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Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/October2013

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Books and Bytes

Volume 1, Issue 1

October 2013

by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs)

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The Bookworm, c.1850, Carl Spitzweg

Greetings Wikipedia Library participants. Welcome to the inaugural edition of Books and Bytes, TWL’s monthly newsletter. Lots of news this month for the Wikipedia Library, including new accounts, upcoming events, and new ways to get involved.

New positions

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Wikipedia Visiting Scholars

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TWL is very happy to announce its first Visiting Scholar (WVS) placement, with George Mason University in Washington, D.C. The WVS program allows an experienced Wikipedian full access to George Mason Libraries’ online holdings, as well as borrowing privileges to its physical holdings. Applications for the position will be accepted in mid-October, and the position will be filled in November/December. We ask that TWL volunteers help get the word out about this position, and apply themselves!

Volunteer Wikipedia Librarians

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In August, TWL started a new volunteer signup form. Volunteers can create a profile, choose from several roles, and share their areas of expertise. We encourage anyone interested in TWL to create one. These profiles will help TWL coordinators to organize different efforts, and better match tasks with skillsets.

Wikipedia Loves Libraries

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WLL is off to a roaring start this fall in the United States: 29 events are planned or have been hosted by volunteers in libraries across the country. These range from edit-a-thons to staff training sessions to informal meetups. If you have organized an event, Books and Bytes would love to hear about how it went. Challenges and successes should be shared with other organizers. Pictures of the event should be uploaded to Commons. For those of us not in the United States, we’ve got some catching up to do! See the WLL outreach page for tips on planning your own event.

Upcoming WLL meetups

2012 meetup in Multnomah County Library, Oregon

New subscriptions

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HighBeam Round 8

The eighth round of accounts for HighBeam Research is currently open. In May, HighBeam renewed its partnership with TWL, offering 1000 more accounts. If you wish to renew your existing account, or want to get access to the database, please add your name to the list. Let other Wikipedians know about the resource as well.

Questia Round 4

The fourth round of accounts with Questia Online Library is currently open. Questia donated 1,000 accounts, and both new signups and renewals are available

Cochrane Round 2

The second round for accounts with The Cochrane Library is currently open. Cochrane is a medical library that donated 100 accounts and all active medical and science research editors are invited to apply

New York Times/LexisNexis

TWL has approached representatives of The New York Times and LexisNexis to obtain accounts for editors. The NYT accounts would have full access to the Times' archives, which date back to 1851. The Lexis-Nexis accounts would have access to one of the world's largest databases, containing large collections of legal articles and public records from all levels of government. Its content covers France, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, South Africa and the United Kingdom, as well as extensive coverage of the United States. TWL will update as negotiations progress.

New ideas

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OCLC developments

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TWL is excited about some recent innovations by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). The e-Switch API, currently under development, would allow readers and editors to access full-text versions of sources within reference templates. Read more about OCLC’s Wikipedia-related work here:

VisualEditor Reference Dialog Workshop

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For those of us who are citation nerds, there is a discussion on MediaWiki about how the new VisualEditor should handle reference editing - i.e., should it emulate the existing RefToolbar? Which citation styles should it support? What should the workflow look like? The developers would very much appreciate your feedback and detailed use cases to help them make design choices.

Photo contest idea

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There is a nascent discussion about starting a photo contest, along the lines of Wiki Loves Monuments, for libraries. Get involved here.

News from the library/archives world

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The current Open Access File of the Day
the beetle Neotermitosocius bolivianus
Kanao, T.; Eldredge, K.; Maruyama, M. (2012). "Two new genera and species of the termite symbiont lineage Termitohospitini (Coleoptera, Staphylinidae, Aleocharinae) from Bolivia and peninsular Malaysia". ZooKeys (254): 67–87. doi:10.3897/zookeys.254.4043. PMC 3561922. PMID 23378816.
This file is from an openly licensed academic publication and has been reused multiple times on Wikimedia projects. Nominate a file!
Use {{OAFD}}
  • The Library of Congress’ website, an essential resource to many cataloguers, researchers, and library professionals, is closed as a result of the US federal government shutdown. The Internet Archive is maintaining links to archived versions of much of the website: Internet Archive blog post
  • Update: As of Friday, October 18th, the LOC website and catalogues are back online.

Announcing WikiProject Open

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WikiProject Open kicked off in October, with several brainstorming and co-working sessions led by User:Peteforsyth. The WikiProject has two main goals: first, to improve Wikimedia content with the help of openly licensed materials, and second, to improve Wikipedia articles related to openness (including open access publishing, open educational resources, etc.). WikiProject Open is a big tent organizing portal for open access, open data, open science, and open educational resources.

New ways to get involved

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Please give feedback on Wikipedia Visiting Scholar requirements, such as tenure, edit count, content writing experience, etc., at Wikipedia talk:The Wikipedia Library/Wikipedia Visiting Scholars.

Subject Guides

To realize TWL’s goal of being a research hub for editors, we would like to start curating subject guides or pathfinders for topics. These guides would list established reliable sources within the topic area, as well as useful databases and serial publications. The idea here is that an editor wishing to work on, say, articles about geology, would be able to get a good list of reliable geology sources from TWL. This is a big project - however, if we enlist the help of expert editors through posts to WikiProject talk pages, and utilize existing bibliographies, the work is not so daunting.

Subject guide resources

New subject guides can be created using the “WP:Wikipedia Library/Subject Guides/Topic name” naming scheme. Please add “Category:TWL subject guides” to your page after starting it, and be sure to post a link to the relevant WikiProject talk page to bring in more helpers.

New initiatives

TWL succeeds because of innovative ideas. Please feel free to float ideas for new database partnerships, software improvements, and WP/library partnerships at the main TWL talk page.

Thanks for reading! To receive a monthly talk page update about new issues of Books and Bytes, please add your name to the subscriber's list. To suggest items for the next issue, please contact the editor, The Interior (talk · contribs) at Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Newsletter/Suggestions.

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