Aubrey, I agree with some of what you say, although it remains difficult to make sweeping generalizations. As I recall, one of the problems with the "Wiki Loves Bieb" project was that libraries consider themselves the authority on the original works in their possession and so when librarians created articles on Wikipedia they were shocked when these were nominated for deletion or changed by other editors.
I am a great believer in learning by doing, and my approach with museum people and library people is to show them work on Wikipedia done by colleague institutions (whenever possible, institutions they know well). Usually this helps. It remains a question of preaching the "Wikification" evangelism, I'm afraid, and that takes personal face-to-face communication that Wikipedia just doesn't have (by nature).
I have been a volunteer at my local history museum for 2 years now, and they have only just now decided to release their own photographs of artifacts (not everything has been photographed yet) under a CC-by-SA license. Digitising the list of books in their library along with their meta data over the books, or digitising some of the shorter books, is now currently being considered. Their main fear is whether this is legal and safe to do, and having proven, published examples by larger institutions helps.
Jane 2012/5/16 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com
I find this thread extremely interesting and deep. If you do not have problem with that, I will forward some of the questions you raised to the librarian mailing list in Italy, it would be good to have an answer directly from them.
Some librarians friends of mine just told me that is mainly a problem of attitude: many, many librarians do think that "Wikipedia is not reliable", "Books are better", "Authorship is king" and many other claim we know very well. This is widespread in the field, in addition to a revolution which is disruption the whole profession - and they are not prepared. In Italy, many librarians have little computer literacy, they work on catalogs and with paper books, they don't really understand what is going on, and are very (emotionally, mentally) attached to the old physical-paper-world they understand and know and manage. Just few librarians undertand that they deal with information and not the support of the information (in this case, books). It will be a painful switch, I'm afraid.
I know that this it is not a very deep insight but I think it is quite true and the consequences of this attitude are shallow.
Aubrey
2012/5/16 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se
On 2012-05-15 16:21, Andrea Zanni wrote:
I think that the world of libraries is gonna be next, but I see a lot of issues too: libraries are in the middle of a disruption, the Internet has been really "though" on them.
In the Swedish Wikipedia, the articles on libraries, librarianship, and library science are very short, poorly written and without references. It's obvious that library school students aren't wikipedians, in the way that soccer fans or physics teachers are. The free encyclopedia attracts more textile craft and fashion nerds than librarians.
Sweden is a protestant and largely secular country, but the Swedish Wikipedia has detailed articles about every Catholic pope. Meanwhile, the list of directors of our national library has red links, http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Lista_%C3%B6ver_svenska_** riksbibliotekarierhttp://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_%C3%B6ver_svenska_riksbibliotekarier
I don't think the Swedish Wikipedia is unique in this.
Nemo mentioned that IFLA conferences are expensive to go to. Yes. The problem is that we are considering the registration fee, instead of negotiating the compensation for giving the keynote speeches.
Imagine a librarian in 1985 who receives a phone call from the future: "Hello, this is a call from the future. We have the fully electronic, free-for-all encyclopedia here, larger than anything you've ever seen." Would the librarian yawn and ignore it, or be all excited and jumping?
Where exactly did we go wrong? If the largest encyclopedia ever is not exciting to librarians, what planet is this? Why do we have to push Wikipedia down their throats, one wikipedian-in-residence at a time? Why aren't they tearing it out of our hands? I don't think it's the Internet and all electronic gadgets that need explanation. It's the library world that needs to explain what exactly they are doing.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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