The Wikipedia Library is entering its next phase of evolution: bigger, more global, and more connected to the community. We are excited to announce that we have 'grown up' from an IEG project into a WMF program (see announcement below). We are also charging ahead with new partnerships. In September we added one of the largest journals in the world--Elsevier--to our partner list. We also are adding one of our biggest donations ever from leading German publisher De Gruyter. As we expand, we need your help and guidance to keep providing the resources you need to grow the quality and quantity of our shared knowledge. Read on for lots more!
We are very excited to announce that the Wikipedia library has been brought in-house as a contract with the Wikimedia Foundation! Previously, the project had been funded with two rounds of Individual Engagement Grants acquired by Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi) (check out our Final Report on Meta). Bringing the Wikipedia Library in-house as a contract allows us to not only expand our impact, but guarantee greater stability in the continuity of the services we are providing. Such consistency and stability allows us to spend more energy developing our ability to support more partners as access donors and create best practices to develop more Wikipedia Library branches in non-English communities.
The funding for the contract goes largely to bringing Jake Orlowitz on full-time to manage the strategy and development of the Wikipedia Library, liaise with the foundation, and develop relationships with both publisher partners and organizations aligned with our mission (such as OCLC). Additionally, the contract brings Alex Stinson (User:Sadads) on at nearly half-time as a project manager who will be responsible for documenting practices and processes on English Wikipedia, outreach with publishers, developing consistent reporting and communications methodologies, and helping coordinate technological and volunteer resources for supporting the library. Other funding from the foundation include support of our outreach efforts at library and publisher conferences, development of our technological capacity, and other business expenses.
Wikimania 2014, held in London this past August, provided an opportunity both to publicize the Library project, and to bring together the many Wikimedian librarians and information specialists from around the world. After a well-attended session with Ocaasi on TWL, over 30 interested Wikimedians gathered for an informal meetup and chat. Languages represented included Spanish, Norwegian, Hebrew, Dutch, German, Russian, and Polish. Attendees had current or previous associations with many prestigious libraries and institutions, including the National Libraries of Scotland, Israel, and Norway, PLOS, Wellcome Trust, British Library, British Film Institute, OCLC, as well as various academic and public library systems. Discussions centered around new tools to bring libraries and Wikipedia closer, and methods to keep collaboration going between the many library fans and professionals within the Wikimedia movement.
De Gruyter: We are always excited when we can get partnerships with larger academic publishers, like De Gruyter, who publishes a wide selection of materials on the sciences and social sciences. Importantly, De Gruyter's large holdings in German as well as other European languages makes this partnership the largest non-English donation of access that we have had thus far. More than being just the largest non-English donation, they offered us a huge number of accounts: we received 1000 accounts, with more available if the community expresses enough interest! We are very excited to see what changes this partnership can facilitate for Wikipedias, especially in non-English communities.
Elsevier: We have had several conversations with Elsevier over the past year, and are very excited to announce our first pilot of content donations from them. We are getting access to 30 accounts of different college library collections from their ScienceDirect holdings: 10 each of their humanities, social sciences and sciences packages. We are very excited to get access to one of the largest international databases of top-quality materials!
Fold3: the success of our Newspapers.com partnership led to a conversation with their sister website Fold3, and we are excited to add 50 accounts from them to our accounts. Focusing almost entirely on research of individuals in the military, Fold3 contains a mix of records marking military service of individuals in the United States, other military records, such as government reports and dispatchs, and other digitized public records that can contextualize those materials. Importantly, Fold3 has an open-access model similar to the one provided by Newspapers.com clippings, allowing users to identify works that they want to cite in Wikipedia, and publish them as a "Spotlight", which create an open-access version of the work with a permalink!
ScotlandsPeople: ScotlandsPeople is a partnership project between the National Records of Scotland and DC Thomson Family History, the same organization that helped us get access to British Newspapers Archive and FindMyPast.com. We are excited to be able to share 50 more accounts with access to biographical research materials!
