permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Wikipedia and libraries: a match made in heaven - Boing Boing
http://boingboing.net/2013/03/05/wikipedia-and-libraries-a-mat.html

John Mark Ockerbloom's "From Wikipedia to our libraries" is a fabulous
proposal for creating research synergies between libraries and Wikipedia,
by adding templates to Wikipedia articles that direct readers to unique,
offline-only (or onsite-only) library resources at their favorite local
libraries. Ockerbloom's approach acknowledges and respects the fact that
patrons start their searches online, and seeks only to improve the outcomes
of their research -- not to convince them not to start with the Internet.

So how do we get people from Wikipedia articles to the related offerings of
our local libraries? Essentially we need three things: First, we need ways
to embed links in Wikipedia to the libraries that readers use. (We can’t
reasonably add individual links from an article to each library out there,
because there are too many of them– there has to be a way that each
Wikipedia reader can get to their own favored libraries via the same
links.) Second, we need ways to derive appropriate library concepts and
local searches from the subjects of Wikipedia articles, so the links go
somewhere useful. Finally, we need good summaries of the resources a
reader’s library makes available on those concepts, so the links end up
showing something useful. With all of these in place, it should be possible
for researchers to get from a Wikipedia article on a topic straight to a
guide to their local library’s offerings on that topic in a single click

I’ve developed some tools to enable these one-click Wikipedia -> library
transitions. For the first thing we need, I’ve created a set of Wikipedia
templates for adding library links. The documentation for the Library
resources box template, for instance, describes how to use it to create a
sidebar box with links to resources about (or by) the topic of a Wikipedia
article in a reader’s library, or in another library a reader might want to
consult. (There’s also an option for direct links to my Online Books Page,
if there are relevant books online; it may be easier in some cases for
readers to access those than to access their local library’s books.)