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, the
National Library of Wales, the
Catalonian public libraries wikiproject, The
Bodleian library’s ventures with Wikidata and the
OCLC online Wikipedia training for librarians. You might find other GLAM examples that better suit your local context. It might also be worth referring to the webjunction
Librarians who Wikipedia 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