In the last quarter, we expanded our existing partnerships with publishers, with extended terms and new collections.
- The British Online Archives extended our access to a whole year after the initial pilot. Wikimedians can continue to access a wide range of primary source collections in humanities and social sciences from The British Online Archives. This collection is available to all eligible editors via the library bundle until June 2025.
- Springer Nature also extended our access for another year. We get continued access to their collections in science, technology, medicine, business, transport, architecture, and more.
- Cairn.Info has been providing access to scholarly materials in the humanities and social sciences, primarily in the French language. They have expanded The Wikipedia Library’s access to their newly released collections in law, science, technology, mathematics, and engineering. You can access Cairn.Info here.
- Finally, we have moved Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com back to email-based access methods. The proxy-based access was brittle and prone to errors, so we worked with Ancestry.com, the parent group of Newspapers.com, to return to the older way of distributing access. Interested community members can apply here for access. More than 200 users have already been given access.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve also been taking The Wikipedia Library to Wikimedia community conferences and publishing events.
- In August, we conducted a workshop about The Wikipedia Library with Wikimedia Canada. The workshop gave an overview of the library and how the community can use it for their Wikimedia projects. If you would like to arrange a workshop or a training session about The Wikipedia Library, please let us know by sending an email to wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org.
- We delivered talks about The Wikipedia Library at Wikimania in Katowice (recording), WikiConference North America in Indianapolis, and WikiArabia in Muscat.
- We attended the world’s largest trade fair for books, Frankfurt Book Fair 2024, to learn, network, and collaborate with the publishing industry. We met with more than 30 publishers, both strengthening our relationships with existing partners and engaging new partners to expand the library. We’ll be announcing new partners soon.
- We joined a London-based conference for product leaders in the publishing industry, addressing the topic of AI and the Future of Publishing: Predictions and Possibilities. There were animated discussions about both research integrity and the need for transparency and consent for training data.
- We’ve also been invited to introduce the Wikimedia projects and movement at the Dubai International Library Conference, alongside the Wikimedians of the UAE User Group.
The next Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention (WikiLibCon25) will be in Mexico City, 15-17 January 2025 and has the theme, Disinformation as a threat. Registration is open now and we hope to see you there.
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