bag of Tricks for any holiday or gift moment is Big Huge Labs. There are many utilities available on Big Huge Labs that will let you manipulate digital images and make cool stuff for free. One of my favorites for gift giving is the pocket photo album. In this day and age, our cell phones are our cameras and we store our pictures on them or in cloud storage. This makes an actual printed photo something special. With the Pocket Album, you can add photos, print, and fold to make a special, one of a kind photo album.

Big Huge Labs has several different utilities for photos, including poster makers (nothing says Happy Valentine’s better than a giant photo of your face), jigsaw puzzle makers (love is a puzzle sometimes), a photo cube, calendar, trading cards, and a billboard maker (if you’ve got something important to say, say it BIG).

These can work for many occasions other than Valentine’s Day and as we talked about in other parts of this Bag of Tricks series, having resources at your fingertips and a basic familiarity with up-and-coming technology can come in very handy for better serving patrons and can also give you a bit more confidence. A Bag of Tricks is a virtual toolkit that you create to help familiarize yourself with new technology and websites that you or your patrons might find handy. Here’s an example of a Bag of Tricks that you can use as a jumping-off point for creating your own:  https://padlet.com/kieran/CSLSHAREANDLEARN.

Kieran Hixon