Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/232

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Notes from the Field
219

work and the task of communicating sometimes complex information to a general audience.

Residency Focus
Of our three case studies, University of Toronto focused the most on article creation and editing work. At Toronto, Jung’s writing work focused on adding information from the library’s unique digital collections to Wikipedia. He contributed work related to the discovery and early development of insulin, including new articles for “Connaught Laboratories” (2020), an institute at the University of Toronto that manufactured insulin, and “Rodney Bobiwash” (2020), an Anishinaabe activist and scholar who helped expand First Nations student support in Canadian education systems.

Jung created a comprehensive GLAM page at “Wikipedia:GLAM/ University of Toronto” (2020) Libraries for reporting on and tracking Wikipedia editing activity at the university and encouraging collaboration in the community. He also created a Wikidata aware “Template for archival records” (2020), so they could be linked to a Wikipedia page later in residency. While events and community engagement were not a focus for Jung’s residency, he did support edit-a-thons and other events when approached.

Residency Impact
As part of his editing work at University of Toronto libraries, Jung tracked the traffic from Wikipedia back to the university’s digital collections and found a significant increase in referral traffic. This gave the Library quantifiable data to show that Carliner’s goal of “being where the researchers were” was working (personal communication, August 17, 2020). This data helped them move Jung into a new Open Technology Specialist position that is covered in another chapter of this book. Statistics are not the only way to show WIR impact, but Jung’s tracking clearly shows how the library collection was being accessed and used by Wikipedia users.

In terms of the impact on the individual, Jung said the WIR helped him develop his research and writing skills and honed “writing for the sake of documenting rather than in support of an argument” (personal