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.
Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research
_______________________________________________
GLAM mailing list
GLAM@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam