Hello Wikipedia and libraries folks,
I work at the University of Pennsylvania library, and have been working with free online resources like online books and Wikipedia for some years now. For instance, I've been maintaining the Online Books Page since 1993, and have recently added links from author and subject browsing pages on that site to corresponding Wikipedia articles.
I've recently developed some templates, and a redirection service, intended to support links from Wikipedia articles to readers' local libraries, wherever those libraries might be. If you think these might be useful, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, and would also be happy to help get people started with them as appropriate.
The service, which I'm calling "Forward to Libraries" or "FTL", is invoked by templates that can be placed in any Wikipedia article. The template documentation can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Library_resources_box
(See in particular, the "Library resources About George Washington..." example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Library_resources_box#Examples The box shown there has working links.)
As you can see from the example, the "Resources in your library" links can take a reader to a relevant search in the online catalog or discovery system of the user's preferred library. (If that preference isn't known, the user will be asked first which library they want to search. But users can register a preferred library for future searches.)
Readers can also choose "Resources in other libraries" to check other libraries and library services. (For instance, a reader who usually uses a university library might also want to check nearby public libraries. Or they might want to do a WorldCat search of lots of libraries.) The service currently knows how to connect to over 70 libraries in the US-- and users can request others to be added-- plus Worldcat.org and The Online Books Page. (Direct links to the Online Books Page are also an option, if there are relevant free online books people can read without leaving their seat or logging into alibrary proxy.) Libraries outside the US can be added as well, though the service currently works best with libraries that use the Library of Congress name and subject headings, or similar ones.
For more details and rationale, see my blog post at
http://everybodyslibraries.com/2013/03/04/from-wikipedia-to-our-libraries/
I'm still fairly new at Wikipedia template-building (and have only recently created an account at Wikipedia instead of just editing anonymously). Suggestions and other feedback would be most welcome, and I'd be glad also to answer any questions folks on this list might have.
Thanks,
John Mark Ockerbloom