Re: [Wikimedia-l] UC Berkeley hires Wikipedian in Residence

Hi all - Thanks :) Fae: there isn't currently an on-wiki page fully summarizing what I'll be doing, partly just for the simple fact that I haven't had time to write one yet. I'm hoping to have one up in the near future, the first couple months I've spent here (and it's also only a part-time position,) have been pretty swamped between working on instructional design issues, doing direct hands-on work with students, liasing with some of our GLAM institutions, and dealing with media inquiries. I'm more or less trying to combine two things in to one: I'm working with several courses affiliated with our American Cultures program in the context of the USEP, and I'm trying to get some of Berkeley's historically significant collections released under free licenses. USEP-wise, we put a _lot_ of time in to instructional design for the classes we're working with with a specific focus on trying to avoid the problems that USEP classes often run in to, and so far (though most stuff is still in a pre-wiki stage,) it's looking like many aspects of our design and implementation are going to be successful in doing so. We'll be releasing all of our instructional design materials as well as a detailed post-mortem after the semester. GLAM-wise - a lot of our neat stuff is already digitized, it's just sitting in silos with extremely limited access. I'll be focusing on historically significant collections related to the material in-line with what the AC program here covers ('theoretical and analytical issues related to race, culture, and ethnicity in the United States,") especially collections unique to Berkeley - unreleased media dealing with the free speech movement, etc. I won't be limited to that, though - one neat collaboration already came up by complete happenstance. The SF Chronicle sent someone out last week to cover my position, and by complete happenstance, the photographer they sent was scheduled to shoot the inside of the [[Lawson Adit]] after he finished up with me - an ENWP article I wrote about a really neat historical oddity on Berkeley's campus, a horizontal mineshaft dug by Berkeley students directly through the Hayward Fault, one of the Bay Area's two really major faultlines. It was a bit surreal to see the inside of the Adit (it's rarely opened, and even more rarely opened to the public,) since it still uses its original ca. 1918 loadbearing redwood timbering and is dug through a major fault - and also kind of hilarious to show up to see that the ENWP article I had written about it years ago was being used as a major source of reference by the journalists and Berkeley person present. UCB is preparing to install seismographic equipment in an old secondary deeper inside the mine than I went - I'll be going back when they do with a real camera, and should get some of the first interior shots of the mine with full electric lighting (since they just strung it) in decades, let alone freely licensed shots. I should be starting substantial outreach to internal GLAMs within the next couple weeks about stuff directly related to the AC program, and should have some media donations lined up in the not too distant future. Tomasz is right that Belfer was first... but Belfer was done so under the radar that I actually had never even realized that someone had been hired for the position until I stumbled across Tomasz's blog about it, some time after the initial announcement of my position at Berkeley. I had a conversation about the matter afterwards with Berkeley's news people and with most of the journalists who have contacted me about it since the initial NewsCenter posting, and the general feeling has pretty much been that Belfer's practices were different enough from the norm of what a Wikipedian-in-Residence is that people have been comfortable running the story without a bunch of caveats to explain Belfer. There's also Arild Vågen's previous position at SLU, which is why most places are going with "first US university" rather than "first university." Best, Kevin Gorman On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 7:03 AM, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote: