Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/October-November2015

 The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes Issue 14, October–November 2015 by The Interior, Ocaasi, Sadads, and Nikkimaria sign up for monthly delivery



In this issue of Books & Bytes, we're happy to announce some new partnerships, branches, coordinators, and news. October and November have seen more non-English branches launching signups, the creation of a new Norwegian branch, and an exciting series of Open Access Week events. We also announce our #1Lib1Ref campaign for the Wikipedia 15 celebrations, and cover an interesting presentation about citations on Wikipedia.

English resources

 * Gale (Signup page)- A very large educational publisher based in the United States starting with a small trial of 10 accounts. Gale is offering access to four of their huge collections:
 * ||129663692219470930731132330063644714198&N=197&Ntk=APG||P_EPI&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial Academic OneFile, a database of peer-reviewed academic articles in a variety of subject areas
 * |10665441145939240762670047821972906366&N=197&Ntk=APG|P_EPI&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial General OneFile, a periodicals collection
 * Infotrac Newsstand, full-text articles from 1800 newspapers
 * Gale Virtual Reference Library (selected content)

Global resources

 * Finnish Literature Society (Signup page): Finnish cultural content
 * Farsi:
 * Magiran, a scientific journal database.
 * Civilica, a database of Farsi magazines, conference papers, and journal articles.
 * Brill (Signup page): one of Europe's oldest academic publishers, with resources in English and Dutch, along with other European languages.

New global branches
We are very excited to announce two more global Wikipedia Library branches:
 * Norwegian Wikipedia Library has established a page to share and request sources, and is highlighting opportunities for free access to resources like the Norwegian Open Research Archives
 * Kurdish Wikipedia Library already has several pages set up, including a Resource Exchange

We'd also like to take this opportunity to highlight the Global Wikipedia Library on Meta. This portal showcases the projects and accomplishments of each of our language branches. New and growing branches also have their own Meta planning pages to coordinate and track their progress, for example: The Wikipedia Library/Norwegian. If you're interested in helping to start a branch on another language Wikipedia, please get in touch! [mailto:wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org wikipedialibrary@undefinedwikimedia.org]

New volunteer coordinators
We want to welcome eight new awesome members to our Coordinators team!
 * Elmacenderesi
 * Alarob
 * Mackensen
 * UY Scuti
 * Cerevisae
 * Csisc
 * MrLinkinPark333
 * WikiBronze

We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or perform 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, sign up here.

Open Access week
During International Open Access Week on October 19–25, 2015, there was a global, virtual editathon to improve Open Access-related content on Wikipedia. Check out the improvements made as part of this effort.

Another highlight of the week was the Open Access Roundtable (full recording) at the Wikimedia Foundation. Melissa Hagemann introduced and Pete Forsyth moderated the panel, which comprised TWL Head Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi), Michael Eisen (an open-access advocate who co-founded PLoS), Rich Schneider of the University of California San Francisco, Wikimedia Foundation legal counsel Stephen LaPorte, and John Dove, the former CEO of Credo Reference. John Dove followed up with a thoughtful Wikimedia Blog post.

DOIs, Wikipedia, and scholarly citations
On 4 December, Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef and Dario Taraborelli of the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a presentation on scholarly citations in Wikipedia. CrossRef assigns digital object identifiers (DOI) to scholarly articles. Wikipedia is now the fifth largest referrer of citations to the scholarly literature – Bilder discussed the implications of this for Wikimedia and academia. Crossref also maintains an intriguing livestream of DOI citations added to Wikipedias (see link below). Taraborelli talked about the possibility of extracting and storing all source data from Wikimedia via Wikidata, to create a human-curated citation repository.
 * "Wikipedia as the front matter to all research"
 * Wikipedia DOI citation livestream

Spotlight: 1Lib1Ref
Librarians have nuanced opinions about Wikipedia. In the early days of the project, many in the library world were openly critical of the crowdsourced approach to knowledge creation. This was for a variety of reasons, but a major factor was the lack of focus on the reliability and authority of the information presented in Wikipedia articles. As Wikipedia evolved in the mid-2000s, the emphasis on reliability and good sourcing increased. However, some librarians still choose not to engage with Wikipedia, and urge their patrons not to use it in their research.

