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Wikipedia Library report

Books & Bytes: A Wikipedia Library Newsletter

By Ocaasi

Books & Bytes
Issue 15, December–January 2016
by The Interior, Ocaasi, UY Scuti, Sadads, and Nikkimaria

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This issue we cover some new sources, including one in Arabic and another in Farsi, a medical resource, and something for all the ships editors out there! We also saw some new branches of the Library come into existence, and are pleased to announce some new coordinators. Finally, we have a summary of the popular #1lib1ref campaign, which ran in January. As always, we have a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

New accounts

We're excited about four new research partnerships including ships, medicine, Arabic, and Farsi sources:

  • Miramar - an index to ships and their histories, covering iron and steel sailing ships, powered merchant ships, and warships, since the early 19th century.
  • Annual Reviews - review articles in the biomedical area, including systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and and overviews of research.
  • Kotobna (Arabic) - multidisciplinary ebooks
  • Noormags (Farsi) - online journals in the social sciences and humanities.

New global branches

We are very excited to announce five more global Wikipedia Library branches:

We'd also like to take this opportunity to highlight the Global Wikipedia Library on Meta. This portal showcases the projects and accomplishments of each of our language branches. New and growing branches also have their own Meta planning pages to coordinate and track their progress, for example: meta:The Wikipedia Library/Bengali. If you're interested in helping to start a branch on another language Wikipedia, please get in touch! wikipedialibrary﹫wikimedia.org

New coordinator and call for volunteers

We want to welcome Harrias as a new account coordinator on our team! He will be managing the Oxford University Press partnership.

We are in particular need of a volunteer for metrics coordination. These volunteers help analyze and report metrics for Wikipedia Library partners and open-access publishers. If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, sign up here.

Spotlight: 1Lib1Ref

Last month, the Wikipedia Library started the #1ref1lib project - an effort to get the librarians of the world to add (at least) a single reference to a Wikipedia article. This initiative was timed to coincide with Wikipedia’s 15 birthday celebrations.

The effort was a success, with many library professionals from around the world participating in many languages. Some edited for the first time, others dusted off old accounts to engage with Wikipedia again. While it is difficult to track all the references added, participants were encouraged to use the hashtag “#1lib1ref” in their edit summaries. This edit summary search tool records all of those edits: 327 users made 1232 changes on 879 pages in 9 different languages (which is not the total, of course - some participants did not use the hashtag). Catalan Wikipedia, led by coordinator Kippelboy, had great success working with Catalan librarians; 350 edits were made by both new accounts (15-20%), and old or reactivated accounts (15-20%), supported by active users (30%) and users supporting groups of librarians (30%).

Screenshot of edit from the #1lib1ref campaign

Some of the stories generated by the campaign are captured in this compilation. Highlights include Phette23 who made a webcast with editing tips, in-person editing events at locations like the West Virginia University, Queensland University of Technology, National Library of Wales, Xavier University Library, State Library of New South Wales, many libraries in Catalonia, Dutch, German, and Danish institutions (just to name a few), and a plethora of baked goods!

The 1lib1ref campaign was able to change some minds and attitudes about Wikipedia in the Library world. Social Media Officer at the Auburn City Library in New South Wales Louise Dolle and her colleagues were initially skeptical about participating. But after some reflection, they concluded that:

this great, collaborative online resource is in need of some help from the very information professionals their website had the potential to threaten. [...] After all, even an organisation as big as Wikipedia asked us for some help which just goes to show; Everyone needs Librarians![1]

We want to thank everyone who took part, either by adding refs themselves, or sharing the campaign through social media. If you have ideas about how this campaign could be improved, let us know on the Meta page! We would love to see it become a regular event.

More about 1Lib1Ref

Bytes in brief

Community roundup

Newsworthy

Worth reading (or watching)

Data dump


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