On February 1, 2019, I attended an event at Fordham\nUniversity\u2019s Lincoln Center campus called \u201c1 Librarian 1 Reference,\u201d which was\nhosted by ASIS&T @ Pratt Institute and sponsored by Educators for Wikipedia\nat Fordham, Wikipedia Library, and Wikimedia Affiliates. The event\u2019s tagline\nwas: \u201cImagine a World Where Every Librarian Added One More Reference to\nWikipedia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1 Librarian 1 Reference, or as it is referred to on their\nsocial media, #1Lib1Ref, is a global campaign organized by Wikipedia and its\nuniversity workgroups to inspire librarians and other information professionals\nto contribute to Wikipedia articles\u2014except that, instead of editing or writing\narticles, they would be providing citations for the content within the\narticles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/em>]. 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\u2014if the editor who added the fact couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The event began with a brief description of the goals of the\nevent and the campaign at large, as in the paragraph above, as well as a wink\nand a nod to the fact that information professionals are the ones best suited\nto this task (more on that below). Attendees were then given a tutorial on\ngeneral article editing and more thoroughly on the guidelines for adding\ncitations. Afterwards, we were provided with a list of web-based databases that\naggregate all the [citation needed<\/em>]\ninstances across Wikipedia, either by category, article, or even paragraph, and\nthen were effectively set loose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond the surface layers of providing an essential\ncomponent to a reference encyclopedia, its users, and community, this event\nfeels strongly, albeit subtly, relevant to the information field and the challenges\nit faces as digital resources become more available and library users\nincreasingly value their independence and personal agency in finding the\nresources they need on their own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Having librarians interact with\nWikipedia is especially important because it continues to teach them about how\nthe public\/users search for information. The decades-long debate around information\nliteracy is interesting to look at in conjunction with this campaign. If\nlibrarians and information professionals are meant to rethink the\n\u201c\u2019one-size-fits-all approach\u2019 to information literacy\u201d as Pawley suggests (446),\nwhy not treat Wikipedia as worthy of our time and effort in teaching users how\nto access information? Not only can we learn more about the ways in which users\ngo looking for information, especially on a site that is, by design, user-controlled\nand user-organized, but we can lean into users becoming active agents in their\nsearch. Tewell points out that librarians are becoming increasingly invisible\nin the process\u2014if we take opportunities such as this event to bolster\ninformation literacy from behind the scenes, we are helping the move away from\nthe \u201ctraditional banking system\u201d of education, so that students may teach\nthemselves from equally trustworthy sources and be able to verify the path of\ninformation for themselves (27).<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also felt interesting to take a look at this event and\nits goals through the concept of the neutral librarian. As we\u2019ve discussed in\nclass, as well as seen in the Schwartz & Clark 2002 article \u201cArchives,\nRecords, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,\u201d librarians, and their\ninstitutional counterparts, cannot afford to be neutral\u2014their interaction with\nhistorical documents and the people who interact with them makes it nigh\nimpossible. Although Schwartz & Clark are referring to archives when they\nnote that archivists have \u201cenormous power over memory and identity,\u201d their call\nfor the power of archives to \u201cno longer remain naturalized or denied, but\nopened to vital debate and transparent accountability\u201d feels especially\ntransferable in the context of the 1 Librarian 1 Reference campaign. Librarians\nare gatekeepers, in both its positive and negative connotation, of information,\nand by taking part in the verification and validation of a public access\nresource in one really strong and clear way to begin the process of\ntransparency of information creation, not least by linking to accredited\nsources that the public cannot find on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The leaders of the event emphasized that we didn\u2019t have to\nsolve every citation problem that came up first in a database search\u2014we were\ninstead encouraged, if we wanted, to look for missing citations in the\ncategories we had personal interest or backgrounds in. And while, yes, you\ncould argue that this is more bias, I think it further helps bridge the gap\nbetween information professionals and the communities they serve, when we can\nexperience the personal stakes that the users feel when searching for\ninformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pawley, C. (2003). Information Literacy: A Contradictory\nCoupling. The Library Quarterly,<\/em> 73<\/em>(4), 422-452.\ndoi:10.1086\/603440<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records,\nand power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science,<\/em> 2<\/em>(1-2),\n1-19. doi:10.1007\/bf02435628<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tewell, E. (2015). A Decade of Critical Information\nLiteracy: A Review of the Literature. Comminfolit,<\/em> 9<\/em>(1),\n24. doi:10.15760\/comminfolit.2015.9.1.174<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" INFO 601-02 \u2013 Assignment 3 \u2013 Event Attendance \u2013 Maddy Newquist On February 1, 2019, I attended an event at Fordham University\u2019s Lincoln Center campus called \u201c1 Librarian 1 Reference,\u201d which was hosted by ASIS&T @ Pratt Institute and sponsored by Educators for Wikipedia at Fordham, Wikipedia Library, and Wikimedia Affiliates. The event\u2019s tagline was: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5278"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5281,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278\/revisions\/5281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Our Responsibility to\nTransparency<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Share the Power<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
A Final Takeaway<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
References<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n