country as a whole, was going through a huge change and staff had to adjust mentally and physically to their new reality. Most were using their own devices rather than Library laptops or PCs, so many were reliant on machines that were slow, out of date, or were shared with other members of their households. Furthermore, the level of Wikimedia knowledge and understanding across the Library was quite low. The layout of Wikimedia sites, the concept of Talk pages and etiquette of communication, and the use of basic HTML tags when editing source code were new to a lot of people, especially nondigital natives and those who didn’t use digital technologies in their work.
In order to overcome these issues, the project team developed clear step-by-step instructions and guidance that covered all aspects of the workflow including how to set up a Wikimedia account and how to communicate with other users (“Wikisource:WikiProject NLS,” 2020). A project support group was set up on Microsoft Teams where staff could discuss the issues they faced; additionally, all documentation was stored on Office 365, so staff could read and access documents without requiring VPN access to the Library’s internal network. Rather than being assigned specific books to work on, staff were pointed to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that listed the books and the different workflow stages they were at; this allowed staff to select suitable items and to work on the project at a pace and time that suited them.
As mentioned above, the project team had very little time to plan this work in advance; one area that was initially overlooked in the rush to get the project started was codifying standards for the work being done. Wikisource has a Manual of Style (“Wikisource:Style guide,” 2020), which outlines guidelines and recommendations to ensure consistency and standardization on the platform. These recommendations mainly focus on trying to achieve an accurate representation of the original item in the transcription. For example using the {{center}} tag to bring a heading into the center of the page, or the {{text-indent}} tag for indented paragraphs, while also ensuring that the spelling in the transcription matches that of the original image. While this works well for straightforward texts, for more complex items it can be extremely time-consuming to ensure that the transcription accurately matches
