Grants:Project/OCLC/Action Plan for Wikipedia + Libraries Training in Mexico/Final

This project is funded by a Project Grant

proposal

people

timeline & progress

finances

midpoint report

final report

Report under review

This Project Grant report has been submitted by the grantee, and is currently being reviewed by WMF staff. If you would like to add comments, responses, or questions about this grant report, you can create a discussion page at this redlink.

• To read the approved grant submission for this project, please visit Grants:Project/OCLC/Action Plan for Wikipedia + Libraries Training in Mexico.

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Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

After conducted research into Mexico's library landscape and meeting leaders at key library organizations, this project generated a plan to document how a Wikipedia+Libraries training initiative could be brought to staff of public and/or academic libraries who would benefit from the new skills and could apply the learning to help their users find reliable and relevant information through Wikipedia. This plan identifies two potential lead organizations that are based in Mexico, which would allow the training program to be created, piloted, and scaled. These organizations can be approached by partners and funders that wish to explore taking the plan into action.

Project Goals

Goal: “Produce an action plan for delivering a Wikipedia+Libraries training program for library staff in Mexico, so that libraries and library staff in Mexico can benefit from a well-constructed and implemented training program that will help them to guide community members’ understanding and use of Wikipedia, increase their information literacy skills, and expand their access to free reliable information on the Web.”

This goal was met through a series of outreach activities to learn about the Mexico library landscape, its organizational structure, and to cultivate relationships with key institutions. Outreach included attending conferences, visiting libraries and government agencies, having meetings with organizational leadership and other key personnel, and doing desk research. The information was synthesized into an action plan, the culminating output of the project.

Project Impact

Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets

1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
The project will produce the following outputs: (1) A summary of our research into and outreach to Mexican libraries; (2) Analysis and recommendation for training implementation; (3) Action plan for implementing training pilot and how it would scale beyond the pilot; (4) Identified lead organization and partners for implementation of training.	The four outputs are combined into the final Action Plan for Wikipedia+Libraries Training in Mexico
The action plan will identify potential training lead organization(s)	Two potential lead organizations were identified.
Cultivate, strengthen, and/or expand partnerships that can support New Reader goals in Mexico	The project raised awareness and interest in Wikipedia and Wikpedia training for library staff among leaders of several Mexico library systems and organizations.	OCLC did not pursue direct partnerships with organizations, but rather investigated the potential for collaboration between Mexico library organizations and the Wikimedia Foundation and/or community.
Provide the foundation for a proposal to secure funds to implement the training program	Elements are included in the Action Plan, but more details will need to be ascertained to understand the budget requirements and the funding sources	Organizational representatives from potential lead organizations will need more time and discussion with potential partners (funders, Wikipedians) before they will be in a position to flesh out details of a proposal.
Provide the Wikimedia community with a working example of integrating human-centered design and action planning into a bold approach	This project focused on understanding Mexico libray staff needs, the needs of the communities they serve, so that a plan would be centered on meeting those needs that align with the goals of the WIkimedia Foundation strategy and Wikimedia community.
Give the Wikimedia community more information about the Mexican library ecosystem that can inform future work in that region.	The Action Plan includes an overview of the Mexico library landscape, with details about key institutions, that will be helpful when approaching the library field for Wikimedia initiatives.

Story

Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

• This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
• Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.

The OCLC project team knew that the Mexico library landscape and infrastructure would be quite different from the U.S. system, but did not know the details of those differences. This project gave us capacity and motivation to learn a great deal about the history, organizational structures, and impact of libraries in Mexico, as well as information about library profession and perceptions of libraries in Mexico. This investigation provided useful information that can be used by those who wish to pursue training initiatives for Mexico library staff, and also sparked curiosity and awareness among leadership at several key library networks and agencies about Wikipedia and its relevance to education, information literacy, and lifelong learning.

OCLC staff relied heavily on our Mexico-based consultants to do the legwork to meet organizational representatives and broach the subjects of both Wikipedia and library staff training. Not only are there structural differences between Mexico and the U.S., there are also language, geographical, and cultural differences that need to be respected. This required clear and thorough communication between OCLC staff and the consultants, so that the talking points about Wikipedia, library staff trainng, and OCLC, could be accurately conveyed, and so that OCLC could gain a clear picture of potential scenarios for how to approach a scalable, sustainable training initiative in Mexico. So, an additional outcome from the project was OCLC's learning how to use intermediaries to establish contact and relationship with people in other countries where language and distance creates a barrier.

Survey(s)

If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

Other

Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here!

Methods and activities

Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.

• Outreach
  • Attending the Mexico Library Association’s annual conference.
  • Meeting in person with leadership of government agencies, library networks, universities, state libraries, and schools.
  • Meeting with Wikipedia Mexico’s president and immediate past president
• General research
  • Gathering facts and data about the library networks, history, populations served, and more.
  • Visiting physical library spaces and observing library interactions
• Scenario planning for how training could be designed and delivered
• Follow-up meetings with potential lead organizations
• Conference calls and emails between OCLC and our consultants
• Writing the action plan.

Note that the action plan document has more details about each of the above activities.

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

Action Plan for Wikipedia+Libraries Training in Mexico

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Your learning pattern link goes here

What didn’t work

What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

• Trying to get to specific details of a budget or proposal with potential lead organizations. This turned out to be a premature conversation, and one that is difficult to have without involvement of a funder for such an initiative.

Other recommendations

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

If the foundation is interested in supporting training on Wikipedia for Mexico library staff, we encourage that a program officer or other representative contact one or both of the organizations identified in the action plan. The Mexico-based consultants we worked with would be amenable to making introductions, if needed.

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense	Approved amount	Actual funds spent	Difference
OCLC staff time	19,430 USD	19,430	0
Regional Outreach Consultant	7,200 USD	7,200	0
Overhead	3,995 USD	3,995	0
Total

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

No.

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Yes.

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Yes.

Is your project completed?

Yes.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being a grantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the Project Grant experience? Please share it here!