Hi Reem,
I must agree with Kerry that the most important step when building a new relationship with
librarians is to assume that their knowledge and understanding of Wikipedia is generally
poor. I work as a wikimedian in residence at the Scottish Library and Information Council
and my remit is to work across all the public libraries in Scotland and engage them in
Wikipedia activities. Over time, we’ve developed a kind of pathway for engaging with new
libraries that want to take part in the project.
We usually start with an advocacy session focused on the benefits of open knowledge,
introducing wikipedia and its sister projects, highlighting how some of the strategic
goals of the wikimedia community overlap with the goals of libraries and finally expanding
on a few examples of GLAM projects that have taken place in libraries. For me those would
using be GLAM projects that took place at the National Library of
Scotland<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/National_Library_o…nd>,
the National Library of
Wales<https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Expert_outreach/National_Wikimedian_at_the_National_Library_of_Wales>,
the Catalonian public libraries
wikiproject<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Case_studies/Catalo…es>,
The Bodleian
library<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Oxford>’s ventures
with Wikidata and the OCLC online Wikipedia training for
librarians<http://www.oclc.org/blog/main/wikipedia-the-webjunction-way/&…y/>. You might
find other GLAM examples that better suit your local context. It might also be worth
referring to the webjunction Librarians who
Wikipedia<https://www.webjunction.org/search-results.html?output=xml_no_…
blog series.
Once we’ve run the initial advocacy session, we’ll then look at running a one day staff
training session focused on teaching librarians the ins and outs of wikipedia and how to
edit. Next we’ll support them to find a group they want to run a project with and offer
the group training before running an editathon. The final phase of this pathway is to
train groups of librarians in how to be wikipedia trainers and event coordinators. This
approach works well with public libraries and we’ve been steadily building a base of
libraries engaged with Wikipedia across Scotland. In future, we also plan on building more
engagement with uploading digital collections to Wikimedia Commons and introducing the use
of Wikidata in relation to library collections.
You can learn more about my project at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/SLIC.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
Best wishes,
Delphine Dallison
Wikimedian in Residence
Scottish Library and Information Council
Turnberry House
Suite 5:5, Fifth Floor
175 West George Street
Glasgow G2 2LB
Tel: 0141 202 2999
www.scottishlibraries.org<http://www.scottishlibraries.org/>