The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/July-August 2021
The Wikipedia Library
In this issue we highlight design work on the Library Card platform, new collections, Wikimania, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
New Library Card platform design
The Wikipedia Library is continuing with its design improvements. With the latest update, My Library is now the first place you're sent after login. Instead of dropping you into an intermediary page, you'll now go straight to the page with the content you came for without any further clicks. The page has been redesigned and now incorporates collection descriptions, tags, languages, and filtering options. You can also quickly switch to the list of collections available to apply for without navigating away or re-filtering. For this first version we wanted to get to a point where we had matched the functionality currently available in My Library and deploy it for testing, and we'll now be building on this base.
Ongoing and upcoming changes include:
- Reworking user experience for eligibility (eligibility criteria now apply to the entire library) - T285929
- Adding EBSCO Discovery Service search bar - T240128, T269932
We'd love to hear what you think of the new UI - whether that's positive experiences, bugs and technical issues, or things you’d like to see changed, please share your thoughts here!
New collections
The Wikipedia Library is announcing several new collections:
- Oxford Research Encyclopedias – long-form peer-reviewed overview articles across a range of disciplines, available via the Library Bundle
- There are also four new German-language publications available from Gruner + Jahr: Art Archiv, Geo Epoche, Geo, and Stern.
Other partnerships with accounts available are listed on Library Card.
Wikimania
The Wikipedia Library presented a session at Wikimania 2021 introducing the library, providing insight into how it can be used, and detailing some of the upcoming technical and design changes outlined above. The session is now available on YouTube and will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons along with the other Wikimania sessions. Other sessions from the Wikimania program are also available via YouTube; if you missed out on viewing the conference live, you can check these out!
Bytes in brief
- (English) Wikipedia and open access academic repositories: the case of Colibrí
- (English) Unveiling the veiled: Wikipedia collaborating with academic libraries in Africa in creating visibility for African women through Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon
- (English) Crowdsourcing COVID-19: A brief analysis of librarian posts on Reddit
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