 All right. My name is Pete Forsyth of Wiki Strategies and we'd like to welcome you to the third Bay Area Wiki Salon. My colleagues Wayne Calhoun and Ben Creasy and I started this up basically so that we would have an opportunity for people interested in Wikipedia, whether they're experienced or brand new to it to get together and talk informally but also occasionally have an exercise or a presentation that kind of exposes you to something new. So I think we have two pretty fun ones planned for this evening. Actually, I'll tell you about the second one first so then I can introduce the first. The second thing we're going to do is called a wiki dojo where we're going to have an opportunity to build a Wikipedia article together. We're going to kind of take turns and go through and get to see how different people approach that kind of process. So this is something I've heard of being done in a number of different contexts. I've heard great reviews of it. I've never had an opportunity to actually do it myself so I'm thinking that's going to be pretty fun. But before that we're going to have a presentation from Merrily Profit of OCLC which is a non-profit organization or the research arm of an organization that provides services to libraries all over the world. And she can maybe tell you a little more about that. And two of her colleagues from the San Francisco Public Library, they recently did a Wikipedia edit-a-thon for Pride at the San Francisco Public Library. So I think we're going to hear a little bit about that and a little bit about libraries in general and how they interface with Wikipedia. So I guess before we hand it over just a couple logistic things. The bathrooms are by the doors where you probably came in back here to the left across from the elevators. Elevators and stairs are over there as well. Wi-Fi, the WMF guest network has a password that is the number one and then all strung together edit can make a difference. All lowercase all strung together. One edit can make a difference with the number one. Any other logistic questions or anything before we get started? Anything I'm missing? Did you guys want to say anything? Thanks for showing up. This can be a little bit hard to get started in Wikipedia. So one of the things I've sort of had in mind here is that we can get people into the actual editing process. So if after the week he told you you want to actually do it yourself and you want somebody to walk you through it, then think of a username and I'll help you make a first edit. And I think in the future, just keep in mind that it's every last Wednesday and you can drop in. There's free food. It's hard to say no to that and come hang out with us. And I think if you have an idea of a talk that you'd like to give at some point or that you know someone that might want to do that, you should definitely let us know so we can schedule stuff because we actually don't have things. I think we maybe have one thing on the schedule coming up, but there's plenty of opportunity for that. Okay. All right, Marilee, why don't you get us started? Okay. Thanks to Wayne and Ben and Pete for making this monthly thing available to us. So Ben was saying Wikipedia can be a little bit hard and intimidating to get started with. And I'm here to talk to you about the synergies between Wikipedia and libraries. And libraries can sometimes be a little hard to interface with and to figure out exactly what they're all about. Libraries are frequently thought of as a place of books, but of course they're really much more than that. Libraries provide all kinds of access to all sorts of information and all sorts of formats. And so I'm here with my two colleagues from the San Francisco Library, Christina and Andrea, who are here to, yeah, let's hear it for libraries. So libraries taglines is really universal access to free information and knowledge. And that's your tagline too. So what I want to do, you know, I've been a Wikipedia editor. My username is Merrily. If you can spell it, you can find me. I've been a Wikipedia editor since I think about 2005, but I haven't been terribly active because I've got a full time job and a full time everything else. But what I'm really and truly passionate about is bringing libraries and Wikipedia more closely together because the minute I saw what Wikipedia has had to offer, I thought libraries really need to be a part of this. And I really genuinely believe that with all of my heart. So one thing that I've been really looking for are opportunities to bring Wikipedia's and libraries together. And if you looked at the agenda for this evening, you saw that there was a secret surprise and that's not so secret anymore. Some of you may have seen that last week at the American Library Association meeting in Orlando, we were awarded a night news challenge library innovation award for bringing libraries and Wikipedia's together. So this is a major grant that will allow us to roll out online training that's aimed at librarians that will help get them up to speed in editing and understanding Wikipedia. And this is really important to us to have buy-in from the Wikipedia community because one thing that we don't want to do is have you guys all terrorize that a whole bunch of librarians are going to hit the edit button and just start unleashing havoc upon the Wikipedia world. What we want to do is we want to make librarians true to Wikipedia's. We want to be able to teach them to edit thoughtfully, considerately and to embody the ethics of Wikipedia. It's very easy to edit Wikipedia, but really kind of embodying the ethos and what you should do and what you shouldn't do. And when you should just be bold is