INFO 601-02 – Assignment 3 – Event Attendance – Maddy Newquist

On February 1, 2019, I attended an event at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus called “1 Librarian 1 Reference,” which was hosted by ASIS&T @ Pratt Institute and sponsored by Educators for Wikipedia at Fordham, Wikipedia Library, and Wikimedia Affiliates. The event’s tagline was: “Imagine a World Where Every Librarian Added One More Reference to Wikipedia.”

1 Librarian 1 Reference, or as it is referred to on their social media, #1Lib1Ref, is a global campaign organized by Wikipedia and its university workgroups to inspire librarians and other information professionals to contribute to Wikipedia articles—except that, instead of editing or writing articles, they would be providing citations for the content within the articles.

Why It’s Needed

Every Wikipedia user, from the casual interest reader to a researcher looking to flesh out a bibliography, has seen it. Instead of brackets containing a superscript number linking to a footnote, there is a bracket that looks like this: [citation needed]. The user has no way of knowing if the sentence(s) that precede this bracket are accurate, and the task of corroborating it is daunting—if the editor who added the fact couldn’t find it, when so many others had not hit obstacles in citing their own facts, how deep and challenging of a dive would it be to the user? The 1 Librarian 1 Reference campaign uses that lack of reliable sourcing as its base mission, hoping that both the immediate and long-term effect will be a benefit to Wikipedia users around the world.

The event began with a brief description of the goals of the event and the campaign at large, as in the paragraph above, as well as a wink and a nod to the fact that information professionals are the ones best suited to this task (more on that below). Attendees were then given a tutorial on general article editing and more thoroughly on the guidelines for adding citations. Afterwards, we were provided with a list of web-based databases that aggregate all the [citation needed] instances across Wikipedia, either by category, article, or even paragraph, and then were effectively set loose.

Our Responsibility to Transparency

Beyond the surface layers of providing an essential component to a reference encyclopedia, its users, and community, this event feels strongly, albeit subtly, relevant to the information field and the challenges it faces as digital resources become more available and library users increasingly value their independence and personal agency in finding the resources they need on their own.

Having librarians interact with Wikipedia is especially important because it continues to teach them about how the public/users search for information. The decades-long debate around information literacy is interesting to look at in conjunction with this campaign. If librarians and information professionals are meant to rethink the “’one-size-fits-all approach’ to information literacy” as Pawley suggests (446), why not treat Wikipedia as worthy of our time and effort in teaching users how to access information? Not only can we learn more about the ways in which users go looking for information, especially on a site that is, by design, user-controlled and user-organized, but we can lean into users becoming active agents in their search. Tewell points out that librarians are becoming increasingly invisible in the process—if we take opportunities such as this event to bolster information literacy from behind the scenes, we are helping the move away from the “traditional banking system” of education, so that students may teach themselves from equally trustworthy sources and be able to verify the path of information for themselves (27).

Share the Power

It also felt interesting to take a look at this event and its goals through the concept of the neutral librarian. As we’ve discussed in class, as well as seen in the Schwartz & Clark 2002 article “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” librarians, and their institutional counterparts, cannot afford to be neutral—their interaction with historical documents and the people who interact with them makes it nigh impossible. Although Schwartz & Clark are referring to archives when they note that archivists have “enormous power over memory and identity,” their call for the power of archives to “no longer remain naturalized or denied, but opened to vital debate and transparent accountability” feels especially transferable in the context of the 1 Librarian 1 Reference campaign. Librarians are gatekeepers, in both its positive and negative connotation, of information, and by taking part in the verification and validation of a public access resource in one really strong and clear way to begin the process of transparency of information creation, not least by linking to accredited sources that the public cannot find on its own.

A Final Takeaway

The leaders of the event emphasized that we didn’t have to solve every citation problem that came up first in a database search—we were instead encouraged, if we wanted, to look for missing citations in the categories we had personal interest or backgrounds in. And while, yes, you could argue that this is more bias, I think it further helps bridge the gap between information professionals and the communities they serve, when we can experience the personal stakes that the users feel when searching for information.

References

Pawley, C. (2003). Information Literacy: A Contradictory Coupling. The Library Quarterly, 73(4), 422-452. doi:10.1086/603440

Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1-2), 1-19. doi:10.1007/bf02435628

Tewell, E. (2015). A Decade of Critical Information Literacy: A Review of the Literature. Comminfolit, 9(1), 24. doi:10.15760/comminfolit.2015.9.1.174