Talk:Draft proposal: Thurrock Libraries

We have run some similar things at the British Library, at Senate House and in Scotland. Yes librarians are exactly the sort of people who we should be showing how to use Wikipedia, but the training for them should be a little tailored to cover some issues such as citation styles, reliability and age appropriateness that are common queries that we can expect from librarians, as well as a reassurance that we are improving their skills at handling wikipedia related queries from their readers, not that we or their employers require them to start editing. We should also plan this for at least two, preferably three training weekday sessions as library staff will expect this to be delivered in working hours and they still need to staff the libraries. To ensure sufficient attendance at three sessions we would hope that Thurrock would act as the lead authority and invite colleagues from neighbouring boroughs. Assuming Thurrock has a reference library and a community of active library users it would also be good to extend the offer to include some training sessions for their reference library users. From past experience these events need to have an assistant or two on hand who can do a one to one session for those people turning up for guidance about contributions they have made that have been deleted or reverted. Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 14:07, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

This sounds like a great project. I hope it goes well. I think you're on the right track starting with the staff and developing their confidence and skills. I do, however, think that it would be worthwhile encouraging the staff to become editors and to later hold events for the library users. Local WMUK volunteers could provide support. This would allow the encyclopedia to be enriched, not solely by new content, but by a diversity of editors in the local community.

During EduWiki there was a twitter conversation about how Wikipedia was still seen as something of a closed shop in terms of editorialship. A project like this makes it possible to challenge that myth, and to help turn learners into producers. Encouraging library staff to become editors would also contribute to the discourse about the function of libraries. Making it easier for libraries to become places where knowledge is created, and made available to the world, rather than simply a place where knowledge is found has to be a good thing.--Graeme Arnott (talk) 07:15, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

metrics

The current water cooler discussion, amongst other things, is I think quite rightly highlighting the need to put careful thought into impact measurement. That might include metrics (no. of booklets taken is one, although not a great one!) it might also include more narrative forms of impact assessment, etc. I'll have a think about this too but perhaps this could be a space to discuss this here Sjgknight (talk) 15:30, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment Simon, it's a really useful point. Among the metrics I've been thinking of (and will be discussing with my contact at the library service before the end of the week) are things like number of booklets, number of library staff trained, outcomes of any supplemental sessions delivered for service users. I'm keen on having follow-up surveys / conversations with those people we train from the library staff at intervals of three and six months. Obviously any metrics would need to be agreed with Thurrock too, but one of the reasons they are so important for this project is to enable us to a) demonstrate its success (assuming it is successful) and b) to make a case to other local / county authorities that they should support (and fund) similar projects. If we get the metrics right this would be a very scalable project. If anyone has any thoughts on what metrics we pursue here, please get involved in the conversation! Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 15:46, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Great! So I think those metrics make sense to track (given they're rather easy) however they give us outputs (or actually, inputs in those cases) rather than outcomes. That is, they tell us what we did and some concrete deliverables, but not what impact it really had, which is where the followup comes in (or asking people to report when a relevant event happens - that might just be that they were able to show someone how to look at the talk page, or it might be a bigger training session). Challenge is tying them together, the at the end of this might be useful?. So in this case, our assumption would be something like "providing library training will facilitate librarians, and their clients in contributing to Wikimedia projects", our output is "We trained 3 librarians" and then hopefully follow up outputs "After 3 months 20 booklets were taken, after 6 months a further 30 were taken", "The 3 librarians trained a group of 3 new editors" (whatever). The outcome would be around establishing new contributors (tough one this eh?). These are clearly some very brief thoughts, but I'll keep thinking Sjgknight (talk) 16:12, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

This is why it's so useful to have an expert in analytics within the community! And now on the board, too - congratulations! Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 16:23, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Cheers Stevie. There must be other people in the community with charity backgrounds who've done stuff on impact. So one thing it'd be useful to think about from the library end is how easy it'd be to get people to give examples of concrete SMART goals, ideally we could give specific instructions to add a category/template to contributions which would a) give us that item as impact and b) indicate that editor route in (and we might want to track them further). Although there would be compliance issues we could probably estimate that and it at least gives some indication (if feasible) that isn't dependent on things like "intent to edit" surveys which are problematic for very obvious reasons... Sjgknight (talk) 16:53, 19 November 2013 (UTC)