RBMS 2015 Blog

Image Credit: Randall Munroe, Wikipedian Protestor, XKCD, (CC BY-NC 2.5).

When does a conference truly end? Whenever that moment arrives for you, whether that means returning home or moving on to new topics of conversation a few weeks or months later, some doubtless feel that a conference ends with the closing plenary. While we have an exciting closing plenary scheduled for this year, I encourage you all to extend your definition of “the end” of our 2015 Conference beyond this. After 12:30pm on Friday, June 26^th arrives, there will be a Participant-driven Service Project with the Friends of Sausal Creek (involving a different kind of weeding than what you may be used to), and a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: both provide opportunities to draw out your conference experience.

Additionally, as members of the Rare Books and Special Collections community and temporary members of the San Francisco/Oakland communities, these two events provide opportunities for us all to give back and engage in service-oriented tasks. This week, I would like to highlight the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which will feature Merrilee Profitt (@MerrileeIam), a Senior Researcher at OCLC Research, as Edit-a-thon Czar. Merrilee has been at OCLC since 2001, prior to which she was the director of digital archive development at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. One of her primary interests involves developing better relationships between cultural heritage institutions and Wikipedia, so who better to direct our efforts to improve this vast, beautiful, and at times treacherous resource?

There is no experience necessary in order to attend this Edit-a-thon, as there will be experts such as Merrilee on hand to help us get started. Joining an Edit-a-thon is an excellent way to learn the basics of navigating Wikipedia as an editor, and work through potential problems both technical and ethical that can be difficult to tackle alone.  Hopefully, this informal and fun event will inspire you to continue on as a Wikipedia editor, and encourage your patrons and colleagues to become editors as well, since your institution’s Wikipedia article can be a new patron’s first connection with your collections and resources. Learning to insert links, provide citations, and clean up gaps in grammar and content will strengthen both Wikipedia overall and your institution’s connection to various communities.

Merilee notes that the RBMS page, the ACRL page, and the Library catalog page are all in need of our help and expertise, but participants will be able to work on whatever articles are of interest.

The Wikipedia Edit-a-thon will take place at the Oakland Public Library from 2:00p-5:30pm on Friday, June 26^th. Don’t let your conference experience end too soon! Come join the fun, learn new skills, or polish your abilities!

– Elizabeth DeBold, Folger Shakespeare Library