We are excited to announce that we have three new volunteer account coordinators, trained by our Head of Volunteer Coordination, Nikkimaria.
Gamaliel is a ten-year veteran of Wikipedia and an administrator with thousands of contributions throughout the encyclopedia. Some recent contributions include development of Signpost articles and work with AN/I. He will be helping us coordinate the Fold3 donation.
Philg88 is an eight-year veteran of Wikipedia and an administrator with thousands of edits throughout the encyclopedia. Philg88 is frequently active in the Guild of Copy Editors, recent copyedits include refinements of Grill (Family), and he has also been closing deletion debates. Philg88 will be helping us coordinate the new donation from ScotlandsPeople.
As some of our subscribers are painfully aware, TWL's account management system is showing some strain as we expand our offerings and get increased numbers of accounts from our pilot partners. TWL is starting to brainstorm the desired elements of a platform that will allow editors to apply for multiple databases at a single location, as well as offering a better workflow for our coordinators. We would like TWL readers to join in the conversation, especially those with coding skills and/or experience with administrative software.
TWL is hitting the road to reach out, share progress, and talk about the importance of Wikipedia in the world of reference. Here's where we'll be in the next two months:
MARAC * Wikipedia: Getting Involved and Increasing Discoverability * Baltimore, Maryland * October 18th * 11:30 am to 1:00 pm
NY METRO * Reference and Citation on Wikipedia and the Library * Online webinar * October 27th * 2:00pm to 3:15pm
Charleston Conference * Resource Discovery in the Age of Wikipedia: How Libraries Can Expose their Collections on the World's Most Visited Reference Site * Charleston, South Carolina * November 6th * 2:15pm to 3:00pm
Every year the Wikimedia community in the United States hosts the national Wikipedia Loves Libraries editathons in conjunction with Open Access Week, with events lasting from October through November. The community has found that these events are a great catalyst for creating more cohesion in the American Wikimedia community and for improving relations with libraries. Already, 11 events have been scheduled in the United States, including a whole week of events in Boston focusing on Massachusetts history! We would like to encourage even more of these events! If you want to create an event in your library check out: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Loves Libraries!
Open Access Week is a series of international events coordinated by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition to support the development of Open Access resources and information about Open Access globally. This year the event runs from October 20–26. This is the seventh year for this week of events, with several hundred events, from lectures and workshops to conferences, already listed at the events page. We are excited to see so much activity: the more open access sources available, the better for the Wikimedia community's researchers and readers. Learn more at http://www.openaccessweek.org/ !
The Wikipedia Library is continuing to build opportunities for Wikimedia editors to access reliable sources, by negotiating with publishers to get Wikipedians free access accounts to their digital databases. We like to see Wikipedians being able to access resources that they could previously only get through academic libraries or costly out-of-pocket subscriptions. We are very excited by the growing number of interested partners and the strength of our volunteers in helping distribute those accounts and who are also using that momentum to scale the project to include more publishers and more editors in more languages.
Our latest partnerships kicked off in August when we opened up several more access collaborations. New to the program is Newspapers.com which donated 100 full accounts and offers a fine across-the-Atlantic complement to the July British Newspaper Archive donation (see our prior coverage ). Volunteers who gain access to newspapers are very keen to use them to develop a whole range of different historical topics both well-documented in contemporary history texts and those under-represented in scholarship. To get a sense of just how useful and flexible historical newspapers can be for our users, we asked User:We hope to share how his access to Newspapers.com helps him on Wikipedia.
Traveling through history
Since I've always been interested in the past and what really happened in it, I’ve tended to draw quite a bit from newspapers. For me, accessing older newspapers is like traveling back in time for facts which may have been lost on later publications.