really important. So we'll be rolling out more information about that grant and the training in the next couple months. So we're aiming to get that off the ground and started probably in the next six months or so. So stay tuned for that. In relation to that, in bringing Wikipedia's and librarians closer together, one of the things that the three of us planned was a pride editathon at the San Francisco Public Library, which was June 12th. We had, I think, 10 to 12 people show up. It was a great group of people. These guys have a fantastic facility for doing training and kind of, you know, it's not this kind of a space, but it's a really nice space. There's free Wi-Fi and you're right there with the library resources to support you. So not only the electronic collections, which my colleagues will be telling you about some of the secret backdoor access to library resources, but also the physical resources in the library. So what we would like to hear from you, maybe a little later on today, is how can we continue this partnership in San Francisco? How can we use the library as a platform both physically and in terms of the collections to do more meetups and editathons? And what other topics could we focus on that would be useful where the library's collections could help to buttress our efforts? So we did Pride. Obviously, there's a ton of stuff that we could do that would be thematic and wonderful. And then finding we did it on a weekend afternoon. It was sunny outside. Maybe some people were inhibited because it was such a lovely day. But I found it really inspired to be there with people who were in unity with one another, really interested in making Wikipedia better and also using the library resources. So the main event in this library trifecta was not just to tell you about the grant and our efforts in training librarians, to tell you a little bit about the editathon and hopefully what your appetite for more. But the real main event is to turn it over to these two to tell you a little bit about the wonders that you can have access to that will help you with your editing and just in general life being better through your public library. So be it San Francisco public library or whatever your local public library is. So my goal is for every librarian to have a Wikipedia user account and for every comedian to have a library card. So that's a happy dream or multiple library cards because it's really cool to have a key chain with a lot of barcode cards on it. So we're going to show you how you can get a library card. First of all, who has one here in the room? Do I see almost 100% I don't want to point anyone out who didn't raise their hand, but I need a first camera to capture that. It was amazing. So you can get a San Francisco. Does are we talking San Francisco when you all raise your hands? Okay. So as a California resident, I'm just assuming everyone is or will not be but you can still take yours with you. You can travel with your card. I mean, you just need to be a California resident to get a San Francisco public library card. There's an online form. And then we have 27 branches throughout the city where you can go pick one up. So I think the closest here could be either we're kind of in between Mission Bay and Chinatown North Beach depending on your mood from this location. So and you want to get this card because we spend millions of dollars on databases. Yeah, lots of money and books to but lots and databases. So we want you to use those. So we're going to you guys are going to get some that you can use from your pajamas and edit away. So we'll show you some of those resources. We're kind of go having fun working the computer behind us while addressing our fantastic audience here. So a little bit of background and tag team on through. So one way to get through your pajamas is coming in here through our library resources. And this right here the top option articles and databases is going to get you literally millions of articles. We have a way that you could search across if you want to look at one particular topic and figure out where those may be. So if you wanted to search whatever topic that you are currently editing on and want to see I need a newspaper article or a journal article or maybe a statistic report or anything else in between. I think one of those could be useful here. Yeah, in the search articles. So I was looking earlier for someone looking at stem cells and they wanted particularly newspaper articles not necessarily the academic resource and they said oh actually maybe I do also want journal articles. So by typing in stem cells into this fine and dandy box right here it's going to search across all the resources that we have subscription to. And if you need to log in off campus like we are right now that is when that library card is going to become very helpful for you. So something like this. And it's a long string of barcode numbers so even I don't have my memorized so that's why it's handy to have it on a key chain or if you're using your own computer maybe just add that to your key pass. A question? That's a really good question. The question was what this is going to search if it's items that we have subscriptions to and you can actually turn that feature on and off. So some of this could be citations that we may have indexing to it might be that we have the full text of the article or it's aware that it exists out there somewhere in the world and as the library we're going to help you connect to that resource. So remember here. Let's not remember that right now. So we're doing the search in here for something like stem cells which was a question we had earlier today or stem cell research