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Wikipedia:Meetup/Corning/Southern Tier history 2014

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Southern Tier Expressway
Southern Tier NY

The Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass hosted an edit-a-thon on Friday, December 5, 2014 focused on introducing local GLAM professionals to Wikipedia and editing articles related to Southern Tier history and culture.

Participants in this edit-a-thon learned about Wikipedia, the GLAM-Wiki initiative, and how their organizations can get involved in Wikipedia. They also had a chance to practice their editing skills and create and/or expand local and regional history articles

When and where

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Corning Museum of Glass Entrance
  • When: December 5, 2014, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST
  • Where: The Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass (website), 5 Museum Way, Corning, NY 14830
  • Cost: Free
  • Participants: No Wikipedia editing experience necessary; as needed throughout the event, tutoring information will be provided.
  • What to Bring: Attendees should bring their own laptops and power cords, if possible. Please create a Wikipedia account before the event.‎

Agenda

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Goals

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The Southern Tier history 2014 edit-a-thon will offer a selection of prepared projects for attendees to work on:

  1. Build Wikipedia editing skills through tutorials and basic edits.
  2. Create and/or expand articles pertaining to local and regional history.

If you have something else you'd like to work on you are welcome to do so!

Suggested articles and topics

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List of articles is in development

Please place a checkY next an article to indicate that edits were made; the mark does not mean that all the suggested work for that article was completed.

Create

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When thinking about pages to create, remember Wikipedia's guidelines on notability and notable people.

Expand

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Revise

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  • Elmira Prison - maybe split large chunks of prose into smaller sections and add more sources?

Add/improve citations

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Resources

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Web access

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Participants can connect to the "CMoG Guest" network while on the museum campus. Please bring your own laptop, if possible. A limited number of laptops and desktop computers will be available.

Library catalog

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You can use the following online catalogs to find out what books, journals, videos, articles, and other materials are in the Rakow Library collection.

  • The Rakow Library Catalog - Search for books, journal titles, videos, sound recordings, manuscripts, archives, and other materials.
  • Glass Article Index - Search this index for article citations from periodicals in our collection.

The Rakow Library also has a large number of bibliographies on different topics related to glass and local history. Ask the reference librarian at the desk if there is a bibliography on the topic you are writing about.

Free databases

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  • Archive.org - A huge array of digital texts, from archived webpages to digitized books, periodicals, videos and other media.
  • Cities of New York State, Celia M. Hastings Local History Room, a service of the Patchogue-Medford Public Library. Not a database, per se, but looks like a useful site for NY state history resources.
  • Chronicling America - Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1836-1922.
  • DPLA - A portal to 8,417,033 items from libraries, archives, and museums.
  • HathiTrust Digital Library - A collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world and contributed by partner institutions.
  • New York Heritage - A research portal with access to more than 170 distinct digital collections, totaling hundreds of thousands of items.
  • Old Fulton New York Post Cards - Search over 28,300,000 historical newspaper pages from the USA & Canada.
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The following Rakow Research Library subscription databases will be available to onsite participants:

NOVEL NY also provides access to:

For a full list of databases available through the Rakow Research Library and NOVEL NY, visit this page.

Books online

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Archival and manuscript collections

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The below links lead to catalog records with more information on each collection. Please ask a Rakow Library staff member if you are interested in using one of the collections.

Basics on editing Wikipedia

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If you have a question about editing, feel free to ask one of the CMoG Wikipedia editors for help! The Teahouse is also a great place to ask for help from expert editors.

Editing tips

  1. Preview your changes before you save them.
  2. Write a brief edit summary noting your changes.
  3. Don’t forget to use the help bar at the top of the edit box.
  4. Sign your posts on talk pages by adding four tildes.

Useful links

Attendees

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Please indicate your intention to attend by editing the appropriate section below.

Attendees at the 2014 Southern Tier history edit-a-thon at the Rakow Research Library of the Corning Museum of Glass.

Will attend

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Maybe attending

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Regrets

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Will attend remotely

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Users who are unable to attend in person but are interested in Southern Tier history are welcome to edit articles remotely.

Please notify me of the next Corning meetup

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Please add yourself to the Corning Wikipedians list to be informed of future Corning-area meetups.

Post edit-a-thon report

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At the end of the edit-a-thon, participants were asked to complete a brief survey about the event. The results of the survey and data collected at the event are summarized below.

Six attendees completed the post-survey report. Out of those six, three created their account for the event and four edited Wikipedia for the first time. Participants worked on The Wikipedia Adventure (5), created their user pages (5), expanded existing pages (3), and added citations to pages (2). They described themselves as librarians, digital communications specialists, and educators. Participants noted they were likely to continue editing Wikipedia and would attend future local edit-a-thons. They preferred the half-day event to a full-day event, and were more likely to come to a weekday edit-a-thon as opposed to a weekend edit-a-thon.