While we wear many hats, building things has always been central to our work at Artefacto. We’ve always described ourselves as both makers and librarians and our consultancy, training and design work fits within these identities.
We are especially excited when we can build and share tools, resources and platforms that deliver a user-friendly experience.
Our consultancy gives us chances to deliver thoughtful and positive user experiences to our clients on platforms such as Omeka and WordPress as well as bespoke software we build ourselves.
Artefacto Labs is another side to our work. This has served as an umbrella for our experimentation, allowing us to build and share tools we use, and to try new approaches and ideas.
Over the years, we’ve worked on a range of projects including the Library Wall project, which enabled us to explore innovative ways to promote and share digital content in physical spaces. Newslet for Libraries is a curated fortnightly publication, while Libraryskills.io is a platform for curated learning pathways of open learning content for library staff. We also published an illustrated Makerspace Starter Guide.
But we have many more ideas that we want to bring to life to help make the work of library and information professionals that little bit easier.
To achieve this, we want to see Artefacto Labs function more as a product studio. Even more so than before.
Our motivation is to create software that is practical, time-saving, and problem-solving. We aim to offer an alternative to po-faced software—software that often lacks the kindness and creativity pivotal to the sector.
We are still excited to work with both new and existing clients on a range of different projects. But we are also hyped to be more intentional and thoughtful about building and sharing software, using the same friendly, iterative and collaborative approaches.
Part of this is sharing what we learn along the way and working transparently. We are excited about this new approach and look forward to continuing our partnerships with you in new and exciting ways.