On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Klein,Max kleinm@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)