User:Dominic/Catalog links

A few weeks ago on The Text Message, I introduced Wikimedia's Wikisource project to you. A sister project of Wikipedia, Wikisource is a free repository of primary-source texts which are transcribed, proofread, and arranged—like Wikipedia—collaboratively by a community of online volunteers. It is my pleasure to announce that since August 15, Wikimedia's presence now extends even into the National Archives' online catalog. The National Archives now links to any validated Wikisource transcriptions of National Archives documents from our catalog. You can see the pages linked so far at this listing. Each of these has a little icon on their page and a talk page banner that mentions their status as NARA-linked transcriptions. We are going to be adding similar links in our catalog to the Wikimedia Commons and Internet Archive where volunteers from the International Amateur Scanning League have digitized videos that the National Archives doesn't host in its catalog. In the future, there may be a field in the catalog record for adding transcriptions and we may have capability to embed full-length, high-quality sound video directly in the catalog records, meaning the content produced by online volunteers would be displayed in full in our own catalog, rather than having to link to an external web page.

If you take a look at http://research.archives.gov/description/306685 you'll see what these catalog records look like in practice:

I am excited because this means our efforts engaging the Wikimedia projects are not just benefiting visitors to their sites, but are also adding value directly back to our own site. Researchers using the National Archives' catalog will benefit even if they had never heard of Wikisource or Commons before, and wouldn't have visited them to find information about our documents. Finally, unreservedly recommending these sites, as the catalog now does, should hopefully also help demonstrate to the Wikimedia community that the National Archives supports and appreciates work by Wikimedians' which adds value to its collections, and encourage more of it.

On a more general note, there is enormous untapped potential here for archives and other institutions. Wikisource houses thousands of texts, many of which, especially the ones that are unique documents, are held in the collections of libraries and archives whose users would benefit from our transcriptions but will never find them using the institution's catalog and research tools. Some institutions, notable the National Library of Sweden, are already ahead of the National Archives in this regard, and nothing here is news for them. However, it's a shame that institutions are usually completely ignorant of the work done by Wikisource, because it means that its patrons are missing out. Institutions could also get involved more directly and donate their images of texts to Wikisource to encourage transcription, as the National Archives is doing, or even use it as a collaborative platform for the institution's own volunteers to transcribe its documents. Hopefully this is only the beginning of more similar partnerships between Wikimedia and those institutions which have a stake in its work to enhance their ability to make documents more accessible and usable.