or any of these. You can start to limit down what your what your search results are. So if you're doing an article about the history of some cells or current events that are happening right now as Wikipedia articles tend to keep abreast of what's happening currently we have opportunity over here in the corner to kind of limit down what is we're looking for in the library catalog that might be just the books. We want to make sure it's a full text online article so you can actually read what that is today. You can say the discipline that you wanted it in. Is it a book review is a newspaper article is it a journal article. Do you care about the publication timeline. So you're looking for items that happened earlier in the 1950s or currently today. These are some of those features that are harder to find sometimes when you're doing a Google search or some of the other open web searching. And so this is here the power to it. So by clicking on one right now you could see I have access full text right now and it'll to answer your question where we're going to have that. So we can link directly out to the article. We say oh my gosh I'm really curious about this whole journal or you can see it actually comes in a variety of our databases. So we actually have some redundant coverage. So we get some bundles of this title from one we get bundles from a title from another. So this is one great way to kind of zero right into what it is that you're looking for. And here you go you get your PDF article right here. So you don't have to physically come into the library to look at these items your access with the library card is going to get you there. So that's one useful topic. Yeah not through our site but they probably that the. Oh pardon me. So the question was if I have a library card from another library not San Francisco can I still use this tool. On the San Francisco public library site you'd have to use a San Francisco public library card but their chances are they have a very similar tool. So it might be like you're looking for a box of Kleenex. You know that you can go into your local corner store or you can go into a supermarket you're going to find it. It's just how you go about getting to there. So it's worth looking on their site for something similar that talks about e resources or databases. And I will show you a trick about how you can plug in if you do have that key chain full of library cards the way you can plug in all of those and find some sources out using everyone's but as Merrily and Christina had mentioned it's very easy to get a San Francisco public library card if you are California resident. So we don't discriminate if you have other cards the more cards the merrier. So something else I wanted to show was some of the databases. So some people are familiar maybe from college years going into databases such as JSTOR or academic search premier. There's some interfacing that you could do in there to do similar searches. So I just wanted to show off that we have this A to Z list and this goes on for about 200 databases. We have ancestry.com the library edition. So if you're doing any searching to find out a date of birth or death or other things if you're doing some biographical research that can be really useful. We have Linda.com if you're learning some new coding. So we have a huge array of resources that you can access off site. So I think that's really useful and JSTOR I know is a common used database which will go back full text to 1838. It's not the only but this is a big hitter in terms of some of the academic and scholarly sources that people are looking for. So have fun looking at that and something else I wanted to let you know is you might find the citation. We don't have that access right then and there but we do participate in an organization called Inner Library Loan which is linked to OCLC and that is a network of thousands of libraries across North America and actually around the world. And so we have a lending program between libraries of books, articles, newspaper, microfilm, sheet music. What is he looking for? We really want to make sure that you can get that via the library. So it might take some time and some patience but if you can't get it today it doesn't mean that we can't get it for you. So I think that's really useful to have. So I'll pass the mic to some open and free resources the library has participated on making available digitally. All right. So we have millions of pages that we've been digitizing through our friends at Internet Archive so I'm sure everyone uses that as a resource and we have, I think it's over a million pages that we've digitized with the Internet Archive and our focus has been local documents so San Francisco documents as well as state and federal if it's connected to San Francisco. So we have a quick link to browse through our collections that we've digitized on Internet Archive and these are great resources for any probably almost any topic especially if you're a government document nerd but there's a handful out there. I don't know why it's going oh okay well I guess Internet Archive might have I don't know might be broken right now but this normally you would see a display of digital eye candy for you to select from and research and there's easy search boxes within the documents. Here we go. Here's your eye candy of choices. They do it based on popularity but you can always search back to. Back to. So here we are at Internet Archive and digital collections and I just want to we have eleven thousand items and texts that we've digitized here and if you ever want to just search right in it like we were doing some stuff for when we were doing our