University of Alberta Library
The University of Alberta is a public research intensive university located in Edmonton, Alberta, and the library has a long history of supporting open movement projects. When a call went out to the library looking for short-term projects to be funded with donor money, Digital Projects librarian Sarah Severson pitched a WIR project. In February 2020, the University of Alberta Library hired Erin O’Neil, a digital humanities graduate student, to work part-time until August 2020, which was later extended to December 2020. e project had a $14,000 CAD budget and O’Neil’s hours fluctuated to accommodate her student schedule; she worked almost full-time in summer 2020 and up to 10 hours per week during winter and fall semesters. She brought some Wikipedia editing experience to the role as well as experience in community facilitation. O’Neil and Severson worked closely together throughout the residency as Severson had Wikipedia experience.
Residency Focus
One of the residency goals at Alberta was to engage the wider community to better learn how Wikipedia could help improve users’ access to our collections. In the first month of the residency, O’Neil participated in a #1lib1ref edit-a-thon organized at the library by Severson and helped facilitate a larger collaborative Art + Feminism edit-a-thon on March 5, 2020. When the COVID-19 lockdowns became a reality in Albert in mid-March of 2020, we moved all our programming plans online. O’Neil and Severson designed an online Wikipedia 101 course to give any interested library staff more in-depth training. The six-week course was delivered in March and April, and again in June and July. We also tried a few efforts to run virtual office hours and collaborative editing sessions but these didn’t find the same uptake. In an attempt to open up conversations beyond learning “how” to edit on the site and tackle the “why,” O’Neil and Severson ran an online, public speaker series in fall to dive deeper into three issues: public accountability, Indigenizing Wikipedia, and information activism.
