Whether it was food or knowledge you were craving, Friends of the Southport Historical Society served up a satisfying dish. Southport Town Hall was packed Aug. 4 for the group’s latest installment of the Donald and Joyce Duncan Lecture Series, “Cookbooks as Historical Evidence,” led by Marieke Van Der Steenhoven, Bowdoin College’s Special Collections Education and Engagement librarian.
Read the full article by the Boothbay Register here.
Linnea Minich, Research and Instruction Librarian at Bowdoin Library, delivered an interactive workshop titled “Citation Needed: Weaving Together Citation and Information Sharing with WikiEdu”, at LOEX, an annual conference on library instruction and information literacy in Pasadena, CA. Workshop participants used WikiEdu resources to determine which Wikipedia articles are most in need of improvement, then practiced adding a citation to those articles.
WikiEdu is a Wikipedia training and instruction platform offering training modules, customizable course pages, and classroom programs. While these resources are designed for semester-long courses, Minich demonstrated to workshop participants that these resources can be used in individual classes and other time-limited library settings to demystify the technically complex world of Wikipedia editing. As Wikipedia articles are subject to peer review by the community, this kind of participation can help students understand citation as a crucial part of the knowledge-sharing process, rather than as a formality.
The WikiEdu curriculum emphasizes the importance of improving representation on Wikipedia for under-represented groups. In Minich’s workshop, she showed participants how to find important articles that need to be improved by looking at WikiProjects like Indigenous peoples of North America and African diaspora. These WikiProjects are formed by groups of Wikipedia editors working to improve articles in a particular area.
Minich notes, “even though this workshop was during the last session block at the conference, I had some enthusiastic participation. The audience asked helpful questions about the practical side of these activities, and about Wikipedia and WikiEdu. I have used WikiEdu in three semester-long courses previously. It was great to have the opportunity to experiment with how this can be applied at Bowdoin to help students think about citations differently.”
Of all the technological contributions to Bowdoin’s library that the senior has made over the past three years, it is his digital map showing the library’s global reach that tends to elicit the most praise.
Read the entire article at Bowdoin News.