Grants:Project/Smallison/Music in Canada @ 150: A Wikipedia and Wikidata Project
This project is funded by a Project Grant
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yorku.ca
Project idea
[edit]What is the problem you're trying to solve?
[edit]Explain the problem that you are trying to solve with this project or the opportunity you’re taking advantage of. What is the issue you want to address? You can update and add to this later.
The “Music in Canada at 150 Wikipedia Project” is a multifaceted campaign which pairs the professional skills of librarians and archivists with academics, music historians, musicians, students and local music communities to increase the quality and amount of content about Canadian music in Wikipedia and Wikidata thereby increasing the accessibility to music heritage for all Canadians and the wider online community.
The project had its beginnings when Stacy Allison-Cassin looked to Wikipedia and Wikidata for structured content for a Linked Open Data project focused on the folk revival movement in Toronto. She was surprised to find large gaps in areas where content was expected. Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood in the 1960s and early 1970s was a vibrant scene that launched the careers of many musicians including Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot. At one time more than forty coffeehouses were in operation in Yorkville, acting as vital hubs in the Canadian folk music and singer-songwriter scene. The storied Riverboat coffeehouse is cited in songs, such as Neil Young’s “Ambulance Blues” and Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote her hit “Universal Soldier” at the Purple Onion. Yet these iconic venues had no presence in Wikipedia. The Penny Farthing coffee house was commemorated with an official plaque this year, but there is no Wikipedia article. This lack of content impacts knowledge of Canadian music culture, the history of Toronto, and impacts projects on Canadian cultural heritage. See a presentation on the topic here: [1]
Lack of Content
[edit]The subjects of Canadian musicians, composers, genres, history and music venues currently suffer from a lack of cohesive online resources. The discontinuation of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada as a distinct resource, its incorporation into the broader Canadian Encyclopedia, and the subsequent infrequency of updates to or creation of articles on Canadian music topics is just one recent example of this trend. Most Canadian universities offer only one or two courses on the topic, with the bulk of course offerings concentrating on European classical music, thus further marginalising Canadian music as a subject within the music disciplines.
Krista McCracken recently wrote an article in "Active History" in which she laments the situation that, while Canada has a very rich and diverse history of folk and traditional music practices, the history and stories of these practices are not told by the media--leaving many Canadians unaware of the breadth of music making practices from across the country and from diverse ethnic groups.
The lack of easily accessible resources makes it challenging for Canadians to find information about music in Canada. Wikipedia is a large resource and an information “first stop” for many Canadians, yet content on Canadian music is relatively underrepresented compared to our knowledge of music making practices in Canada.
We offer the following brief initial analysis of coverage in Wikipedia:
- The Juno Award is the major music award in Canada and winning a Juno indicates notability and high achievement, yet many Juno winners have no entry, or a minimal level entry. The page for the Juno Award for Aboriginal Album of the Year is full of red links.
- The Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival held a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in November 2016 for content on experimental music in Toronto because they have recognised a significant gap in coverage [2].
- The Mariposa Folk Festival has been the biggest folk festival in Canada for over fifty years and performing at the Festival is a mark of high professional accomplishment. An analysis of performers from the first ten years of the Mariposa Folk Festival (1961 to 1971) reveals a gap in Wikipedia coverage: of the 217 individual music performers, 119 have no entry at all. Of the 97 performers with entries, 52% could be considered Canadian, or have spent a significant portion of their working lives in Canada; of this number, 40% have only stub records (21). In total, only 14% of the total number of Canadian performers have records that are not stubs, and of this number, a significant amount are “starter” class.
- The Canadian Music Centre was founded in 1959 and is the major source of post-1950s Canadian classical music. Composers wishing to become associate members and have their works collected and circulated must prove "notability" by undergoing a vetting process which demonstrates high professional competency. In a survey of representation of Canadian composers in Wikipedia, which provides analysis of a sample of composer entries from the Canadian Music Centre database, there is significant room for improvement of coverage of Canadian composers. The sample represents 3.85% of total entries in the CMC database. Of these entries (40), only 40% have pages in English Wikipedia, only 40% have pages in Wikidata, and only 1.75% have entries in French Wikipedia. As Canada has two official languages (English and French), this under-representation is significant. The data analysis can be accessed here. Of the 40% of articles included in English Wikipedia, 50% were classified as stub-class and 50% as start-class, leaving significant room for improvement.
- The Aboriginal music of Canada page is in need of much work. It is rated "starter" class and of the 11 people and groups named in the section "Contribution of First Nations music to Canadian Culture", only two are women.
We have not yet done an extensive survey of wikidata, but expect to have similar findings.
Lack of Connection
[edit]There are a wealth of resources created and curated by Canadian memory institutions and higher education institutions, yet for many Canadians, these are essentially invisible. Although the finding aids, research guides, and digital collections that Canadian memory institutions create serve an important purpose for those seeking information on music in Canada, they are often designed with specific constituencies in mind. For example, academic libraries and archives design resources for students and researchers at their institutions, and have them located within their own contexts (e.g. the library website).
Lack of Linked Data and Structured Data
[edit]Data contained in many sources is “locked down” and is difficult to access, and unavailable for researchers and the larger public for reuse and sharing, a problem when it is increasingly apparent that high quality, highly structured and standardised metadata is necessary for researchers across all disciplines. Wikipedia and Wikidata hold amazing potential as platforms for the mobilisation of structured data that can be reused and connected in a multitude of ways.
Opportunity
[edit]- 2017 is the sesquicentennial of Canada's confederation. Timing this initiative for 2017 allows us to take advantage of national energy and attention on consideration and marking of Canadian culture and identity.
There are existing events that we will be coordinating with, helping to increase participation and reach. Some opportunities include:
- #1lib1ref campaign from the Wikipedia Library. This is a campaign focused improving citation quality and building librarian involvement in Wikipedia
- Training Workshop. May 24th, 2017 at the University of Toronto. There is a large meeting of four major music societies, as well as the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Toronto in May 2017. Coordinating a workshop with these meetings will allow people to participate and save on travel costs. We will also be able to reach people who might not otherwise participate.
- Wikimania. August 11-13, 2017. Wikimania is taking place in Montreal which could enable an additional workshop and participation in Wikimania.
What is your solution?
[edit]If you think of your project as an experiment in solving the problem you just described, what is the particular solution you're aiming to test? You will provide details of your plan below, but explain your main idea here.
This project is modelled on the very effective Art+Feminism and Ada Lovelace Day distributed editing campaigns. Several of our group members have participated in these projects through their home libraries and we want to bring the same approach to Canadian music, but focusing on specifically on mobilising the librarian community. Librarians have access to high-quality resources, as well as deep expertise in writing in a neutral tone, knowledge of the power of metadata (thus librarians understand the importance of info boxes, categories, and structured citations).
We are proposing the following solutions:
- Create an overarching framework that models collaborations between librarians, GLAM constituencies and Wikipedians with target communities to create structured data within the Wikimedia projects, focused especially on Wikidata and Wikipedia.
- The project will result in sustained engagement with Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia and Wikidata by both the organizers and the participants. The project has already resulted in greater knowledge of the Wikipedia landscape and potential for libraries and researchers to get involved. With music librarians spearheading the project, we know we are in somewhat stable positions to continue the project in future, and continue providing in-kind time/resources. We know our universities like to support digital projects and big data projects. This project gives us a way of strengthening relationships within our musical communities; stronger relationships can only lead to stronger research collaborations in future. Several institutions have indicated an interest in creating a more programmatic focus on Wikipedia and Wikidata.
- Create a community of practice amongst Canadian music librarians, scholars and musicians that will be sustained beyond this one-year campaign. This engagement will take different forms depending on the individuals, but potential areas include Linked Data, pedagogical initiatives, or content-driven initiatives. There are several key components of the project that intend to spark online impact beyond the generation of more content on Canadian music. Librarians and faculty members have a stake in teaching digital literacies. Wikipedia provides an ideal platform for teaching about online communities, writing for the web, the importance of citation, issues around copyright, the importance of open access, open data, and licensing. A number of members have experience with the open access movement and this is project is a natural extension of this work.
- The project will increase the diversity of Wikipedia. As pointed out in the OCLC project grant proposal, most librarians are women and involving librarians will necessarily result in a higher number of women editors. We have also committed to focusing on specifically on traditionally underrepresented communities such as women and indigenous peoples.
We will develop:
- A toolkit with techniques for creating structured data to maximise reuse. This toolkit will be made available to the wider community to be used, updated, built upon, etc.
- Develop a collaborative project between libraries in Canada to build on the mutual goals between libraries and Wikimedia to expand knowledge, open content, linked open data, open data and open access to information.
- Techniques for surveying target subject areas. We will be conducted extensive surveys of the coverage of Canadian music in Wikipedia and Wikidata and lists of areas needing work will be created. This will identify areas that can and will be worked on in the future.
- Online Training materials for in-person workshops and online materials.
- Increase the amount of content by holding several events, culminating in a series of coordinated, multi-site edit-a-thons and related events on the broad topic of music and music-making in Canada, to mark the 150th anniversary of Canada’s confederation in October 2017. This will increase the representation of Canadian cultural content in Wikipedia, Wikidata and the Wikicommons, particularly for underrepresented areas. Our intention is to both grow the amount of content available in Wikipedia and engage in discussions of representation of music and musicians in Wikipedia.
- Advocate within the GLAM community on the "nothing to link to" problem (that is a lack of linked data sources in the cloud) so that Wikidata is considered a powerful option for creating structured data
We can test the following research questions:
- How might both the library and the musical community in Canada take advantage of structured data and create content that is more findable, more mobile and available for reuse and thus help to mitigate a number of problems highlighted above? We have a strong interest in working on improving structured data content on Wikipedia and Wikidata, especially in the ways Wiki projects can interact with digital humanities and digital library projects. The Music in Canada @ 150 will allow us to test contributions in this area as linked data and structured metadata are increasingly important as a means to connect disparate data stores. Several of the project leads are currently involved in linked data project related to music in Canada. Unlike content campaigns, it will specifically focus on collaboration with community partners to build structured data, a key building block of digital infrastructure. This will be achieved by focusing on creating or improving infoboxes, improving citations and connections to content held in libraries and archives as well as adding and improving the content in Wikidata. It also allows for advocacy within the library and archival community for considering ways content and collections might be mobilised. The experiences gained during this campaign will help us test assumptions and prepare education and outreach activities.
- Can interconnected initiatives such as concerts and panel discussions allow for better uptake and sustainability within the music communities?. For example pairing concerts with works specially commissioned for Canada 150 with an edit-a-thon event. How can music libraries and archives create new partnerships?
Project goals
[edit]Explain what are you trying to accomplish with this project, or what do you expect will change as a result of this grant.
- Create opportunities and mechanisms within GLAM (galleries, libraries, archive, museum) community for the use and creation of structured data in Wikipedia and Wikidata
- Expand collaborations between librarians, scholars and students in the Wikimedia project sphere in Canada through links with classes, research projects
- Increase the visibility of important collections and content in GLAM collections, with the possibility of integration with Wikicommons
- Understand the coverage of Canadian musical activity in Wikipedia to get a picture of priority areas and align the areas with local communities and potentially drive research projects
- Significantly expand content in specific priority areas
- Build local communities of expert users and support for ongoing work in Wikipedia and Wikidata and create a culture of sustained engagement by the GLAM and music communities
- Propel project goals through finding opportunities and alignments with activities related to the 150th anniversary of Canada's confederation in 2017
Project plan
[edit]Activities
[edit]Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organisers spend your time doing? What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?
The project will have 3 in-person outreach activities:
Music and Belonging in Canada at 150: A Wikipedia Summit
[edit]“Music and Belonging in Canada at 150: A Wikipedia Summit” held in May 2017 to coincide with the joint meetings of the: Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres,[3] The Canadian University Music Society (MusCan),[4] the Canadian Traditional Music Society[5] and the Canadian chapter of the Internation Association for the Study of Popular Music [6], and more broadly, the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. This meeting, open to Congress attendees and the general public will bring together the project team, pan-Canadian edit-a-thon hosts, external stakeholders, and a keynote speaker (TBD) for training (train the trainers) and discussion. This workshop will be open to 40 individuals. We will work on writing and expect to contribute 40 to 50 pages new entries.
Wikimania Montreal
[edit]We will participate and contribute to the meeting in Montreal and possibly hold a "train the trainer" session for Quebec participants, including the francophone community.
National Edit-a-Thon
[edit]- Coordinated national simultaneous edit-a-thon event and accompanying panels and concerts. There will be at least 17 locations. We estimate an average of 15 participants at each location we should expect a minimum of 225 people. We assume we will have higher participation rates in more densely populated areas.
