User:KateFisherGA

I am a Public Librarian in Macon, Georgia employed by Middle Georgia Regional Library (MGRL) tasked with uploading archival collection material into Wikipedia articles. The archival material has been digitized by the Digital Library of Georgia and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Georgia Public Library Services (GPLS) is exploring a new partnership with Wikimedia and the Digital Public Library of America.  This project enables the linking of Middle Georgia Regional Library’s (MGRL) digitized, public domain materials in the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) to articles in Wikipedia. With nearly 3 billion monthly page views on the English language site in the U.S. alone, linking primary source materials to Wikipedia articles increases traffic to our collections by many orders of magnitude.

For example, the Toledo Lucas County Public Library in Toledo, Ohio recently completed a round of linkages to their public domain materials and generated almost two million new page views in the two months of its initial project phase.

MGRL has copyright-free materials in the DLG that can be included as part of this trial. Here's what you need to know:

Working with our project partners, GPLA will uploaded our public domain materials to Wikimedia and provided virtual training to the library staff for linking items to Wikipedia articles. ''By putting these rights-free materials into Wikimedia, we are releasing them into the wild, so to speak. Anyone would be free to do anything they like with them (which is currently the case, but the DLG does not get the widespread public access that Wikipedia does).''

MGRL library staff are responsible for editing Wikipedia articles to link to our library materials where relevant.