Wikimedia and libraries

From Devwiki

Chuck Henry, Tim Spalding, Ismail Serageldin, Jakob Voss, Phoebe Ayers

Panel participants: Phoebe Ayers (University of California), Jakob Voss

To be invited: Ismail Serageldin (director of the BA), Tim Spalding (LibraryThing), Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) (or another representative of the Internet Archive project); possibly others

On this panel, we'll discuss Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects in relation to the world's libraries and knowledge-gathering projects.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina provides an amazing and inspirational setting to talk about how the world's largest encyclopedia-building and free-knowledge project to date fits in with libraries and knowledge-gathering efforts throughout history. The traditional concerns of libraries and of the Wikimedia projects are similar: to preserve information and knowledge, to catalog and arrange it, and to distribute it as widely as possible. As the Wikimedia projects mature, questions of how the projects can work best with libraries to achieve the goal of disseminating free knowledge -- and how libraries can work best with Wikimedia -- become increasingly important. What can Wikimedia learn from libraries? And what can libraries learn from the Wikimedia projects?

The panelists are library professionals from different countries, working in very different settings. Other invited panelists will bring further perspectives on other digital library and preservation projects from around the world. The format will be discussion, with Q&A from the audience (possibly gathered ahead of time online). The exact topics of discussion may shift depending on the ultimate makeup of the panel.