Actually for newbies and 1lib1ref, I don’t usually do biographies but save them for those with a little more experience. For newbies, I use lists. Every public library in Queensland , Australia, is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for the applicable town, suburb or rural area, even down to mobile library service points. If you believe public libraries are important civic amenities (and I presume I’m preaching to the choir here), get their existence onto Wikipedia. All it takes is one or two sentences. E.g. for the town of Miriam Vale ...

The Miriam Vale Library is at 41 Blomfield Street; it is operated by the Gladstone Regional Council.[15]

If we knew when it opened, we added that too. Or some other interesting fact about it (not opening hours). For example for the town of Mackinney

The McKinlay Shire Council operates a public library at Middleton Street; it is claimed to be Queensland's smallest public library.[9][10].  (The article has photos if you want to see just how small it is)

Schools are another great list of topic. Librarians generally think schools matter too. What you can say depends on what easily accessible data you have. But all of our governments schools have a link from the home page of their website to their last annual report which tells you what years of schooling are offered, number of enrolled kids, and number of teachers, which is all good factual material for Wikipedia.

If you wanting to celebrate new public domain manual, look for list-of resources like almanacs and tourist guides, which are full of information about tiny towns like the name of their mayor or the number of hotels and beds therein and the price of a week’s stay with full board, or other factoids. Such books were the Wikipedia of their times, and provide interesting tidbits for the history section of any town article in Wikipedia today.

Kerry



Sent from my iPad

On 4 Jan 2019, at 5:49 pm, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:

- Nemo - cool! 
- Marie - that is fantastic, best of luck. I am sad to learn about the Canadian copyright issues. But I am very glad to learn about any initiatives involving Wikipedia editing and library & information science schools - we need much more of this! 
- Kerry - thanks for all the good advice, good for any event. I have run many editathons, but usually I pick a somewhat looser topic that is easier to find a variety of articles to work with. Side note: I would like to challenge our community to host more editing events that *don't* involve writing biographies - though they are easy to start with, there is so much more to do! All of your advice about Wikiprojects is good for this. 
- Bob - it sounds like we need a jazz project! I was thinking of at the very least playing 1923 jazz during the event :) 

Any other public domain related events or ideas? PS: here are the books we digitized in honor of the day: https://archive.org/details/mitlibrariespublicdomain 
  
best, 
Phoebe 


On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 2:08 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
The English Wikisource is busy adding books, starting of course from the
ubiquitous Gibran:
https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Template:New_texts&diff=9024624&oldid=9024435

Federico

_______________________________________________
Libraries mailing list
Libraries@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries


--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *
_______________________________________________
Libraries mailing list
Libraries@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries