The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/January-February 2023

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes

Issue 55, January–February 2023

In this issue we highlight two new Bundle partners, a report from 1Lib1Ref, a spotlight on a search feature, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

New Bundle partner

The Wikipedia Library is announcing that Fold3 and Newspapers.com have transitioned to the Library Bundle, which allows access without application for all eligible users.

See all available partners that you can access on your My Collections page.

1Lib1Ref January report

This stats update / travelogue is excerpted from a report by Silvia Gutiérrez, Senior Program Officer Libraries (WMF).

#1Lib1Ref January 2023 marks the campaign's 7th anniversary, and we have decided to give our traditional stats a twist and travel around the #1Lib1Ref globe in eight points:

Let's start with our contributions-champions in Serbia, which celebrated the end of the campaign with 38 editors who edited 5,461 articles and added 12,689 references! We also love to note that the three top editors are a dedicated pedagogy student, a brilliant librarian, and a member of Serbia's Senior Citizen project. It is clear to us: a diverse team makes a great one!
While we're close, let us also celebrate other members of the CEE region. Polish Wikipedia contributors made around 4,000 edits in more than 2,000 articles; 29 editors of Romanian Wikipedia edited more than 600 pages; 16 editors of Bosnian Wikipedia gave reliable sources to more than 160 pages; the five editors in both Serbo-Croatian and Croatian Wikipedias; the four enthusiastic Czech Wikipedia editors, and the four Macedonian Wikipedia editors who managed to edit more than 700 pages! Let us close this CEE trip with a special mention to Ukrainian editors, who closed this year's campaign with more than 50 users, and made over 1000 useful edits in 700+ articles on various topics.
Let us move now to the French-speaking space, the second language on the board. This community has even created a podium, and it is exciting to see how they're planning to join the second round in May!
The 28 editors of the English Wikipedia have also made great contributions, and at least half of them are from the State Library of Queensland. Thanks to them, we now have verifiable information on 195 articles about the second-largest of the Australian states!
We fly to Catalonia and the 11-year-old Amical Bibliowikis project in which more than 200 libraries make knowledge accessible through Viquipèdia. To get a taste of one of their many long-standing partnerships, we can read this post about the Learning and Research Resource Center's 45 participants (who added 1,916 references!). And while we’re near, why not see Wikimedia Spain’s post on the campaign? There are many interesting highlights in this text: Extremaduran Güiquipedia is now third on the board, and library workshops had direct impact on the stats, so kudos to workshop leaders: Arantxa & Mentxu!
After a great trip, we arrive in Indonesia to greet the 21 users who improved more than 100 articles (from Agriculture in the country and art museums to earth worms and Lake Sipin)
We drive 92 hours and say hi to the 40 editors who have enabled readers from Malayan Wikipedia to easily access reliable information on Organic Agriculture, Maize, Sabah's people culture, and so much more!
Finally, we hop on an imaginary satellite and pass by editors in Swedish, German, Euskera, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Belarusian, Portuguese, Aragonese, Arabic, Asturian, Breton, Galician, Montenegrin, Dutch, and Norwegian Wikipedias. No matter how small the contribution, they donated their time to make knowledge reliable, and verifiable, one reference at a time.

You loved this and want to be part of it? Join the May edition!

Spotlight: EDS SmartText Searching

The Library Card platform uses a search tool called EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to provide a single search bar for many library resources. It includes a feature called "SmartText Searching" as one of its search options.

You can access SmartText Searching under Advanced Search, which allows you to enter a large amount of text into the search box. If you click on a search result you will see the option to find similar articles using SmartText. This will enter the abstract of that result into a SmartText search. SmartText Searching is also activated when you run a search that returns zero results; it's meant to expand your search to find potentially relevant content that doesn't quite match what you entered.

The SmartText search works by analyzing the text to identify key words and phrases. It then runs a search that assigns relevance weight to each word/phrase in a particular database, and uses that to return a list of results. This search will tend to return a higher number of results compared to other search approaches.