Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/55

42 In conclusion, all students were highly motivated by the combination of discovering and examining old books, learning about Wikipedia, and improving their literature search skills. All students passed the project with high results.

Impact in and beyond the Classroom

The collaboration between college staff (teachers, researchers), university library employees (curators, information specialists), and Wikimedia volunteers resulted in engaging and comprehensive courses. Evaluation of these courses suggests a valuable impact on multiple levels, both inside and outside the classroom. An important aim for the developers of these courses was to improve the academic information literacy skills of students, such as searching and analyzing historical information sources, communicating academic knowledge to a public audience, practicing encyclopedia-style writing, and referencing and citing literary sources. Surprisingly, practical implementation and hands-on experience with these courses suggest that the realized impact was much broader.

An additional impact of these courses relates to a unique element that differentiates them from other academic courses: the course results in the publication of the student’s work on an open-access platform. For many students, this is the first time that they expose and demonstrate their academic knowledge and skills to a general audience. Feedback from the students indicates that the prospect of this outcome results in increased motivation, readership, and a sense of responsibility and ownership for “their” Wikipedia article throughout the course. Students also indicate that this course contributed to their understanding about the importance of open-access knowledge transfer and valorization of information. For example, by contributing high-quality, scholarly articles to Wikipedia they can contribute to a positive image of Wikipedia as a legitimate information source freely accessible to everybody in the world. The hands-on experience of contributing to these processes resulted in a feeling of personal gratification and proudness.

In addition to the actual course activities, the library contributed by scanning the images and other relevant information from the books