We’re super excited to be part of the Institute of Imagination Mini Maker Faire at OxoTowerWharf on the 11 and 12th of June. We’ll be there with the Makercart, a mobile pop-up makerspace for schools and libraries with a 3d printer, digital cutter, electronics, micro-controllers and robotics. We’ll also be hosting a Digital Making Workshop […]
An introduction to Making Library Makers
An intro Making Library Makers; An Intro was the first event for library makers run jointly by Artefacto and the Makercart Project. The event was created for staff in libraries who were interested in running maker events or otherwise learning more about the maker movement and makerspaces. It was held at Makerversity, a co-working, membership-based […]
“Community Libraries”: a Dutch Model
Much has been written about the ongoing shift to volunteer-led provision for public libraries in England – and from all manner of mouthpieces. Since the rise of this phenomenon, in the cold light of day of austerity politics, various governmental and organisational reports (such as Arts Council England and the Local Government Association and Locality), […]
Research adventures chapter 1
Recently, Artefacto have been developing a series of short, interactive resources aimed at helping people learn basic research skills. This is part of a bigger project to develop a series of collaborative, active-learning resources that can be used by both staff and students to explore new ways of teaching information and digital literacy and other […]
RSS is not dead, but Yahoo Pipes is: an overview of possible alternatives
Yahoo have recently announced they are sunsetting Yahoo Pipes, a sad but not entirely unexpected decision. One of the many awesome abilities of Pipes was that you could easily combine and manipulate multiple RSS feeds. This was great for creating a curated, multi-source RSS feed around a particular topic. What tool available still does this? […]
Locating the library at Mozfest 2014
The annual Mozilla conference (aka Mozfest) covers a wide range of topics and many that are very relevant to information professionals, including many on the ‘Build and Teach the Web’ track and others from across the other 11 tracks that formed the 3-day event. The Librarian-run courses tended to be on the Science Track because.. […]
North London’s first outdoor digital bookshelf
Ribbon Factory Library Wall For the last month here at Artefacto we’ve been working on a project very close to our own hearts and we’re really excited that launch day has arrived! The original idea for the project came from Sara reading about the Bucharest metro “library“, sponsored by Vodaphone, which enabled commuters to […]
Meaningful metrics and visualisation for libraries – a workshop overview from Pi and Mash
Our recent workshop at the Pi and Mash unconference, held at Senate House Library in August, came about because we wanted to start a discussion about how we might make the most of user and collection data to help deliver library services. How can we ensure that we’re making data-driven decisions about services and not […]
Newslet for libraries – beta launch
We’ve just launched a newsletter for people working in the library and information sector. Newslet for libraries is designed to be a quick and easy way to stay up-to-date with the areas that matter most to you. We created this as we found ourselves constantly sharing interesting links, tutorials and resources via email, Twitter and […]
The Metadata Quest (part 1)
Recently, we’ve been involved in an exciting new project, which comes out of some exploratory work we produced during the British Library Labs May 2013 hack event as part of their inaugural 2013 digital collections competition. Here at artefacto, we were particularly excited when BL Labs launched, in March last year, not least because we’d been following the pioneering digital […]