The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 6, April/May 2014
by The Interior, Ocaasi, Sadads

The months of April and May saw some exciting developments with the Wikipedia Library. We expanded our journals and online database offerings with two new partnerships, both of which are currently open for signups. TWL also made plans to attend and present at the American Library Association's Annual Conference, held this year in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the last week of June.

Library highlights[edit]

We are very pleased to announce two new partnerships at TWL. Two of the UK's oldest and most reputable publishers, the Oxford University Press (OUP) and the Royal Society, have donated accounts for Wikipedians to use in their research. As of publication, there are still open spots available. In detail:

The OUP donation (apply here!) consists of 150 Humanities packages, which bundle five of OUP's popular online products for our editors. Included in the package are:

The Royal Society journals donation (apply here!) came about through the efforts of the Royal Society's Wikipedian-in-Residence, User:Wiki at Royal Society John. The venerable Society has offered access to its journal archives in three disciplines:

Biological sciences
Physical sciences
History of science

As we are still in talks with JSTOR about expanding the number of available accounts, current access for the original 100 editors has been extended through June.

TWL will be attending, presenting, and meeting with potential new partners at the American Library Association's Annual Conference, held this year in Las Vegas. Along with partner OCLC, TWL will be giving a presentation titled "Wikipedia and Libraries: Increasing Your Library's Visibility", scheduled for 1:00pm to 2:30pm on Saturday, June 28th, at Caesars Palace. TWL will be looking to make more contacts with library professionals to improve the Wikipedia/library interface, increase awareness of The Wikipedia Library and its partnership model, and approach new partners through the conference's well-attended vendor Exhibitor's Hall.

As part of the activities, User:Merrilee and User:Kosboot are leading an edit-a-thon at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas' Lied Library, on Friday, June 27th. This event is specially directed at Rare Books and Manuscripts/Special Collections librarians. Find out more about the event, and sign up, at the Wikipedia description page.

As part of an ongoing effort to broaden TWL's availability to more Wikipedias, Arabic Wikipedia opened its branch of the Wikipedia Library in May. Part of the rollout was an innovative new approach: micro-grants for editors to make book purchases. The project is now up and running, and applications for new books are open.

We have created a new Meta Portal for The Wikipedia Library, which contains, among other things, a kit for starting new TWL branches. We strongly encourage our multilingual readers and editors to start discussions about new branches in their language versions of Wikipedia. TWL coordinators are available to assist with setup and logistics.

TWL coordinators made a push to contact the next group of publishing partners from our January survey. We talked to: Cambridge University Press, NewsBank, NewsStand, Project Muse, Literature Online, British Newspaper Archive, Handbook of the Birds of the world, Lyell Collection, Keesings Record of World Events, OVID, BMJ, HathiTrust, HighWire, InfoTrac, PaperOfRecord, PsycInfo, The Washington Post, America's Historical Newspaper's, Taylor & Francis, and The Times. Having a team of four coordinators doing outreach is helping us follow-up at an even bigger scale.

Four universities are taking on six Wikipedia Visiting Scholars as part of TWL's outreach to academic libraries: Montana State University, University of California at Riverside, Rutgers, and George Mason University.

TWL is pleased to announce a new coordinator and project manager, User:Sadads. An experienced Wikipedian and academic, Sadads will be assisting with donor outreach and building relationships with academic libraries over the summer of 2014. Welcome to the TWL team!

One of Sadads's first projects was to compile best practices for library interns contributing to Wikipedia; he is compiling best practices from the Wikipedia Education Program, GLAM-Wiki movement and published case studies in professional library publications (for example, see last week's Signpost discussion of such an article from the University of Pittsburgh libraries). Feedback, further materials (whether intern assignments or advice), copy editing, and help developing materials would be greatly appreciated at the main resource page. Also, if you are interested, we could use experienced Wikipedia contributors or librarians to act as Online Ambassadors and help monitor interns throughout the Fall through our new course page.

Bytes in Brief[edit]

Opening access — Data dump

Flickr loses structured licensing data, no longer easily surfacing creative commons content: [1]
WHO joins Europe's PubMed Central: [2]
The real costs of Elsevier's journals: [3]
Penn State gets grant funding to study personal scholarly archiving: [4]
White paper suggests a radically different publishing model, an open access overhaul: [5]
Zotero gets grant to study and build altmetrics tools: [6]
Chinese Academy of Sciences issues open-access mandate: [7]
The National Library of New Zealand has new use and reuse policy: [8]
How the Vatican will digitize its millions of documents: [9]
Beautiful new photography site, Skitterphoto, all public domain (CC0): [10]
Peer review is also going open access! New researcher initiative: [11]
Met Announces New Open Access Initiative: Free Access to 400,000 images: [12]
National Archives and Records awards $2.6 Million in Grants for 30 Historical Records Projects: [13]
Berkeley professors launch nonprofit to advance author publishing rights: [14]
ScienceOpen launches new OA platform for open science: [15]

Around the stacks — Worth reading

An open access bibliography worth perusing: [16]
Interview with the new national archivist of Canada: [17]
The Open Access Wiki: [18]
A medical librarian raises concerns about doctors relying on Wikipedia: [19]
Wikimedia Foundation legal team explains how they handle requests for private data: [20]
Why online news organizations need a librarian on staff: [21]
A broad overview of trends in scholarly publishing: [22]
Lessig's thoughts on the future of Creative Commons: [23]
The Universal Library is Us: Library Work at Scale in HathiTrust: [24]
Academic opinions of Wikipedia and open access: [25]
University of Pittsburgh (PITT) increases collection discoverability through Wikipedia editing: [26]

Library highlights[edit]

Bytes in Brief[edit]

Further reading[edit]