Locations include:
- St. John's, Newfoundland
- Sydney, Nova Scotia
- Halifax, Nova Scotia
- Charlottetown, PEI
- Montreal, Quebec (2 locations)
- Kingston, Ontario
- Toronto, Ontario (2 locations)
- Hamilton, Ontario
- London, Ontario
- Winnipeg, Manitoba
- Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
- Calgary, Alberta
- Edmonton, Alberta
- Vancouver, British Columbia
- Whitehorse, Yukon
Other Activities
[edit]- Conduct pre-event surveys of Wikipedia activity amongst our network to better understand our national context
- Work with our network to look at ways local content and collections might integrate with Wikimedia projects. For example seeking photographs to illustrate articles.
- Survey at least 15 content areas to target and expand and we will continue to monitor these areas post-project.
- Create workshop tools for the distributed edit-a-thon on using Wikidata and creating structured data in Wikipedia
- Hosting panel discussions and concerts with local musicians, writers and composers to engage in discussions of the ways digital environments shape our national cultural narratives and our shared Canadian identity, particularly as it relates to music and music-making practices.
- Engage in discussions with the GLAM community, and especially the library community about this project. This will be through conference talks, articles and other public discussions
- Engage in post-event assessment activities and engage in report-out activities such as reports, conference talks and local outreach activities
Completed activities
[edit]- A steering group was formed in August 2016.
- A call for interest was circulated in May, June and July 2016 via an in-person conference and email lists. 30 individuals from organizations across Canada responded to this initial call demonstrating strong enough interest to move forward
- Personal network building in key areas
November/December 2016
- Continue to create network and follow up with contacts
- Outline and assess target areas, including surveying specific areas of local interest identified by volunteers.
- Develop project framework and detailed timelines and goals
- Assess best practices, available tools and training materials for working with Wikidata
- Programming and planning for the May Summit. Distribute a call for participation in November
- Outreach and planning with music faculties, departments, community groups, etc and look at area and level of participation. For example, will students be involved? Does it require course integration?
- Book site for Workshop event
- Create website and an event listing
- Choose a date for the edit-a-thon
- Strategize around Wikimania participation
January/February 2017
- Open registration for the workshop with specific slots held for site leads
- Develop online and physical training materials.
- Begin to gather reference and other material for use by local editors
- Plan the Summit and Workshop sessions. Look at previously developed curriculum materials
- Book sites for the national edit-a-thon event
- Plan and book speakers and concerts for the national edit-a-thon
- Plan press strategy
- Specialised outreach to conference participants
March/April 2017
- Planning for the Workshop, including local arrangements, finalising session, and final outreach
- Work on training materials
- Set-up entries to be worked on at workshop
May 2017
- Hold workshop
Summer and Early Fall 2017
- Post workshop assessment including review of training materials
- Work on target areas, including documenting articles requiring work
- Coordinate with local sites, ensuring strong admin and editing support
- Final planning and press outreach in September
- Final local arrangements (i.e. catering, room bookings, wifi)
- Hold edit-a-thon event
October/November 2017
- Post-event assessment and review with steering group and site leads
- Review of created content
- Participant survey
- Assessment of the efficacy of training materials and event success
- Post-even reporting out and advocacy through blog posts, articles, and talks
March 2019
- Plan summit
April 2019
- Plan summit
May 2019
- GLAM Wiki Summit
- Begin planning edit-a-thons
June 2019
- Coordinated edit-a-thons
Budget
[edit]How you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. (You can create a table later if needed.) Don’t forget to include a total amount, and update this amount in the Probox at the top of your page too!
Music and Belonging in Canada Wikipedia full-day Workshop and Summit (50 participants)
- Catering $1,000 (lunch and coffee breaks)
- Supplies/Contingency $200
- Live streaming and recording $1,000
Overarching project expenses
- Online project training material development (national) $1,000
- Promotional materials (national) $500
National edit-a-thon
- Catering (15 participants average at 15 nodes) $3,375
- Supplies/Contingency (15 nodes / $50) $750
Total: $7825
Community engagement
[edit]How will you let others in your community know about your project? Why are you targeting a specific audience? How will you engage the community you’re aiming to serve at various points during your project? Community input and participation helps make projects successful.
The heart of the project is the advancement of community engagement in creating structured open content on the web. Outreach is targeted to communities of all kinds, including communities of learners, ethnic communities and artistic communities. We will also engage with ideas of representation and identity of Canada’s diverse music-making practices. The secondary area of focus is to work within the realm of digital culture and online spaces and the ways digital environments shape national cultural narratives and our shared Canadian identity. To meet these goals we are focusing specifically on partnerships between academic libraries, public libraries, researchers, students, musicians, and the wider arts community.
- Focusing on a specific subject area and working with those actively engaged in music will ensure greater participation and retention of active editors.
- The project is also of interest to national organisations such as Library and Archives Canada and Women working in music. Regional leads, all music librarians, will work local communities within their specific regional area. We are also working to strengthen GLAM relationships.
- The workshop and summit will be timed to coincide with conferences that will see thousands of scholars from across Canada meeting in Toronto. We see this workshop as key to the success of the national campaign as it will allow us to hold "train the trainer" workshops. We will also hold discussion sessions for specific areas, such as incorporating the campaign into university courses on Canadian music, outreach and involvement of musicians and musical organisations and specific discussions for librarians and archivists.
- This project will involve valuable outreach to students. We, librarians and scholars, will be working with our student communities on content, but will also be providing training on digital technology, the landscape of "open" movements, and social media skills. Working with established scholars we will also be involved in training on writing and communicating to the public will also be part of the project.
Advisors
[edit]- Dan Scott, Chair (Library and Archives), Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario is a systems librarian who has contributed to the schema.org structured data vocabulary and RDFLib projects, enabled the Evergreen, Koha, and VuFind library systems to express bibliographic metadata as schema.org, published research, led workshops in the use of RDFa, and recently spoke about Wikidata's emerging role in the modern semantic web.
- John Dupuis, has been the engineering librarian at the Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University in Toronto since August 2000. He blogs at Confessions of a Science Librarian (http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/) and tweets at @dupuisj. One of his current projects is helping run Steacie Library’s Ada Lovelace Day Wikipedia Women in Science Edit-a-thon.
Sustainability
[edit]What do you expect will happen to your project after the grant ends? How might the project be continued or grown in new ways afterwards?
- We will be creating a toolkit for training purposes, with a focus on wikidata. This can be reused and adapted by other projects, creating a sustainable impact.
- We will be conducted extensive surveys of the coverage of Canadian music in Wikipedia and Wikidata and lists of areas needing work will be created. This will identify areas that can and will be worked on in the future.
- Increased collaboration among music specialists and Wikipedians across Canada
- Increased awareness in the cultural heritage sector around open access resulting a greater amount of content being licensed for use in Wikimedia projects.
- Participation in the project will raise awareness around the need for structured data resulting in a tighter connection between digital projects, digital collections, the tighter connections to Wikipedia and Wikidata.
- Increased pedagogical use of Wikipedia in undergraduate and potentially classes on Canadian music, digital culture, and beyond
- Participants will continue to engage with Wikipedia and Wikidata beyond 2017 and hopefully make use of, and adapt the model for future projects.
Measures of success
[edit]How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include specific, measurable targets here.
Measures of success are multifaceted. While this appears in name to be a content drive, the intent is actually focused on community engagement and programmatic developments that will lay groundwork for ongoing development of collaborations between librarians, scholars and Wikimedians.
- The huge interest the project has already generated amongst the Canadian music library and academic community and commitment from most of the academic institutions in Canada can be considered a success and is an indication there is a community interest. We have also had initial positive from the Canadian Wikipedia community and will work collaboratively with existing Canadian projects and initaitives.
- We will conduct several surveys of our participation network at key points in the project: pre-workshop, post workshop and post edit-a-thon to assess training impacts and ongoing engagement in Wikimedia projects. Surveying our participants at least 3 times will give us baseline numbers we can then measure against.
- The project will aim at improving target articles (250) with info boxes, structured citations and other modes of structured data. The project team will track the articles. There will be a focus on improving the quality of articles over the number of articles.
- The large reach of the project in the library and university community will expand the conversation and knowledge around open access, open data, open source and linked open data. Participation of several hundred people will ensure these conversations have taken place. Participation in the project will ensure this goal has been reached.
- We intend to engage in a number of post-event assessment activities as well as ongoing assessment. Following on the example of Art + Feminism, a project one of our grantees has participated in, we will survey participants as to both their experience with editing and the possibility of future engagement with Wikimedia projects. We will develop assessment tools and we will share these tools for reuse by other projects.
Get involved
[edit]Participants
[edit]Please use this section to tell us more about who is working on this project. For each member of the team, please describe any project-related skills, experience, or other background you have that might help contribute to making this idea a success.
We have been very successful in activating our community (music librarians, music scholars, and music community members) with representation from all universities in Canada with music programs. This is an impressive response and clearly demonstrates there is interesting and willingness to sustainably engage. However, it appears that this community has not been very engaged in Wikipedia. We intend to change this. Furthermore, our project is using a stepped approach, including a workshop and online materials, and we are engaging with our community on a continual basis.
Steering group
[edit]A steering group of librarians has been struck to guide the project and assist the geographically distributed nodes.
- Stacy Allison-Cassin. Smallison - W.P. Scott Chair in E-Librarianship, Metadata Librarian and Music Cataloguer at York University for 11 years. Stacy is also a PhD candidate at York University where she is writing her dissertation on Arcade Fire. She has been editing and creating content on Wikipedia for one year. Stacy has organised a number of large and small events, including organising and running the LODLAM Toronto meeting in May, 2016. She co-organized of the OneBigLibrary Unconference in Toronto 2008, as well as talks, presentations and panel sessions on issues such as open access, digital pedagogy and linked data. As a metadata specialist, she has worked on a number of research and digital projects. She is passionate about opening access to information and wrote the York University Libraries Open Access mandate.
- Carolyn Doi - Chittah - is music, art and art history, and education librarian at the University Library, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Sask. and the incoming president of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries. Carolyn has experience with edit-a-thons and in collaboration with a librarian at the Banff Centre led nodes of the art + feminism campaign in 2015 and 2016. She co-authored an article on information activism, which appeared in a 2016 issue of Briarpatch Magazine. Carolyn has a long-standing passion for community activism, especially in connection with libraries and information.
- Monica Fazekas, Monfaz is Student Engagement and Outreach Librarian at Western University in London, Ontario. She has either been the primary coordinator or part of small team organizing and implementing projects from inception to planning and design, implementation, monitoring, completion and evaluation, including RFID implementation in Music Library (project leader), UX team for website redesign, Western Libraries signage and branding for multi-library system (project leader), Western Libraries integration with Universities' Orientation Month including "Bash Outside the Stacks" event for approximately 400-500 people (project leader), work with Western Libraries' Development Officer on events for personal and corporate donors. She also coordinates communications and marketing efforts for Western Libraries.
- Jan Guise, jglibrarian is the Head of the Eckhart-Gramatté Music Library at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has expertise in numerous areas of music in Canada, particularly as it relates to the prairie region. Jan has extensive experience with project management, having led a major building renovation, and planned local and national conferences and workshops. She provided leadership to the Canadian music library community as President of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries.
- Sean Luyk Seanluyk is the Music Librarian at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. Sean oversees the extensive music collections at the UofA. He has expertise area of music in Canada and also in metadata, open access, and digital projects and recently worked on creating OAI-PHM compliant metadata for a unique sheet music collection, ensuring it is openly accessible and submitting is for inclusion in the Sheet Music Consortium. Sean holds an MA in Music Criticism and B.Mus from McMaster University, and an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario. Prior to coming to the University of Alberta in 2011, Sean worked in information management at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Sean is currently serving as Chair of the Canadian Committee of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), and Past President of the Greater Edmonton Library Association (GELA). His research interests span the areas of collegial governance in academic libraries, local music collecting, music information retrieval, scholarly knowledge-making practices involving sound, and web archiving.
- James Mason, careful73 Acting Head, Music Library, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. He has expertise in metadata and digital projects for music materials, particularly for sound recordings and archival materials. James has extensive project management experience and experience with open sources software and rights management. He has lead a number of digital projects, including an ongoing project on the violinist Kathellen Parlow.
- Brian McMillan, Director, Music Library, Western University, London, Ontario. Brian is the current president of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries. He manages the Music Library at Western, one of the largest music collections in Canada. He is also an active performer, singing in a number of choral groups in Toronto, Montreal and London. He has deep expertise in the area of vocal music and frequently gives talks at venues such as the pre-Concert talks at the Canadian Opera Company. Brian has organised conferences on the local (Rencontre annuelle de la Section québécoise de l'ACBM (2005-2013)), national (CAML conferences (2007 on), and international levels (IAML 2012).
