Librarians and library lovers,
We hope that you and your loved ones are taking care during this challenging time for the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected countless aspects of our personal and professional lives, and the Wikimedia Foundation is sending our very best wishes to all of you.
Equitable access to reliable, unbiased information has never been more important. From May 15th to June 5th, we will be running the global #1Lib1Ref campaign (virtually), with a focus on improving and increasing the quality of content for the billions of people staying at home during the public health crisis. As you may know, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have seen record-breaking pageviews in the last few weeks, reflecting that people around the world are turning to us for trustworthy information.[1]
With that in mind, this is a critical time to bring librarians and Wikimedia together: more people are reading and learning from the web, and we need to strengthen trust in our content through citations. Join us as we do that, by helping us organize to encourage library communities to add one more citation to Wikipedia.
What can you do?
We are advising everyone to follow WHO health guidelines and not conduct in-person events. Instead, we will organize virtually, and we have created recommendations for online meetings! Please share your digital events so #1Lib1Ref contributors can join you!
You can visit our resource page for guides on how to virtually participate in the campaign. Ensure your contribution is recorded by using the #1Lib1Ref hashtag in your edit summary. This is very important for us to monitor the reach and success of the initiative.
Let us know if you need new kinds of support
We know that with the COVID-19 pandemic, it's not as easy to participate in volunteer activities or organizing online activities. Many of us are focusing on our families, figuring our homeschooling and working remotely, and responding to the demands of the crisis in other ways. We also know that certain parts of the library sector are facing difficult challenges, such as layoffs, increased work, or extreme changes in work.
We want to know how the pandemic may affect your ability to participate in #1Lib1Ref, as well as how we can support you better in this unprecedented situation. Please fill out this short survey to help us better understand how to support you during this round!
Join our communications!
You can join the 1Lib1Ref community via the Libraries (libraries@lists.wikimedia.org), and 1Lib1Ref (1lib1ref@lists.wikimedia.org) mailing lists, or by joining the Wikimedia + Libraries User Group: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_and_Libraries_User_Group
As we get closer to the launch of the campaign next month, we will update our social media toolkit, which you can use to spread the word about #1Lib1Ref. Stay tuned for updates on this page.
Looking forward to #1Lib1Ref!
You can learn about last year's campaign and what we learned in our recently-released blog post at Medium
Lastly, to learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation’s response to COVID-19, please visit wikimediafoundation.org/covid19.
Sincerely,