Wikipedia Library finding success in matching contributors with sources
This week, the Signpost caught up with the Wikipedia Library (TWL), which aims to connect reference resources with Wikipedia editors who can use them to improve articles. Funded through the Wikimedia Foundation's Individual Engagement Grants program,[A] TWL has several initiatives coming up (including "visiting scholars" and an Arabic Wikipedia microgrants program). It declares on its Wikipedia page that it has five "big goals" to accomplish:
- Connect editors with their local library and freely accessible resources
- Partner to provide free access to paywalled publications, databases, universities, and libraries
- Build relationships among our community of editors, libraries, and librarians
- Facilitate research for Wikipedians, helping editors to find and use sources
- Promote broader open access in publishing and research
The program relates to GLAM-Wiki—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums—by focusing on the libraries, which Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi), the overall coordinator of TWL, sees as the outlier in the original GLAM model (libraries are not cultural institutions with extensive collections): "It's totally complimentary and the lines are not well-defined. Where we get editors access to a university library's collections, they can improve articles, possibly in the area of that library's expertise". He continued:
| “ | It was GLAM Bootcamp that steeped me in the basic spiel, that cultural institutions and Wikipedians are seeking to fulfill the same mission of sharing knowledge with the same audience of the general public—so it makes sense to work together with those institutions as partners. The same case can be made for aggregators or databases of reliable sources, and with university libraries. It's another area where missions align and we can do good work together. GLAM-Wiki started all of this, and I'm just adding focus to a piece. | ” |
TWL's recent priorities were influenced in large part due to a December 2013 survey that was sent out to 1500 TWL recipients. Out of the 200 responses, Ocaasi told the Signpost that out of thirteen proposed areas for growth, an "overwhelming" amount asked for access to additional research—particularly the voluminous publications held behind JSTOR's paywalls. While TWL has a program in place with JSTOR, it only opened up 100 free accounts. This left around 200 still waiting on the list, with the potential for far more—TWL's Questia partnership had over 400 applicants, while HighBeam gave out about 1000 accounts. This has resulted in, as of publishing time, 7052 links to Questia and even more to HighBeam. Ocaasi remarked that "it's clear our pilot program has only whetted the appetites of editors for more", and "we are working very hard to expand that offering."
TWL is also in talks with the New York Times, EBSCO, Proquest, the Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Science, among others, to open up their archives to Wikipedians. They narrowly missed out with LexisNexis, even having a meeting with eight department executives, but they were unable to sort out a host of legal issues. This isn't unusual, as Ocaasi noted: "It's part of the process that we have hits and misses, both in arranging partners, and finding resources the community really wants and needs."
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