I’ve previously mentioned the importance of librarians having the skills to repair their own tech hardware and the Maker’s Bill of Right’s. Now we have the ability to better enact those rights, thanks to iFixit.

iFixit provides free repair manuals for a variety of technological devices, allows people to share their own experiences, provides access to the required tools, and encourages people to recycle.

How did iFixit start?

We started out fixing an old iBook together. There were no instructions on how to do it, so we started the way everyone does: the hard way. We tinkered. We fiddled. We broke some tabs and lost a few screws. But we fixed it!

We attempted to fix some other laptops but had trouble finding parts. So we bought a broken computer on eBay and stole parts from it. Then we decided to start selling the parts ourselves, and iFixit was born.

But that’s not the whole story. All of our customers still had to do things the hard way, just like we did. Easy-to-use repair instructions didn’t exist — yet.

So we wrote some instructions the first chance we got. And we posted them online, for free. For the first time, it was easy for someone with no technical background or experience to take apart a Mac. Our step-by-step instructions were enabling people to repair Macs they wouldn’t have been able to repair on their own.

We thought the instructions would be useful to our customers — and they were. But it turned out that they were useful to a lot of other people as well! We’ve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids. From New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff. They saved money, they kept their Macs out of landfills, and they did it completely by themselves.

So if you ever break the glass panel on that new iPad, now you know that you can fix it yourself.