collaborations may be in the future, if the purpose of these collaborations is to leverage an organizations’ capacity to improve their strategy for open and public engagement (Stinson & Evans, 2018, p. 43), we should be thinking about an important face of sustainability: continuity. If WIRs continue to be short residencies, how can we keep these “little fires” burning? In the next section, I hope to show how we addressed this matter in the Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas (BDCV), and thus share some of the many ways we can keep our “flames” alight.
The BDCV Experience
In March 2017, when the BDCV’s dean Micaela Chávez and I decided to apply for a Wikimedia grant to hire a WIR we knew there had been no other residencies in Spanish-speaking academic libraries, and we wanted to build a plan not to be the last.4 The BDCV is the academic library of El Colegio de México in Mexico City, an institution of higher learning specializing in the humanities and social sciences. In March 2016 and August 2017, prior to the WIR experience, we had given Wikipedia workshops (Education/Countries/México . . ., 2019) and organized one edit-a-thon (Quiroa, 2017). These initiatives had started to catch the eye of other institutions (especially other libraries) and they wanted us to give workshops and share documentation. Unfortunately, our daily tasks left us almost no time to do anything else, and that is when the idea came to us: what if we applied for a Wikimedia grant that could help us bring together the tools we needed to help others build their own “fireplace”?
In June 2017, we got one of the seven Offline Outreach Wikimedia grants (Johnson & Jue, 2017). The next month, we launched the call searching for a WIR (Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas, 2017), and by October we had found the perfect candidate: Aidee Murrieta, a library student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who came to the job interview with handouts for everyone and a clear timeline for the project. One year later, we were writing in our project’s final report about the more than 100 articles that were written in our events, the 600 plus references our team added, the more than 300 elements created in Wikidata, the 13 workshops we conducted, the 4 edit-a-thons we
