On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Klein,Max <kleinm(a)oclc.org> wrote:
Hello,
I am Max Klein new Wikipedian in Residence with OCLC. My dedications for
the next few months will be in trying to bridge some divide Wikimedia
and Libraries.
In response to Bob's insight that "GLAM formulation is Wikimedia's
own,"
and that "*librarians* in museums, many I've encountered see themselves
as part of the special libraries sphere." I think it very important that
Wikimedians start to treat Librarians in a more nuanced fashion, and
acknowledge their distinctions. (Just as I'm sure those Wikimedia
Commons contributors would not like to be bundled with Wikipedia
Copy-editors.) The title of GLAM as an package of institutional types
was probably necessary at some early stage, but now it doesn't serve us
as well because Museums and Libraries will need their own tailored
approaches to integration.
What are those levels of integration? So far we've seen work from
Wikipedians in Residence at museums creating and editing actual pages
based on the housed works. That model will work to some extent for
Libraries that have special collections. For other less specialist
libraries, that model would result in a lot of WIRs just twiddling
thumbs.
That is not to say that there would be no purpose in collaboration. Alex
Hinojo (a Catalan WIR) informed me of his idea of *Librarians as
Wikipedia Ambassadors*. I'm interested to get a feeling from the
Librarian community about how excited they would be to trained in
Wikipedia Literacy as a trainers themselves to their patrons? From my
experience in the Education Program (training students) the hard parts
were explaining the technical knowledge, and then a crash course in
Information Literacy. Librarians are already extremely information
literate in what would qualify as reliable sources, so they are actually
more natural fits to be in person contacts for Wikipedia help. This is
approach is more "teach a man to fish," (or "teach a man to teach
fishing," rather) than the classic approach, and relies on the
willingness of Librarians.
What are the feelings on this proposed paradigm?
This has actually already been my experience in helping to coordinate
the Wikipedia Ambassadors in the NY/Northeast US university region,
where we have been actively recruiting librarians, and have seen an
outsize positive influence from them.
Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)