Books & Bytes
Issue 11, March–April 2015
by
The Interior,
Ocaasi,
Sadads
Welcome to the March and April edition of The Wikipedia Library's Books & Bytes. The Library has much to announce, including new global branches, an exciting batch of diverse new partnerships, an outstanding group of volunteer coordinators, and news from a wide range of conferences. For this edition's Spotlight, we have a special guest section from the creators of the Remixing Archival Metadata Project (RAMP) from University of Miami Libraries!
We're very pleased to announce the following new partnerships:
Many other partnerships still have accounts available. You can see a tagged list of them at our Journals page.
TWL is pleased to welcome four new coordinators:
We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or help with other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, signup here.
TWL continues to engage non-English Wikimedians to set up Library branches on their projects. TWL coordinators have created a new branch setup guide to help editors with the page setup and organization (translations of the guide are very welcome). This is a community-led approach; TWL recommends a consultation with the editing community in each new language to help create branches that serve their editors' specific research needs. Any multilingual readers are encouraged to join in on the setup drive.
Brand new branches are being organized with volunteers in several languages:
Existing branches on Arabic, Chinese and German are looking for ways to expand and better serve their communities. Potential next projects for expansion include:
Many galleries, libraries, archives and museums ( GLAM institutions) have acknowledged the benefits of using Wikipedia as a means to increase the visibility of their collections. Yet even for information professionals like librarians and archivists, it can be daunting to find the time and resources to tackle the Wikipedia learning curve and become actively engaged as Wikipedia editors. In the spring of 2013, a group of librarians, programmers, and archivists at the University of Miami Libraries came together to work on a project that could help bridge this Wikipedia participation gap.
We wanted to see whether it was possible to take some of our existing metadata, remix it, and republish it to Wikipedia; we postulated that a tool that did this would help librarians and archivists see some of the parallels between their existing standards for resource description and the way that Wikipedia structures its data, expressed as wiki markup. Archivists, in particular, have a tradition of contextual description that emphasizes the biographical and historical background of their collections. Many archival finding aids include an introductory section that reads in some cases like a brief encyclopedia entry. Moreover, a new metadata standard called Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Person, and Families (EAC-CPF) had recently been established to encode this kind of contextual information. So, that was where we started with RAMP, the Remixing Archival Metadata Project.
Essentially, the RAMP editor lets you generate records for creators of archival collections and publish the content of those records as Wikipedia pages. RAMP extracts biographical information from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids using EAC-CPF and converts it from XML into wiki markup for publication to the English Wikipedia. Along the way, it also allows for the integration of additional data from other sources such as WorldCat Identities and Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).
To test the tool and its associated workflows, we started with a thematic focus on a set of theater collections from the university's Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC). We reviewed a total of 32 finding aids to determine which ones had the most complete biographical content and identified 18 target collections for which to create Wikipedia entries. As a central part of the editing process, we released the text of the relevant finding aids using a CC-BY-SA license, per Wikipedia guidelines. The creators of these collections included a range of Cuban and Cuban American actors, directors, playwrights, and theater companies. Working on these articles also allowed us to strengthen coverage in the English Wikipedia of an underrepresented group of artists.
During the year following completion of the pilot project with CHC theater collections, we tracked web traffic and referrals from Wikipedia to our collections and found a noticeable increase in pageviews. From April to September 2014, there was a 67% total increase in pageviews for the 18 finding aid pages in the project over the previous six months of Web traffic (258 pageviews from October 2013 to March 2014 versus 432 pageviews from April to September 2014). Direct referrals from Wikipedia accounted for about 59% of this increase (102 pageviews). Although the absolute numbers are not large, the relative impact of this increased visibility is significant given the limited amount of traffic these pages had received prior to the pilot. Based on our positive experience with the pilot project, we have continued to use the tool to harvest and republish descriptive metadata from CHC finding aids. A list of pages created or edited using RAMP can be found at " Category:Articles with information extracted by the RAMP editor."
RAMP is still very much an experiment, and this initial phase of the project has focused on proving its viability. Moving forward, we would like to begin using OAuth for secure login functionality. RAMP has already been registered as a MediaWiki OAuth consumer, and we are investigating possibilities for integration. More generally, we would like to shift our focus toward linked data and incorporate a wider range of metadata--broadening the scope of the project to something like Remixing All the Metadata rather than only archival metadata. Achieving this goal would involve a significant redesign of the software, most likely using a NoSQL database platform like eXistdb.
Thanks for reading! To receive a monthly talk page update about new issues of Books & Bytes, please add your name to the subscriber's list. To suggest items for the next issue, please contact the editor, The Interior ( talk · contribs) at Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Newsletter/Suggestions.