Organization -level participant list (draft)
[edit]- Memorial University of Newfoundland
- Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia
- Cape Breton Public Library, Nova Scotia
- University of Prince Edward Island, PEI
- McGill University, Quebec
- Concordia University, Quebec
- Queens University, Kingston
- Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
- University of Toronto, Toronto
- York University, Toronto
- Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Toronto
- Western University, London
- University of Manitoba, Winnipeg
- University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
- University of Calgary, Calgary
- University of Alberta, Edmonton
- MacEwan University, Edmonton
- University of British Columbia
- Wikimedia Canada
Organizational/Wikipedia support
[edit]- Wikimedia Canada, through myself, is in contact with the organizer of this project. Some of our board members have review this grant proposal and agreed that it is a viable project. We are confident that the team behind the project is very professional, having contacts in universities and librairies. However, we understand that there is a lack of involvement from the Wikipedian community, especially from experienced Wikipedians to guide the creation of articles and the edithathons. This is where Wikimedia Canada will get involved, to breach the gap between the two groups and connect local experienced Wikipedians with the participants of this project in every location. More discussions will need to occur between myself and the organizer and I will need to see a more detailed breakdown of the activities and the calendar, but we will work together to make this happen. I am offering the Wikimedia Canada's wiki site as a working platform to elaborate the plan and collaboratively work to the success of this project. For example, we are planning to do a "National Contribution Month" in Canada where a series of edithathons are held accross the country during a month, it will be easy to fit several edithathons of this project within the National Contribution Month. This project also aligned with Wikimedia Canada's priority of engagin the librarians community with the contribution to Wikimedia projects. Thank you very much, Jean-Philippe Béland, vice president of Wikimedia Canada, Amqui (talk) 21:43, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
Volunteers
[edit]In addition to the members of the steering group and their associated institutions, we have the support of librarians and faculty at a further ten universities with additional volunteer leaders/participants at public libraries and Library and Archives Canada as well as well-known researchers on Canadian music history. These volunteers have extensive knowledge of their locally held music collections, a number have devoted their whole careers to writing and researching Canadian music, but have not yet looked at transferring this knowledge and experience to the web. Many of the librarian participants bring a wealth experience with metadata, and a strong desire to improve the impact of their collections as well as provide better outreach. These groups have already identified target areas such as fiddle music in Cape Breton, fiddle music in PEI, the "new music" scenes in Halifax and Montreal, women composers and musicians in the Yukon, Maritimes, Toronto, the important work of and indigenous musics in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta. Our intention is to train a number of these volunteers as leads in their local area.
Volunteers and content areas (preliminary list)
[edit]- Stacy Allison-Cassin, Librarian, Toronto. (site lead, Toronto) Folk music, folk revival and singer-songwriters involved in the Mariposa Folk Music Festival. Toronto music venues.
- Heather Sparling, Canada Research Chair in Musical Traditions, Cape Breton (site lead, Cape Breton). Fiddle music in Cape Breton
- James Mason, Librarian, Toronto. (site lead, Toronto) early Canadiana and sheet music
- Allana Mayer, Archivist, Hamilton, Ontario
- Julia Armstrong, Editor, Canadian Dictionary of Biography, Toronto. choral music, early music
- Monica Fazekas, Librarian, London (site lead,), music education in Canada and music in London, ON
- Alex Carruthers, Librarian, Toronto, local indie music
- Aaron Lupton, Librarian, Hamilton/Toronto, punk music scene
- Judith Cohen, Prof., Toronto, Sephardic music
- Kathleen McMorrow, Librarian, Toronto. Toronto Women's Musical Club
- Bonnie Woelk, Archivist, Calgary. Edith Fowke and her legacy
- Sean Luyk, librarian, local music in Edmonton
- Carolyn Doi, Librarian, Saskatoon. local music from Saskatchewan
- Volunteer I would like to help edit the proposal, shape the project, and run an event to support the goals of the project. 24.89.247.114 14:07, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- Volunteer Become a writer/editor for article about Canadian music. 129.100.106.79 20:03, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
- Volunteer editor/writer Bibliojo (talk) 20:04, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
Community notification
[edit]You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a Village Pump, talk page, mailing list, etc.--> Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?
On Wiki
- Posted notification of project proposal on the Wikimedia Canada and WikiProject Canadian Music discussion pages
Off Wiki
As stated above this project relies heavily on networks between librarian, archivists, music faculty and musicians. As such community, notification has taken place via multiple modes
- In-person announcement at the annual 2016 meeting of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries (CAML)
- A call for participation was distributed to the email lists for: CANMUS-L (CAML and the Canadian University Music Society), the Canadian Traditional Music Society and the Association of Canadian Archivists
- Personal network were activated to ensure national geographic coverage
- Volunteers made contact with their home institutions
- A notification was posted on the Facebook GLAMWiki global page
- A notification was posted on the Facebook Troublesome Catalogers page
Endorsements
[edit]Do you think this project should be selected for a Project Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project below! (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the discussion page).
