Greetings, Australian Wikipedians!
Today we have had the big announcement (see email below) that the "Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together" course is now available for worldwide reuse. "Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together" was a major project undertaken by OCLC (a global library co-operative) and the Wikimedia Foundation (as organisations both committed to the goal of free public knowledge) and supported financially by the Knight Foundation (a USA philanthropic fund established to foster better informed and engaged communities to ensure a healthy democracy). The project's goal was to provide an online course to enable USA public library staff to better understand Wikipedia and how to better incorporate Wikipedia in their everyday options serving the broader community. As well as online materials, the course involved weekly live webinars (with recordings available afterwards), discussion forums, and other tools. Although I was not involved in the course development, I was involved in the delivery of the course as one of the "experienced Wikipedians" recruited as the mentors who participated in the Q&A in the discussion forums and in giving one-on-one advice on taking first steps contributing to Wikipedia. Also, Jacinta Sutton from State Library of Queensland was one of librarians interviewed in the webinars about the Wikimedia initiatives at State Library of Queensland, who has long been a partner of Wikimedia Australia. Jacinta's inclusion in this USA-focussed program demonstrates just how much respect SLQ has earned in the Wikimedia & Library communities; Jacinta was also an invited speaker at an OCLC Asian conference in Tokyo last year. The entire course has now been packaged up under a CC-BY-SA license so it can be freely re-used and modified as required worldwide. I would love to see a similar course run here in Australia for our librarian community as all kinds of libraries would benefit from it, not just public librarians, but others such as state libraries, university libraries and school libraries. I believe any library that has users who are reading Wikipedia and/or wanting to contribute to it would benefit from this course so they could better serve their users' needs. But to roll such a course out, whether on a national, regional or local basis will still require a lot of resources, including organisation, technical and human. So I am hoping I can count on our local Wikimedian community to be supportive of any Australian initiatives in whatever ways you can. Kerry From: Proffitt,Merrilee [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 6 June 2018 3:52 AM Subject: Wikipedia + Libraries: it's a wrap Hi all, I wanted to let you, our Wikipedia Course Guides, know that we have officially wrapped up our project! The WebJunction and OCLC communications team did a great job on the website which has links to all the curriculum materials plus the "Librarians that Wikipedia" series of interviews. <https://www.webjunction.org/explore-topics/wikipedia-libraries.html> https://www.webjunction.org/explore-topics/wikipedia-libraries.html I also want to encourage you all to read the final report for the grant - this is full of information on the entire project. A reminder as you read this; much of what is shared under project outcomes was funded by the Knight Foundation - for the sake of simplicity and transparency we decided to combine reporting about the entirety of the project with the WMF funded portion of the project. <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/OCLC/A_Wikipedian-in-Residen ce_to_Engage_500_Librarians_and_their_Communities/Final> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/OCLC/A_Wikipedian-in-Residenc e_to_Engage_500_Librarians_and_their_Communities/Final Thank you for all the work you put into this project! I know that for many of our course participants getting advice and guidance from you and having you serve as the voices and faces of our project was a real highlight. Best, Merrilee -- Merrilee Proffitt OCLC . Senior Manager, OCLC Research Library Partnership 155 Bovet Rd, Suite 500, San Mateo, CA 94402 T +1-650-287-2136 M +1-510-684-4717 <http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2322-8337> orcid.org/0000-0002-2322-8337 <http://www.oclc.org/home.en.html?cmpid=emailsig_logo> <http://www.oclc.org/home.en.html?cmpid=emailsig_link> OCLC.org . <http://www.facebook.com/pages/OCLC/20530435726> Facebook . <http://twitter.com/MerrileeIam> Twitter . <http://www.youtube.com/OCLCvideo> YouTube The <http://www.oclc.org/research/partnership/> OCLC Research Library Partnership provides a unique transnational collaborative network of peers to address common issues as well as the opportunity to engage directly with OCLC Research. Join with us!
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