Wikipedia editathon for a couple weeks ago we were just kind of like if you wanted to do something about AIDS and the gay community there's lots of reports and trials and surveys that have been done so there's immediate resources for you a lot through of course city agencies like the Department of Public Health but these are always great for quick media like a lot of these reports have great histories and that type of thing at the beginning of them for easy citations and authoritative and the other part that I want to mention is we do have a database of 42,000 images and we when we were at when we had our little Wikipedia editathon a couple weeks ago oops thanks I can't type I can't type and talk and so we had I uploaded I'm the photo curator so I have access to 42,000 images so I worked with a couple folks who were editing articles and we were able to illustrate them and then another wikipedia who was there really wanted a photo to illustrate her article so I was able to upload those images with authority as holding the copyright so we have so search away we I would say about 65 percent of what we have online does not have copyright issues so we can upload those I learned I do want to do a dump of images in wikipedia so I'm going to work with our programmer on how to do that to write the script to make that question and I also want to figure out a way to make it like friendlier for wikipedia to use the database and get permissions so I'm always looking for feedback from that and and kind of you know that to follow of like every wikipedia and having a library card and every library and having a wikipedia page like that just kind of keep that conversation going of how san francisco public library can be friendlier for wikipedia and so there's that and then if you guys want to come you know do research not in your pajamas and we do have the archives for the city and county of san francisco at the public library we have extensive secondary resources we have what's called ephemera files these are old vertical files and they have newspaper clippings for shores printed materials that are like gems for editing and writing articles so those are the main things that we wanted to share with you all and so of course we want you to visit and it's a very nice place and in the archives I will say it's very quiet we like we do sh people there even though we're really loud right here so um and I wanted to leave you yeah you wanted to show one more I wanted to leave you with one more piece of how you can take your library card and play with it out in a place that most people are searching for and that's uh does anyone here use google scholar for searching okay have you turned on your library links yet aha great okay let me show you how this works um so if you go to scholar.google.com let me just punch that in here okay up here at the top under the the settings wheel where you generally see a lot of these how you turn on kind of advanced features click on that and then over here on the left hand side in the middle is library links if you click on this this is a great place that you can punch in whatever those local libraries are so let's say uh san francisco public library is good one to search obviously okay uh san francisco public library um maybe you have a alma mater from your previous university so maybe you have a library card from harvard maybe you have a library card from singapore maybe you have a library card from any number of other places that you get to in your travels search and turn these on and i think this will answer your question earlier about can i search what is at my other library at the same time once you've turned those on you could now do one of the searches in google scholar let's say for uh we are doing aids or we're doing stem cells or we were doing happy bunnies or whatever the topic is that you happen to be searching at that time and lo and behold we're starting to get these links that are showing up this will let you know that it is available at san francisco public library and by clicking through on one of these let's you know the pdf is freely available from a government resource here as a nih the national institute of health or san francisco public library clicking on those links will bring you back to that page that we visited where you can visit either the article or the journal or the source and so i think this is a great resource to play with no matter where you are turn on your library links and they'll have fun in google one way that the library can play with you out out there in the wild so i'm happy to have any questions we're really interested in finding out how we can make libraries a little more wiki friendly and would love to carry the conversation so thanks for your attention and we'll take some questions maybe when you have a break just to keep the things okay could you guys repeat your names before we take questions sure my name is andrea davis christina marata oh and mary leah so any questions we have one in here in the middle hi um so first of all i think like what you guys are doing is amazing i think this is uh i do have a library card i'm pretty sure it's expired you can renew it for free excellent i need to do that sometime but i have to say like the last time i did use it it was a while ago for sure and um you already had some of the electronic databases and stuff like that so it seems like what you have done since then um and and all this stuff like the partnering with the internet archive and so forth like it's it's absolutely incredible i'm excited about this um i am curious about how widespread some of like the knowledge that all of you clearly have about licensing issues