| Institution | Resident's Name | Period Covered | Date of Report |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford | User:MartinPoulter | 1st April-30th April 2015 | 12th May 2015 |
This report covers the first month of half-time activity at the Bodleian Libraries. Naturally some time has been taken up with induction processes.
Content
editSummary objective: To make content from the Bodleian available for use on the Wikimedia projects.
In April I met with staff to discuss:
- Rare books
- The John Johnson collection of Printed Ephemera
- Oriental collections
- Early books/ Google books
- ORA (Oxford University Research Archive)
The Bodleian has a large variety of images online in its Digital Bodleian collection. I have been gradually reviewing these, identifying areas where sharing would address deficiencies in Wikipedia. So far I have found two themes of overlap.
The first theme is the Hebrew Bible Canon and the books of the Old Testament. This involves existing digitised material and connects with the theme of areas of history and geography under-represented on Wikipedia. The rare books collection also has early Bibles that can be photographed. My staff card has been upgraded to allow me to access areas where rare books are kept and the Communications office has suitable camera equipment.
The other theme is illustrated Arabic texts depicting notable people, buildings and legends. This relates to a lot of material which is already digitised, and paper materials from which I can request individual scans. Material from these two themes will be requested at the next meeting of the access committee (see Institutional policy section below).
I have put in a request for a small pilot set of files from the John Johnson collection under three categories of 18th/19th century material: 1) women in the penal system, 2) newspaper cartoons related to women, and 3) women in entertainment. One file is a short book that I am suggesting for transcription on Wikisource as well as a source for Wikipedia.
I met with Anne Manuel, Librarian at Somerville College, who has offered to digitise and share some images of notable women including a portrait of Ada Lovelace.
- Upcoming
I am pursuing meetings about
- Transcribing out-of-copyright books on Wikisource, where the Bodleian has scans and raw OCR text. There is a large amount of potential content and my intention is to identify reference books that will be of most useful to Wikipedians.
- Other workshops and events for Oxford staff
- Creating articles about medieval composers
- Access to Prof Dame Carol Robinson’s research (which includes a paper about women in science)
- Hosting an event for the local Wikimedian community
Community
editSummary objective: to expand, diversify and train the contributor community
The project’s first event is a one-hour staff development workshop in the first week of May. This has been publicised in the internal staff newsletter and in emails. See wmuk:Oxford_libraries_and_museums_May_2015
I will have a 25-minute slot in the Anybook Oxford Libraries Conference on 21 July.
Oxford Geek Nights have accepted my proposal for a five minute talk about “Bias on Wikipedia”. This will take place later in the year and is intended to interest the local tech community in events to address the bias.
I am not able to make local Oxford meetups at weekends, but Liz and I will approach the Oxford Internet Institute about hosting a mid-week event for Wikipedians.
I met with Sarah Loving, a writer/ web content manager with two jobs in the University. We discussed Wikipedia editing, managing conflicts of interest and the overlap of Wikimedia and Open Access. I followed up by emailing materials for new users. She has since created an account (User:SarahPowellLoving) and made her first edits.
I am gradually building a list of target articles for creation and improvement in future editathons (“the redlist”) and red-linking articles to highlight their absence. The project has drawn the attention of Monica Green, a US-based historian, who has emailed helpful references which I will use to identify other targets.
I attended a talk about a British Library Labs/ Edge Hill University project which is transcribing and reusing Victorian jokes. I’ve followed up in email suggesting they use Wikisource as a platform and in volunteer time I’ve transcribed some pages of a joke book as an example.
Institutional policy
editSummary objective: Shape and implement policies and workflows for licensing and releasing digital media and reporting their use and impact.
The phrase “Digital Shift” is often used here, and staff are convinced of the virtue of making digitised content visible online without charge. Staff appreciate that making their content visible on Wikipedia benefits the collection by raising awareness and promoting use. Less appreciated is what might be called the “Open Shift” exemplified by the Open GLAM principles and the Free Culture movement which includes Wikimedia. People are keen to share content for education and research purposes, but not for someone else to make money from. Bodleian image files normally have a Noncommercial clause, which rules out their use on Wikimedia, whose content must be reusable by any one for any purpose.
In preparation for this Wikimedian In Residence project, the Bodleian has created a new workflow for re-licensing digital content, for purposes including upload to Wikimedia. An Access and Reuse Committee will meet on this topic on 28th May to consider my requests for content.
I am trying to address collection holders’ concerns about intellectual property in one-to-one meetings and in the staff workshop. I make the following points in favour of free licences.
- Sharing the content improves the content (examples from Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource).
- “High resolution” files on the web are not “high resolution” by the standards of conservation professionals. The 1000px-1500px images that are fine for Wikimedia are much smaller than the archive-quality scans.
- When content is available freely on the most popular educational website, it is harder, not easier, for a third party to make money selling it.
- The Open Shift is a change happening now across academia and education. The policies of the major funding councils and HEFCE require research outputs to be not just online but freely reusable (with some exceptions for non-commercial licensing). The definition of Open Educational Resources also requires them to be freely licenced.
My request for scans from the John Johnson collection has started off an internal discussion about a process for re-licensing of this kind of material. These scans are a special case as the material is currently held by ProQuest, owned by Bodleian but subject to a contract with ProQuest. Once a procedure has been decided for this pilot material, future decisions will be quicker.