I've done quite a bit of work on Wikipedia around articles, such as US TV personalities Red Skelton and Perry Como, where my main sources were older newspaper stories. These sources allow me to "get closer" to when they were happening and allows us to present somewhat different information on Wikipedia than may be found in books on the given subject. When working on Red Skelton, I found that two book sources listed his son's birthdate incorrectly. A newspaper article on the boy's death said he was ten days shy of his tenth birthday; checking California vital records showed that the newspaper story had his birthday correct.
Wikipedia is a wonderful environment for capturing this information and correcting it for public record: almost everyone visits Wikipedia for research and providing both the older sources alongside new sources ensures that future researchers can discover the same information I did.
Exploring an old locomotive
The postcard from the Library of Congress uploaded by We Hope and setting him off to develop the William Crooks article
Recently, I became interested in the locomotive William Crooks when I discovered the engine while uploading public domain railroad photos and postcards to Wikimedia Commons. The old engine has an interesting history: it was built in 1861, almost destroyed by a fire in 1868 and was saved from the scrapyard by the Great Northern Railway’s president, James J. Hill, around the turn of the century.
When researching the Wikipedia article, a copy of an old railroad brochure about the train helped fill in some information, as well as providing photos of the William Crooks in various places after it was officially retired. The brochure helped document its many tours made under its own power across the country, such as the 1927 Fair of the Iron Horse in Baltimore and the 1939 World's Fair, but there still was not enough information to expand on the article.
That changed with access to the older newspapers available on Newspapers.com. I have been able to add much more specific information. For example, I found an article with an interview of Albion Smith, who restored the locomotive after the 1868 fire and was one of its early engineers. Mr. Smith was instrumental in saving the old engine from the scrapyard by speaking to James J. Hill about the situation. Another interview in the article was with John J. Maher, who started as a fireman on the William Crooks. Mr. Maher helped highlight the earlier wood-burning days of the locomotive. These interviews allowed me to better document the trains transformation from wood-burner to a coal-burner. I hope to further expand the article with many of my other Newspapers.com clippings.
More than just research
Having Newspapers.com access has also made it possible to verify the copyright status of comic strip images uploaded by various users over the years. Our community on Wikipedia and sister sites like the free media repository Wikimedia Commons, want to ensure every piece of material is free from non-free copyright claims when we publish it so it can be easily reused by our readership. We carefully screen images uploaded by thousands of contributors to make sure the copyright statements are accurate. Sometimes older images are uploaded to Wikipedia under a public domain claim due to age, but were not in fact public domain, or couldn’t be easily checked for their copyright status because they had been uploaded without contextual information like dates of first publication. Having access to a larger collection of newspapers provides us the needed information so that I can double-check the original publication status of the comics, and allows me to send those images to Wikimedia Commons to be used and enjoyed by more people.
An example of one of the comics that We hope was able to verify the license of via a clipping.
In other contexts, I am using Newspapers.com to explore topics such biographies of public figures like Ruth Etting, the star of the Amos 'n' Andy television series Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and the bandleader and composer Paul Weston. Being able to capture all of my research with clippings allows me to share them with collaborators on those articles. For example, I recently worked with fellow Wikipedian User:This is Paul to explore the life and history of murder victim Joan Robinson Hill, who was discussed in the book Blood and Money. We were really successful in expanding the article using Newspapers.com information to compile what happened after the book was published. We were also able to add some previously “lost” information to the Featured Article Jo Stafford. An interview I discovered with Jo Stafford gave her first-hand account of how her hit record "Tim-tay-shun" was recorded with Red Ingle and her use of the name Cinderella G. Stump on the label.
Having access to so many sources means a lot of clippings on any given subject. I find that when I start searching on a subject, I start clipping and clipping and clipping, because there are just so many good sources that need to be added to the Wikipedia article! This partnership has helped make public a great deal of information about many, many different subjects and I hope we will be able to continue making these discoveries through the access to older newspapers.
Alex Stinson (User:Sadads), Project Manager, The Wikipedia Library
The Wikipedia Library