about interfacing with other services other people and in this like broader community around trying to make you know free resources available um i'm curious how much your colleagues at the library um are aware of these issues um i had an experience a couple of years ago where uh i took a photography class that was offered at my branch of the library it was an awesome class it was in partnership with the chronicle um and uh they asked us to sign over you know copyright so that they could use you know the photos which of course makes perfect sense and all of those things but you know i had a question of like you know why aren't we at minimum creative commentings these right or doing something like that and so i'm curious if your other colleagues at the library are as aware of these issues as you are yeah there's three of us i'm just kidding um i think you did the through our eyes richman branch program yes so we have your photos in the archives all circle um so there are open discussions going on of trying to figure that out and putting more stuff in the public domain um that we physically have like in regards to photographs so um we're just kind of shifting around um in the archives so of providing more and for free so it takes um a little bit of a cultural adjustment in regards to that um and then also just we've had discussions for i think it's five years now of why our um website's not creative comments like we still have our website copyrighted you know um so it's very limited conversations and then i mentioned the city attorney's office earlier and they'll get involved with contracts when we're negotiating but they won't be as involved with actual like our you know copywriting our our our website or other licensing issues so um it's so i have a comment on this and this is that um librarians are very conservative not politically but in terms of uh their their general genetic makeup and that's for very good reasons you want people who are sorting resources to do the same thing day after day and be very consistent so conversations are definitely shifting within the cultural heritage communities overall but uh i think librarians are looking to their peers and seeing what they've done and new york public library for example has entered a very big you know has really very um uh publicly and in at scale put a lot of their digital collections into the public domain and other public libraries are watching that but it's hard to get the resources to be able to kind of turn on a dime so that when you've kind of put copyright on all of your images to then be able to turn around and take all of that off we don't have often the kind of technical resources or even like the legal resources to be able to think about that and do that but i think overall libraries are shifting this grant i think from the night foundation that helps to kind of wave a magic wand and say wikipedia libraries you belong together that's another thing that i think libraries are watching for things like that let's say it's okay to go into the water you know the sharks are not going to bite you it's going to be it's going to be fine particularly with things that are in the public domain that maybe we've improperly put copyright on too so i think libraries are shifting they need gentle encouragement not brow beating although sometimes shaming is sort of okay but yeah yeah and i'll tap in one last second on that notion which is kind of looking one more question okay perfect um only thing i'll say about that is just like the xerox machine the desktop printers and other technologies that come along libraries have weathered through a lot of those and so i think in these discussions is some experience as well in terms of how information can be copied distributed and so it's in in some of that guidance and how to make information available but also to respect you know uh those who created it too so it's a long conversation um last question you said thank you for switching people the library should provide what is scarce and quiet is is very scarce i wonder if you do anything to help well people be wikipedia and wikimedia readers in addition to providing resources for editors for example do any of those databases search search wikimedia everybody note wikipedia maybe wikipedia isn't isn't needed because it always comes up in google searches but wikimedia has a lot of other projects that are very relevant to people searching stuff like wikisource that would be nice of it if it does come up and congratulations if it doesn't it would be great to see i actually don't know of any libraries that include wikisource or wikimedia commons or anything like that in a federated search but certainly that would be i think that's a great idea for something that we should be returning to our patrons i know that a lot of free and open access materials are indexed in a federated search um but i don't know of any wiki projects that are can you guys think of any so that is a great example of ways that we could surface more wiki content to um to our audiences so thank you for that yes topics for future editathons bring them on and and uh i'm hoping to personally i'm hoping to make it back here on a more regular basis so hope to see more of you here in the future thanks pete okay thank you very much for that presentation that was i know i learned a lot it's uh it's always great to see what comes up at something like a library site when you're not looking seems like every time i don't look at a library site for a couple years and come back all of a sudden there's there's a much more available that's great stuff um for the next the next piece uh what we're gonna do is called a wiki dojo