Hello colleagues,
As you may have heard, we were fortunate to receive funding from The John S. and James L.
Knight Foundation to develop and run a program for librarians in order to equip them to
embrace, edit, and interact on Wikipedia with a goal of getting them to the point where
they can lead programs at their home institutions, engaging their communities. We are
thinking big and aspire to have 500 librarians trained in our program. We will do this by
developing content for a virtual online cohort that will learn together in real time. We
are really excited about the possibilities of bringing the Wikimedia community close to
librarians - two communities that are passionate about providing access to information and
knowledge.
(I wrote about the grant here
http://www.oclc.org/blog/main/lets-open-library-doors-to-wikipedia/ )
Unfortunately, we were only funded for 57% of the requested amount. We are making an
additional request to WMF to fund the Wikipedian-In-Residence that will be a key part of
this program. We think that because of the potential that we have for reaching librarians,
and supporting them at scale that this is an exciting program and one that may be a good
model for other types of allied communities, and definitely for librarians in other
geographies. I am particularly excited about the prospect of developing librarians to the
point of being able to empower the diverse committees they serve.
We hope you'll take a look at our proposal, give us feedback, and hopefully lend your
support.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/A_Wikipedian-in-Residence_to…
Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research