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DPLAfest presentation-2016
- 1. Engaging students and highlighting DPLA collections through Wikipedia Shannon Davis Washington University in St. Louis
- 2. Driving traffic to your collections through Wikipedia The Wikipedia Library Internship class
- 3. Middle of the Semester: Contributing in volume Week 1: Establishing expectations and Wikipedia basics Weeks 2-4: Warming up to Wikipedia! Last three weeks: Polishing & reporting
- 5. Recruiting students Easy! They already work for us* *More on this later
- 7. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Kansas City Public Library Linda Hall Library Missouri State Library St. Louis Public Library St. Louis University State Historical Society of Missouri University of Missouri - Kansas City University of Missouri - St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis
- 9. Recruiting students They don’t have time to work for us
- 10. New article based on Street Begging in St. Louis by the Bureau for Homeless Men in St. Louis, MO Student contributions Added biographical information and citations to Eric P. Newman’s Wikipedia page Added image of memorial card for Elijah P. Lovejoy, abolitionist newspaper publisher
- 11. Lessons learned
- 13. Freedom bond asserting the freedom of Joseph Postlewaite St. Louis Grey’s Quick Step by Joseph (JW) Postlewaite New Wikipedia article!
- 14. Invoice incurred by Governor Brown at the Planter’s House Hotel from Missouri State Archives Image of Courthouse and Planter’s House Hotel from Missouri History Museum
Editor's Notes
- Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums have been using Wikipedia for years to drive traffic to our digital collections and increase accessibility and visibility This concept is nothing new, so to better organize this work, the Wikipedia Library has created a curriculum that helps GLAMs organize interns, instruct them in best practice for contributing to Wikipedia, and find support among fellow interns and community members
- Wikipedia’s Internship class page provides the structure for the semester long course and a timeline that is meant to be customized to an institution’s own needs In the first week, students set up an account, enroll in the course, and do some basic tutorials One particularly useful tutorial was the Wikipedia Adventure that is a step by step tutorial on how to edit Wikipedia and some info about unbiased writing, providing appropriate references, how to be a good Wikipedia citizen, and copyright issues After these tutorials, students can making small edits to Wikipedia In weeks 2-4, students should familiarize themselves with an institution’s collections, or in our case, the collections in the DPLA Missouri Hub Students will begin making more substantial edits to existing articles, add references to articles, and begin researching topics of interest In the middle of the semester, students should have a good understanding of how to edit WIkipedia and where to find resources. They can begin drafting articles or significantly expand existing articles, and give feedback to other students enrolled in the course. On the course page you can see everyone that’s enrolled in the course, do peer review, get help, etc. In the last few weeks, students should polish their articles and report what they did to their supervisor
- Our institutions are not the only ones gaining something from this internship course Students should be learning something and not just banging on the keyboard Wikipedia suggests some basic learning outcomes for the course, including Research and writing skills Using library resources and other reference materials to support their research and writing Applying research and writing skills to Wikipedia best practices, which emulates how students must adapt when writing for various journals or publishers Using CMS to develop web content Collaborative writing Media literacy Understanding the implications of using social media and web platforms as a place to disseminate and shape public knowledge
- The Wikipedia Library recommends that when hosting an intern, an organization should have an established practicum or offer credit or payment for the internship The intern also needs a supervisor to guide them through the course and staff willing to assist with research and collections to highlight Interns should typically be self motivated, writers who can communicate well, and able to learn new technologies and platforms Since this was the first time we were hosting interns, I extended the opportunity first to students who already worked for our department Many are graduate students who are extremely familiar with research and writing They are used to learning new tools and technologies from working on various projects in our department It would give us a chance to explore the course and its requirements with students we were already familiar with They could work from home and earn some extra money in their “off hours” Two of our student workers were interested in enrolling the course However, this did not pan out exactly as planned, which I’ll talk about a little later
- So how did WU get involved in this? Wikipedia Library program sent out a call to DPLA hubs looking for interested organizations to host interns who would feature content in their hub MO Hub partners were interested so we decided to host interns at Wash U initially and then possibly expand to other partner organizations
- Missouri Hub partners are all listed here Although the interns would be hosted at Wash U, we wanted to make sure this was inclusive of all MO Hub organizations, so we then ask partner institutions to suggest collections we might highlight in Wikipedia The partners came back with several suggestions that would help us focus our work with the interns At Wash U, in addition to collections we had contributed to the MO Hub, we wanted one intern to focus on content in Wash U’s Newman Numismatic Portal Explain NNP This intern would use the research and reference material available in NNP to contribute to articles on numismatics, Eric P. Newman who sponsored the project, and related subjects
- Once we had buy-in from our MO Hub partners, interested students, and some collections to start with we were ready to begin the course and started work in January 2016 The students initially got off to a good start completing the training activities and making small edits and contributions to Wikipedia articles They also participated in some related activities that happened to coincide with the timing of the course 1lib1ref was part of Wikipedia’s 15th anniversary celebration and was a campaign to increase verifiability of Wikipedia by having every librarian add one reference to an article The students and several librarians at Wash U participated in this and added citations to articles that needed them There was also an Art + Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon hosted at Wash U’s Art & Architecture Library to create and improve to articles regarding women in the arts. One of our students is a graduate student in the art school and served as a facilitator at this event.
