Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/181

168 a key role within Wikipedia: they provide access to sources and can assess the impact of Creative Commons licensing in public knowledge transfer from higher educational institutions to the general public (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Comissió d’Accés Obert, 2020). Academic libraries possess deep expertise in Open Access research and education. Hence, they incorporate their skills on best practices on how to promote open knowledge values and its transfer to classrooms, research groups, and administrative communities, and consequently in academic outreach. As a result of this commitment, some Catalan universities, such as the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), have updated their institutional policies to enrich horizontal transmission of knowledge with licensing conditions suitable for Wikipedia (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2012).

As previously mentioned, the figure of a university librarian who is engaged with the Wikimedia values (and, in general, with the free knowledge movement) is of great value as it normalizes the still reluctant bond with the academic community. In the Catalan context, small- and large-scale projects have been developed, and are intended to promote Wikipedia’s academic impact. Examples of these combined systems, in which University libraries take the lead, are the creation of the Honoris Causa biographies; online librarian trainings during the COVID-19 pandemic; release of archive images to Commons; and ORCID links to Wikidata of admissible personnel at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s (UAB) (Allué & Casaldàliga, 2018); and the Viquidones permanent space edition at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) (Dengra i Grau, 2020; Martija, 2019). Other activities have involved edit-a-thons and scoring wikiprojects for students jointly promoted by librarians and professors at the Catalonia College of Music (ESMUC) (Catalunya Ràdio, 2020) or the above-mentioned support and mentoring to high schools by the National Library of Andorra (Diari d’Andorra, 2019).

In the same regard, librarians have contributed to official, longterm agreements between Amical Wikimedia and UAB or with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in order to promote workshops, training, conferences, open-access engagement, and #eduwiki projects