Welcome to the March and April edition of The Wikipedia Library's Books & Bytes. The Library has much to announce, including new global branches, an exciting batch of diverse new partnerships, an outstanding group of volunteer coordinators, and news from a wide range of conferences. For this edition's Spotlight, we have a special guest section from the creators of the Remixing Archival Metadata Project (RAMP) from University of Miami Libraries!
We're very pleased to announce the following new partnerships:
The digital Loeb Classical Library is a project of Harvard University Press to make Classical Greek and Latin literature accessible. There are 25 one-year accounts available to Wikipedians.
RIPM provides access to the largest online collection of rare music periodicals published between 1760 and 1966. RIPM is offering 20 free accounts to their index, full-text periodical archive, and e-library of music periodicals to help write Wikipedia content related to music.
Sage Publications is offering access to two statistics resources covering social science data for geographies within the United States and topics such as healthcare, crime, education, employment, religion, and government finances, as well as data visualizations and research tools related to US Congress, the US Supreme Court, and the US Presidency. There are 10 one-year accounts available.
MIT Press Journals is a scholarly publisher of over 30 journals in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. This partnership has up to 200 one-year accounts available.
HeinOnline is an extensive legal research database with over 2000 fully searchable law-related journals as well as resources related to English, Scottish, American and international legal history. Up to 25 accounts will be available.
Many other partnerships still have accounts available. You can see a tagged list of them at our Journals page.
Samwalton9 will be helping to coordinate metrics for TWL. He writes "[I] have found access to Highbeam and Newspapers.com incredibly useful. Now I'd love to help other editors use these wonderful sources of information too".
ThaddeusB will be working with SAGE and MIT Press Journals. He is an experienced Wikipedian with "a passion for 'saving' content and helping new users".
RHM22 is an experienced Wikipedian with an interest in numismatics. His goal "is to help make material that was once available only in expensive reference books available to everyone".
Penny Richards is the new coordinator for Women Writers Online as well as Loeb. She writes: "I love edit-a-thons; seeing Wikipedians teaching each other how to make content better is a joy. Helping connect people to excellent online resources seems like another way to enjoy that edit-a-thon vibe".
We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or help with other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, signup here.
GLAM-Wiki – Alex attended GLAM-Wiki 2015 in The Hague, Netherlands! It was a great conference, allowing for plenty of networking within the outreach elements of the Wikimedia community. He came back with several contacts that will help us grow both existing branches of the Wikipedia Library and new branches in several languages (see our Global updates). For more reflection on his experience, see his blog here (we also recommend User:OR drohowa's blog post here). Having a window into global communities' GLAM-Wiki strategies, concerns, and needs helps us better discover GLAM-Wiki opportunities with our potential Wikipedia Library partners.
DPLAFest – Jake and Alex attended DPLAFest 2015, the annual conference for the Digital Public Library of America, in Indianapolis and presented about The Wikipedia Library and best practices for Source Discovery Anyone Can Edit. The event was a very valuable networking event for both identifying key actors in the research libraries community to collaborate with on programs,like Visiting Scholars, while also discovering potential partnership opportunities with organizations like DPLA.
Project MUSE publishers conference – Jake presented a keynote at Project Muse's annual conference on April 27 talking about the Wikipedia Library, and the place of academic publishing in the Wikipedia community. Jake's slides can be found here and there are some great reflections on Twitter.
American Library Association Annual – We are preparing to have a booth at ALA in San Francisco, host an editathon and give a talk. The close proximity to the WMF office is a positive, as is the opportunity for outreach across a wide range of interested parties: publishers, university libraries, professional organizations, and other movers and shakers in the larger conversation about research access.
Jake and Alex compiled experiences from Wikipedia Visiting Scholars in a blog post. If you have an affiliation or contact with an academic or research library that may be interested, be sure to get in touch with TWL coordinators for support and materials for reaching out to librarians and administration.
Citoid is a new backend tool to help "auto-fill" reference templates on Wikipedia, using URLs, DOIs, and eventually ISBNs. Currently, the tool is enabled in VisualEditor. The development team has asked experienced editors to help identify web resources that aren't working, so that they can create "translator" patches to improve the results. TWL encourages readers to test their favourite resources at the testing page.
Wikidata has the potential to be a metadata backbone for Wikipedia references. According to WikiProject Source Metadata, these are areas to work on:
to define a set of properties that can be used by citations, infoboxes, and Wikisource.
to map and import all relevant metadata that currently is spread across Commons, Wikipedia, and Wikisource.
to establish methods to interact with this metadata from different projects.
to create a large open bibliographic database within Wikidata.
to reveal, build, and maintain community stakeholdership for the inclusion and management of source metadata in wikidata.
TWL continues to engage non-English Wikimedians to set up Library branches on their projects. TWL coordinators have created a new branch setup guide to help editors with the page setup and organization (translations of the guide are very welcome). This is a community-led approach; TWL recommends a consultation with the editing community in each new language to help create branches that serve their editors' specific research needs. Any multilingual readers are encouraged to join in on the setup drive.
