The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/March-April 2024

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes

Issue 62, March–April 2024

In this issue we highlight two new partnerships, upcoming presentations, an award spotlight, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

Partner announcements

The Wikipedia Library is announcing free access to two new partners:

IEEE Xplore: a research database for discovery and access to journal articles, conference proceedings, technical standards, and related materials on computer science, electrical engineering and electronics, and allied fields
Haaretz newspaper, including the English and Hebrew editions and TheMarker business daily

See all available partners on your My Collections page.

Let's Connect Clinic

The Wikipedia Library will be delivering two Learning Clinics in Let's Connect, a sharing space for peer learning among Wikimedian organizations.

This edition of Learning Clinic is to help the participants understand the workings of the Wikipedia Library, a demo of how the product works and the process behind building partnerships for The Wikipedia Library.

They will be held on 23 April 2024 at 16:00 UTC and 26 April 2024 at 7:00 UTC. Let's Connect participants and affiliates can register through the Let's Connect calendar.

Spotlight: Outstanding Professional Advancing Open Access to Cultural Heritage Award

This section is excerpted from Diff.

The "Outstanding Professional advancing Open Access to Cultural Heritage" Wikimania Scholarship, in memory of Effie Kapsalis, has the goal to recognize outstanding cultural heritage professionals and activists that are tightly working with the Wikimedia communities to make more cultural heritage available online as open access. The award, with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, will cover a full scholarship to Wikimania 2024 for a cultural heritage professional working on open access. This year, following the momentum of GLAM Wiki Conference in Uruguay, the award will be given to a professional from Latin America.

The award serves as a way to honor Effie Kapsalis. Effie's legacy to the world includes spearheading the Smithsonian Open Access initiative (launched four years ago, in February 25, 2020), which released millions of images from the world's largest museum, education, and research complex into the public domain. Effie put equity and care at the forefront of her concerns, being a champion for respecting the heritage of marginalized and oppressed communities.

Throughout her work, she often found support and allies in the Wikimedia community, and she was a fierce advocate for Wikimedia projects inside cultural heritage institutions. Without professional champions like Effie, Wikimedia's mission of the "sum of all knowledge" would be impossible to accomplish. She was also passionate about bridging the gender divide on Wikimedia projects, and that inspired her involvement with the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, which laid the groundwork for the new Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.

Tip: Microcontributions

Editors gain access to The Wikipedia Library's resources by meeting the criteria, which include at least 500 edits and at least 10 edits in the past month. One way in which new and returning editors can meet those bars is by making microcontributions: small edits that can be made quickly but still move the project forward. Here are some examples:

Several projects have a task centre (example on English Wikipedia) that collects a variety of tasks in one place for easy reference
Other projects list areas for improvement on their community portal (example on Wikimedia Commons)
Citation Hunt pulls out statements requiring referencing
The Distributed Game gamifies Wikidata contributions