Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/297

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Gavin Willshaw

have taken part now have Wikimedia accounts, have been trained in the basics of editing Wikimedia sites, and have received a bespoke Wikisource overview from Sara Thomas, Wikimedia UK Scotland Programme Coordinator, and Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian-in-Residence at the University of Edinburgh. Several Library staff also attended the Wikipedia and archives webinar by Kelly Foster in April 2020 and the Wikidata and cultural heritage collections session run by the Science Museum in June 2020. All of this means that the Library now has a better educated staff about the value of engagement with Wikimedia projects and there is now a strong base to develop future Wikimedia-related work. Members of staff who are now back to work at the Library are still working on this project during quiet periods, meaning Wikimedia work is embedded in staff roles for the first time. Following the success of this project, a Wikimedia Community of Interest was set up at the Library, which has already had a significant internal impact. There has been more staff engagement with the 1Lib1Ref campaign and Wiki Loves Monuments, for which the Library uploaded over 100 images in the 2020 campaign (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020), an intern was employed to write articles about the Library and its collections, a member of staff attended the Wikidata Summer Institute, and plans are in place to run a Bannatyne Manuscript Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the end of the year in collaboration with the University of Saskatchewan. This project has been a catalyst for far greater Wikimedia activity at the Library and collaboration with the Wikimedia community over the coming years.

And finally, adding digitized books to Wikisource appears to have improved access to and use of the Library’s digitized collections. Although no large-scale analysis has been undertaken, a sample of five randomly chosen Scottish chapbooks on Wikisource was viewed an average of five times per book, which, if expanded to cover the 1,000 chapbooks already published on Wikisource, would suggest around 5,000 page views per month for the entire collection, a figure that adds to views on the Library’s Digital Gallery site, and may well be higher because of Wikisource’s superior search engine optimization (SEO). Indeed, another quick, internal test of five different random books