- As it turned out, after about two months of the course, the students and I realized that we had overestimated how much time they have to devote to their schoolwork, work in Scholarly Publishing, and this third, independent job that we were offering them The third student who was focusing on the numismatic collection realized that she did not enjoy research and writing as part of her job because she is in the nonfiction writing program and spends so much time researching and writing for school Need lingo for numismatics The students made contributions, but the progress was very slow The two students made about 70 contributions total in the first couple months Good number, but not as significant of contribution as I had hoped I decided to hire a third student who would work on the Wikipedia course full time She began work in March and has made much more progress devoting all of her working time to this and working in our offices helps her stay focused and I can work more closely with her Over about a month, she made 50 contributions
- This is just a small sampling of the contributions made by our students They range from small edits to existing articles to drafting entirely new articles based on items in DPLA One student used a publication contributed by the Federal Reserve Bank on street begging in St. Louis to draft a new article on an anti-begging committee formed in St. Louis to eradicate street beggars from the city Another student added an image to enhance an article on Elijah P. Lovejoy, a well known abolitionist newspaper publisher who worked in St. Louis and Alton, IL and was killed defending his press A third student added biographical information to Eric P. Newsman’s Wikipedia page
- So after going through this course for almost one semester and it not turning out exactly as I had hoped, I’ve definitely learned a few lessons that will help in supervising our next course of interns First, hire students specifically for this project or devote some of their hours specifically to the course You will both think they have time to do this on top of their other school work and jobs, but they don’t Hire students that are interested in research and writing in addition to the research and writing they already do for school and make this explicit when they begin working Second, go through the course yourself first or alongside the students This will help you get a good grasp of what’s required during the course and a good feel for how to edit and contribute to Wikipedia You will find your way through all your digital collections and figure out which ones are most suited to feature in Wikipedia You will also make mistakes that will help you in guiding the students Third, make sure that you and your students become very familiar with Wikipedia’s guidelines and best practices Provide adequate sources for your contributions and carefully examine copyright
- The first article I drafted was on Erastus Wells, a former member of the House of Representatives for Missouri I was using a book in the MO Hub contributed by the Federal Reserve Bank called Episodes of My Life, by Rolla Wells, Erastus’ son and a former mayor of St. Louis When I submitted the article, it was declined because I did not have sufficient references If I was writing a research paper, this book would’ve been sufficient, but understandably, Wikipedia requires more sources to verify the information in the article and would prefer an unbiased source, not one written by the featured person’s son I also uploaded a couple images that were in the public domain according to the contributing institution, but were not published before 1923 When I uploaded these images, reviewers questioned the copyright because of this, even though I linked out to the contributing institution’s website These were good lessons in citing sources and copyright that I was able to pass on to our students
- Although, the students this semester didn’t make as much progress as I had hoped, because I was participating in the course alongside the students, I can see the potential for highlighting our various MO Hub collections in Wikipedia going forward There are some interesting stories to tell from our own Wash U collections, as well as among partner organizations Within our own institutional collections, using DPLA, I was able to find connections between materials that I thought would have no relation to each other whatsoever Our Music Library has been very active in digitizing their sheet music collections and we host those collections in our Omeka digital exhibit software, which then gets contributed to DPLA One of our most robust digital collections that we have continued to add content to since 2009 is our St. Louis Circuit Court Records project Reading an ebook on the history of St. Louis, I discovered a mention of Joseph Postlewaite, who was an African-American composer in St. Louis around the time of the Civil War Postlewaite had many compositions published, including several that are held in our Music Library and have been digitized Reading about Postlewaite, I discovered that he was a free person in Missouri at the time of the Civil War, which from working on the Circuit Court Records project, I knew meant that he would have to have carried a piece of paper with him asserting his free status These freedom bonds, held at the Missouri History Museum, who is also a DPLA partner, have been digitized and are a part of that collection Looking through our freedom bonds, I saw that we had one for Joseph Postlewaite, presenting a unique and new connection between these two collections and providing interesting historical context for a new article I drafted on Postlewaite for Wikipedia He was previously unrepresented in Wikipedia
- There are also promising possibilities for telling stories with contributing institution’s collections in the MO Hub Planter’s House was a popular hotel in St. Louis and there were 3 incarnations of it from the late 1800s to early 1900s While previously unrepresented on Wikipedia, the hotel played a part in many historical events in St. Louis and many prominent guests stayed there In reviewing MO Hub materials that could be used in this article, we found an image of the hotel from the Missouri History Museum and an invoice incurred by Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown from the Missouri State Archives These are small connections, but they prove the opportunity for connecting materials that have sat in separate locations and separate interfaces for years By bringing these together, we can enhance the stories behind the digital assets and create a more robust historical record online This is another benefit to contributing to Wikipedia - not just promotion, but enhancing historical value of your collections