- There is a definite need to increase the coverage of Canadian topics on Wikipedia, and this project will not just do that for music, but provide areas to link to for other Canadian content. 141.117.12.78 14:45, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
- This is a great project, definitely a nice extension of the kinds of experiments that we would like to see around project models like Art+Feminism. Its also very strong to shift towards Wikidata. Sadads (talk) 17:41, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
- Provide a valid reference resource to Canadians 130.63.100.151 18:04, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
- As a librarian at a Canadian arts institution with a large music collection the improvement of music coverage on Wikipedia is something that I heartily endorse. Wikipedia, as an open access resource, will give librarians, musicians, and researchers the opportunity to collaborate to bring together a definitive history of music in Canada. The funding of this project will ensure that accurate information is available on Wikipedia in the realm of Canadian music history.
- As a woman who has been working in experimental music and video art for over 20 years now, I see a very strong need to research, organize, publish, and disseminate the work of other artists working in these fields. Commercial media outlets often fail to address the rich legacy of cultural production in non-traditional Canadian arts and this puts our culture at risk of being co-opted by the voices of non-Canadian artists that tend to focus on commercially marketed work (which tends to be populist in composition and male-dominated). As digital publishing has opened up many new and competing streams for attention, it seems as though the "flash factor" of market-driven publicity is overriding the importance of creating in-depth historical research on how our past achievements have informed our current state of cultural production and technological developments. Our next generations deserve to have Canadian history in music production available to them, and as time goes by it will be more and more difficult to create these archives, so I fully endorse supporting immediate support of this project. - Carrie Gates (Saskatoon, SK, Canada, www.vjcarriegates.com)
- A nationwide collaboration helping local groups to collaborate on increasing the Wikipedia content about Canadian music history and also to create linked data is a wonderful example of what Wikipedia can do. (Full disclosure: I work with Stacy Allison-Cassin at York University.) WilliamDenton (talk) 14:49, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
- Looks like a good team of people involved, and a very valid goal (disclosure - I'm biased - I love Canadian music :) The Interior (talk) 16:09, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
- support expansion and documentation of knowledge about music in Canada Bliek (talk) 19:20, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
- I am a colleague of several members and believe they have the skills and knowledge necessary to carry out this project. I would join the project myself if possible! Lukasmiller (talk) 21:25, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
- Looks like a good model and a worthwhile goal. Nikkimaria (talk) 11:56, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
- This project will expand coverage of arts topics on Wikipedia, and provide cultural information for Canada's sesquicentennial. Jmclean13 (talk) 19:02, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- This proposal is deserving of a Project Grant and will make a valuable contribution to Wikipedia and Canadian music communities. The objectives and success criteria are ambitious but also well defined and attainable by the experienced and capable team organizing this project. I offer my full support and hope I will be able to be involved in some capacity. - Shannon Lucky, Assistant Librarian, University of Saskatchewan Sluckylib (talk) 21:59, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
- As one of the Wikipedia contributors who is active in the area of Canadian music to an extent, I can absolutely attest that we've always had a major problem in this area. While current artists in popular music genres are pretty well-covered, we've actually got fairly serious problems getting adequate coverage of less mainstream genres and older stuff. There were some holes even in 1990s pop and rock that I only just filled this year -- and going further back, by the 1970s the problems are horrendous. We've got major problems with francophone music. We've got major problems with folk and classical and jazz and experimental music. en:Caribbean music in Canada is absurdly inadequate (it spent five full years claiming that the genre only emerged in the 2000s until I caught and rectified that laughable absurdity, but it's still far from good). Even for basic no-brainers like Juno Award nominees and winners, we've got far more redlinks in those articles than we should. An active project to rectify some of the ongoing gaps would indeed be very welcome and tremendously important, people with expertise and access to specialized sources are definitely needed, and I'd be very happy to try to help out if I can. Bearcat (talk) 03:21, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
- I agree that there is a lot of missing articles that should already been covered about Canadian music. The Juno Awards is a good example, but also Canadian rock in general. For example, there are no album articles in en:Stompin' Tom Connors. Also, I've noticed a lot of Canadian albums only having a track listing, which is sad. There should be stronger Canadian music articles while also creating articles which should but don't exist yet. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 19:22, 12 June 2017 (UTC)