Books & Bytes
Issue 11, March–April 2015
by
The Interior,
Ocaasi,
Sadads
Welcome to the March and April edition of The Wikipedia Library's Books & Bytes. The Library has much to announce, including new global branches, an exciting batch of diverse new partnerships, an outstanding group of volunteer coordinators, and news from a wide range of conferences. For this edition's Spotlight, we have a special guest section from the creators of the Remixing Archival Metadata Project (RAMP) from University of Miami Libraries!
We're very pleased to announce the following new partnerships:
Many other partnerships still have accounts available. You can see a tagged list of them at our Journals page.
TWL is pleased to welcome four new coordinators:
We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or help with other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, signup here.
TWL continues to engage non-English Wikimedians to set up Library branches on their projects. TWL coordinators have created a new branch setup guide to help editors with the page setup and organization (translations of the guide are very welcome). This is a community-led approach; TWL recommends a consultation with the editing community in each new language to help create branches that serve their editors' specific research needs. Any multilingual readers are encouraged to join in on the setup drive.
Brand new branches are being organized with volunteers in several languages:
Existing branches on Arabic, Chinese and German are looking for ways to expand and better serve their communities. Potential next projects for expansion include:
Many galleries, libraries, archives and museums ( GLAM institutions) have acknowledged the benefits of using Wikipedia as a means to increase the visibility of their collections. Yet even for information professionals like librarians and archivists, it can be daunting to find the time and resources to tackle the Wikipedia learning curve and become actively engaged as Wikipedia editors. In the spring of 2013, a group of librarians, programmers, and archivists at the University of Miami Libraries came together to work on a project that could help bridge this Wikipedia participation gap.
We wanted to see whether it was possible to take some of our existing metadata, remix it, and republish it to Wikipedia; we postulated that a tool that did this would help librarians and archivists see some of the parallels between their existing standards for resource description and the way that Wikipedia structures its data, expressed as wiki markup. Archivists, in particular, have a tradition of contextual description that emphasizes the biographical and historical background of their collections. Many archival finding aids include an introductory section that reads in some cases like a brief encyclopedia entry. Moreover, a new metadata standard called Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Person, and Families (EAC-CPF) had recently been established to encode this kind of contextual information. So, that was where we started with RAMP, the Remixing Archival Metadata Project.
Essentially, the RAMP editor lets you generate records for creators of archival collections and publish the content of those records as Wikipedia pages. RAMP extracts biographical information from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids using EAC-CPF and converts it from XML into wiki markup for publication to the English Wikipedia. Along the way, it also allows for the integration of additional data from other sources such as WorldCat Identities and Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).
To test the tool and its associated workflows, we started with a thematic focus on a set of theater collections from the university's Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC). We reviewed a total of 32 finding aids to determine which ones had the most complete biographical content and identified 18 target collections for which to create Wikipedia entries. As a central part of the editing process, we released the text of the relevant finding aids using a CC-BY-SA license, per Wikipedia guidelines. The creators of these collections included a range of Cuban and Cuban American actors, directors, playwrights, and theater companies. Working on these articles also allowed us to strengthen coverage in the English Wikipedia of an underrepresented group of artists.
During the year following completion of the pilot project with CHC theater collections, we tracked web traffic and referrals from Wikipedia to our collections and found a noticeable increase in pageviews. From April to September 2014, there was a 67% total increase in pageviews for the 18 finding aid pages in the project over the previous six months of Web traffic (258 pageviews from October 2013 to March 2014 versus 432 pageviews from April to September 2014). Direct referrals from Wikipedia accounted for about 59% of this increase (102 pageviews). Although the absolute numbers are not large, the relative impact of this increased visibility is significant given the limited amount of traffic these pages had received prior to the pilot. Based on our positive experience with the pilot project, we have continued to use the tool to harvest and republish descriptive metadata from CHC finding aids. A list of pages created or edited using RAMP can be found at " Category:Articles with information extracted by the RAMP editor."
RAMP is still very much an experiment, and this initial phase of the project has focused on proving its viability. Moving forward, we would like to begin using OAuth for secure login functionality. RAMP has already been registered as a MediaWiki OAuth consumer, and we are investigating possibilities for integration. More generally, we would like to shift our focus toward linked data and incorporate a wider range of metadata--broadening the scope of the project to something like Remixing All the Metadata rather than only archival metadata. Achieving this goal would involve a significant redesign of the software, most likely using a NoSQL database platform like eXistdb.
Thanks for reading! To receive a monthly talk page update about new issues of Books & Bytes, please add your name to the subscriber's list. To suggest items for the next issue, please contact the editor, The Interior ( talk · contribs) at Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Newsletter/Suggestions.