Brand new branches are being organized with volunteers in several languages:
Spanish: With potential new Spanish-language resources from JSTOR, and a good group of interested es.wikipedia editors, TWL hopes to get this branch on its feet soon. Contact for support: Patrick
Finnish: After meeting the Finnish Chapter's partnerships team at GLAM-Wiki 2015, and discovering they were thinking about a branch, Alex was put in contact with several fi.wikipedia contributors and the Finnish Chapter and they have started developing a conversation. Join the conversation on Finnish Wikipedia or contact Alex for information.
French: Potential French-language resources are being finalized, and TWL is looking for interested fr.wikipedia editors to coordinate them and begin branch setup. Contact for support: Alex
Norwegian: With support from the chapter and the National Library of Norway, this branch is scheduled to get started in May. Contact for support: Jake
Existing branches on Arabic, Chinese and German are looking for ways to expand and better serve their communities. Potential next projects for expansion include:
Turkish: Set up by Rapsar in November, this branch is already off the ground, but needs more participation and engagement
Dutch: At GLAM-Wiki 2015, Alex met a number of interested community members, and we are beginning to get interest for donations from Dutch-language publishers. Let him know if you are interested in joining the group.
Farsi: TWL is seeking Farsi editors to help with this effort
Hebrew: Several he.wiki editors are interested in helping, but more involvement will help get this branch off the ground
This guest post was written by Timothy Thompson and Mairelys Lemus-Rojas of the University of Miami Libraries. They are the developers and maintainers of the Remixing Archival Metadata Project. "We welcome perspectives from the Wikipedia community on this project."
Many galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) have acknowledged the benefits of using Wikipedia as a means to increase the visibility of their collections. Yet even for information professionals like librarians and archivists, it can be daunting to find the time and resources to tackle the Wikipedia learning curve and become actively engaged as Wikipedia editors. In the spring of 2013, a group of librarians, programmers, and archivists at the University of Miami Libraries came together to work on a project that could help bridge this Wikipedia participation gap.
We wanted to see whether it was possible to take some of our existing metadata, remix it, and republish it to Wikipedia; we postulated that a tool that did this would help librarians and archivists see some of the parallels between their existing standards for resource description and the way that Wikipedia structures its data, expressed as wiki markup. Archivists, in particular, have a tradition of contextual description that emphasizes the biographical and historical background of their collections. Many archival finding aids include an introductory section that reads in some cases like a brief encyclopedia entry. Moreover, a new metadata standard called Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Person, and Families (EAC-CPF) had recently been established to encode this kind of contextual information. So, that was where we started with RAMP, the Remixing Archival Metadata Project.
Essentially, the RAMP editor lets you generate records for creators of archival collections and publish the content of those records as Wikipedia pages. RAMP extracts biographical information from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids using EAC-CPF and converts it from XML into wiki markup for publication to the English Wikipedia. Along the way, it also allows for the integration of additional data from other sources such as WorldCat Identities and Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).
To test the tool and its associated workflows, we started with a thematic focus on a set of theater collections from the university's Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC). We reviewed a total of 32 finding aids to determine which ones had the most complete biographical content and identified 18 target collections for which to create Wikipedia entries. As a central part of the editing process, we released the text of the relevant finding aids using a CC-BY-SA license, per Wikipedia guidelines. The creators of these collections included a range of Cuban and Cuban American actors, directors, playwrights, and theater companies. Working on these articles also allowed us to strengthen coverage in the English Wikipedia of an underrepresented group of artists.
During the year following completion of the pilot project with CHC theater collections, we tracked web traffic and referrals from Wikipedia to our collections and found a noticeable increase in pageviews. From April to September 2014, there was a 67% total increase in pageviews for the 18 finding aid pages in the project over the previous six months of Web traffic (258 pageviews from October 2013 to March 2014 versus 432 pageviews from April to September 2014). Direct referrals from Wikipedia accounted for about 59% of this increase (102 pageviews). Although the absolute numbers are not large, the relative impact of this increased visibility is significant given the limited amount of traffic these pages had received prior to the pilot.
Based on our positive experience with the pilot project, we have continued to use the tool to harvest and republish descriptive metadata from CHC finding aids. A list of pages created or edited using RAMP can be found at "Category:Articles with information extracted by the RAMP editor."
RAMP is still very much an experiment, and this initial phase of the project has focused on proving its viability. Moving forward, we would like to begin using OAuth for secure login functionality. RAMP has already been registered as a MediaWiki OAuth consumer, and we are investigating possibilities for integration. More generally, we would like to shift our focus toward linked data and incorporate a wider range of metadata--broadening the scope of the project to something like Remixing All the Metadata rather than only archival metadata. Achieving this goal would involve a significant redesign of the software, most likely using a NoSQL database platform like eXistdb.
Project GITenberg launches to curate a free and open library of books: [32]
Open Data Resource: OrgRef Contains Data About More than 31,000 Academic and Research Organizations Around the World [33]
National Science Foundation Releases Plan for Public Access to NSF-Funded Research: [34]
UNESCO's Open Access (OA) Curriculum is now online: [35]
SpaceX takes advantage of new public domain and Creative Commons licensing options on Flickr: [36]
National Endowment for the Humanities and Mellon Foundation provide $1 million to convert out-of-print books into e-books with a Creative Commons license: [37]
The Wikipedia Library
