The Wikipedia Library (TWL) helps editors do research. Here is what happened the last 2 months, and what is coming next...
New free access partnerships
The digital Loeb Classical Library is a project of Harvard University Press to make Classical Greek and Latin literature accessible. There are 25 one-year accounts available to Wikipedians.
RIPM provides access to the largest online collection of rare music periodicals published between 1760 and 1966. RIPM is offering 20 free accounts to their index, full-text periodical archive, and e-library of music periodicals to help write Wikipedia content related to music.
Sage Publications is offering access to two statistics resources covering social science data for geographies within the United States and topics such as healthcare, crime, education, employment, religion, and government finances, as well as data visualizations and research tools related to US Congress, the US Supreme Court, and the US Presidency. There are 10 one-year accounts available.
MIT Press Journals is a scholarly publisher of over 30 journals in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. This partnership has up to 200 one-year accounts available.
HeinOnline is an extensive legal research database with over 2000 fully searchable law-related journals as well as resources related to English, Scottish, American and international legal history. Up to 25 accounts will be available.
Many other partnerships still have accounts available. You can see a tagged list of them at our Journals page.
We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or help with other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, signup here.
Conferences
GLAM-Wiki – Alex attended GLAM-Wiki 2015 in The Hague, Netherlands! It was a great conference, allowing for plenty of networking within the outreach elements of the Wikimedia community. He came back with several contacts that will help us grow both existing branches of the Wikipedia Library and new branches in several languages (see our Global updates). For more reflection on his experience, see his blog here (we also recommend User:OR drohowa's blog post here). Having a window into global communities' GLAM-Wiki strategies, concerns, and needs helps us better discover GLAM-Wiki opportunities with our potential Wikipedia Library partners.
DPLAFest – Jake and Alex attended DPLAFest 2015, the annual conference for the Digital Public Library of America, in Indianapolis and presented about The Wikipedia Library and best practices for Source Discovery Anyone Can Edit. The event was a very valuable networking event for both identifying key actors in the research libraries community to collaborate with on programs, like Visiting Scholars, while also discovering potential partnership opportunities with organizations like DPLA.
Project MUSE publishers conference – Jake presented a keynote at Project Muse's annual conference on April 27 talking about the Wikipedia Library, and the place of academic publishing in the Wikipedia community. Jake's slides can be found here and there are some great reflections on Twitter.
American Library Association Annual – We are preparing to have a booth at ALA in San Francisco, host an editathon and give a talk. The close proximity to the WMF office is a positive, as is the opportunity for outreach across a wide range of interested parties: publishers, university libraries, professional organizations, and other movers and shakers in the larger conversation about research access.
Reference news
Citoid is a new backend tool to help "auto-fill" reference templates on Wikipedia, using URLs, DOIs, and eventually ISBNs. Currently, the tool is enabled in VisualEditor. The development team has asked experienced editors to help identify web resources that aren't working, so that they can create "translator" patches to improve the results. TWL encourages readers to test their favourite resources at a testing page.
Wikidata has the potential to be a metadata backbone for Wikipedia references. According to WikiProject Source Metadata, these are areas to work on:
Jake and Alex compiled experiences from Wikipedia Visiting Scholars in a blog post. If you have an affiliation or contact with an academic or research library that may be interested, be sure to get in touch with TWL coordinators for support and materials for reaching out to librarians and administration.
Global growth
TWL continues to engage non-English Wikimedians to set up Library branches on their projects. TWL coordinators have created a new branch setup guide to help editors with the page setup and organization (translations of the guide are very welcome). This is a community-led approach; TWL recommends a consultation with the editing community in each new language to help create branches that serve their editors' specific research needs. Any multilingual readers are encouraged to join in on the setup drive.
Spanish: With potential new Spanish-language resources from W:EN:JSTOR, and a good group of interested es.wikipedia editors, TWL hopes to get this branch on its feet soon. Contact for support: Patrick
French: Potential French-language resources are being finalized, and TWL is looking for interested fr.wikipedia editors to coordinate them and begin branch setup. Contact for support: Alex
Norwegian: With support from the chapter and the National Library of Norway, this branch is scheduled to get started in May. Contact for support: Jake
Turkish: Set up by Rapsar in November, this branch is already off the ground, but needs more participation and engagement
Dutch: At GLAM-Wiki 2015, Alex met a number of interested community members, and we are beginning to get interest for donations from Dutch-language publishers. Let him know if you are interested in joining the group.
Farsi: TWL is seeking Farsi editors to help with this effort
Hebrew: Several he.wiki editors are interested in helping, but more involvement will help get this branch off the ground
Full updates are available through our Newsletter, Books & Bytes