Part of the Wikipedia Library's mandate is to build relationships with librarians and professionals in the information world. One very easy way for librarians to contribute to Wikipedia is by adding references. Librarians are specifically trained to locate and organize the best available sources of information on a topic. They know where to look, and how to look. So TWL is issuing a challenge to librarians worldwide:

'''add one reference to any Wikipedia article! '''

We're calling this global, crowdsourced campaign #1Lib1Ref, and you can read all about it on Meta.

A librarian might ask: "Sure, I can contribute to Wikipedia. But why should I?" A simple answer would be that library patrons, especially the younger generations, are already using Wikipedia, and that librarians should be more familiar with how it works. Editing is the fastest way to get a deeper understanding of the inner mechanisms of the project. A second, often-overlooked reason is that Wikipedia can be a publicly available bridge between the Internet and the resources in brick-and-mortar libraries. Items used as references in Wikipedia articles have much higher discoverability than they would otherwise, and the more the reading public becomes aware of them, the higher the chances are that people will want to access them at the institution. Many libraries have unique collections of excellent resources; Wikipedia can be an avenue to let the world know about them.

If you are a librarian, please join the project! If you have librarians in your social or professional circles, let them know about the initiative. The Meta project page is still under development; please join us there to improve the instructions and strategy, and sign up as a coordinator. The #1Lib1Ref drive is scheduled for January 15–23 in the new year (coinciding with Wikipedia's 15th birthday!) We hope to use social media heavily to get the word out about the project. If even a small percentage of the world's hundreds of thousands of librarians participate, Wikipedia will be a more reliable source to the public.

Strategy and planning: Q3 goals
This is what we're planning for January through March in 2016. Note that these are a draft and won't be finalized until the end of December. We'd love to hear your thoughts on our direction and focus. Click through to see the second slide with 3 more goals.



Community roundup

 * English Wikipedia has reached 5 million articles!
 * Winners of Wiki Loves Earth-2015
 * Wikidata now provides the fun way of helping to identify and disambiguate authors of scholarly articles
 * Wikimedia and Open Access — a rich history of interactions
 * #1Lib1Ref (One Librarian, One Reference) — a campaign during the week of January 15–23, 2016
 * Wikimedia Foundation's annual year-end contribution campaign is up again — You can donate
 * Wikipedia turns 15 on 15 January 2016

Newsworthy

 * OCLC prints last library catalogue cards
 * Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) now hosts monthly edit-a-thons
 * Google book-scanning project legal, says U.S. appeals court
 * Nature Publishing Group (NPG) to make all legacy content in the journal free to access from January 2016
 * Six editors and 31 editorial board members of Lingua, a top linguistics journal, have resigned protesting high journal fees, move to Open Access
 * U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) releases searchable database featuring geo-referenced copyright and royalty-free field photographs
 * Paperity and Open Library of Humanities partner to enhance discoverability
 * Reiss Engelhorn Museum's lawsuit over public domain works of art
 * Award honors 10 US librarians for public service

Worth reading (or watching)

 * Toronto, Kansas City Public Libraries get silly over baseball season
 * AirBnB takes heat for pointed billboards about local libraries' closing hours
 * Art is universal – no country should claim a masterpiece for their own
 * How can you write an open access encyclopedia in a closed access world? (from Wikipedia open access panel)
 * The chaotic wisdom of Wikipedia paragraphs
 * Explore 14 billion years of Wikipedia history with this hypnotic data viz
 * Open Access explained
 * Busting myths about Open Access
 * Wikipedia significantly amplifies the impact of Open Access publications
 * How Open Access empowered a 16-year-old to make cancer breakthrough
 * Librarian as public knowledge leader: ways to use Wikipedia
 * Why librarians should learn to code
 * The cost of Open Access publishing
 * Academic print books are dying. What’s the future?
 * The library’s global future
 * Ever wondered what libraries will look like in 2100? This piece is for you
 * What would an open access academic library look like, and what would an open access academic librarian do?
 * Why Wikipedia and Open access equals revolution
 * Wikipedia deploys AI (Artificial intelligence) to expand the ranks of human editors and a video explaining the process
 * Understanding the Turnitin/Wikipedia Collaboration

Data dump

 * Massive creativity and awesome remixes when NASA puts 8,400 public domain lunar mission photos online
 * Demo of using Wikisource for depositing Open Access materials (Test phase)