Over this past, unprecedented year, more than ever the library and information community has stepped up to support patrons and each other, to ensure services are maintained for some of the most vulnerable in society. Amid the chaos and uncertainty they have been at the forefront of the fight against misinformation – and they’ve also […]
Cultural institutions are realising the value of working with makers, artists, writers and technologists to bring new perspectives and to forge connections with the community in a variety of new and creative ways. In this post we’re taking a look at the shorter-term, dynamic residencies that bring in a variety of creative practitioners, rather than […]
Over the last few months, we’ve been working with CILIP Cymru Wales on For the Record, a participatory archive of the experiences of library workers in Wales during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Inspired by the ‘citizen journalist’ approach of the Mass Observation Project and its voluntary, qualitative social research on everyday life, For the Record […]
A couple of years ago we bought a Prusa 3D printer for our Artefacto labs. Artefacto Labs is the umbrella under which our more experimental work falls, for prototyping and testing new technologies and new ideas. We intentionally bought the printer as a kit because we were interested in learning more about the mechanics and […]
As libraries and museums (rightfully) close in order to keep people safe during the global pandemic, attention has shifted to how we can best support our communities and users solely online. New digital services are emerging, and existing digital service touchpoints are being brought to the fore. What does this mean for digital literacy support […]
As a remote-first company, we love tools that let us collaborate in different, creative ways. We also find, for the sake of productivity, meetings are best avoided unless there’s a strong and clear reason for them. We wanted to share some tools that can be useful for different types of collaboration – for when the […]
Current awareness and removing barriers to keep up with your sector An important part of CPD is making sure your knowledge stays relevant and up to date. With so much information available (and so little time) this can be difficult to stay on top of. It can be useful to familiarize yourself with some tools […]
The Data Detective Agency is an Artefacto Labs project that we’ve been working on since sometime late last year. It’s taken a bit of time as we tried different approaches and ironed out some unnecessary complexity. It’s an experiment in delivering Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for library staff in new and interesting ways. It’s also […]
It’s always interesting (and sometimes a little bit surprising) to see what links are most popular with the library and information network we share our newsletter with. It also seems like a good way to summarise the year in libraries and start looking forward to what’s to come for 2020. So let’s look back at […]
We interact with a lot of different software every day. Some of it is pretty clunky (hi collection management software!), some of it quite specialised and for staff eyes only. But more and more of our software choices impact our users too. There’s a lot of software out there to make our lives a bit […]