Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/Chronicling America

The Historic Maryland Newspapers Project at the University of Maryland Libraries and DC Wikimedia (official page | Meetup group) will be hosting an edit-a-thon on Monday, 18 August 2014 focused on using the newspaper sources available through the Library of Congress's Chronicling America (official site | Wikipedia page) database.

Participants in this edit-a-thon will learn about the Library of Congress's online public domain newspaper resources. Presenters will include Chronicling America staff and National Digital Newspaper Project members. The organizer of the Summer of Monuments WikiProject will demonstrate how Chronicling America can be used to tell the stories of America's National Register Historic Places.

When and Where

Monday, 18 August 2014, 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM

The University of Maryland's Hornbake Library, Media Room J (in the basement). See the Google map for the location of Hornbake.

For people unable to attend in person a live stream of the morning speakers and a chat room will be available through an Adobe Connect webinar.

Agenda

9:00 AM - Arrival and coffee
9:30 AM - Welcome, Liz Caringola, Historic Maryland Newspapers Librarian, UMD Libraries
9:35 AM - "Using Wikipedia to Make the Digitized Newspapers of the National Digital Newspaper Program More Discoverable": Preliminary Results, Donald Taylor, Wikipedian-in-Residence, Historic Maryland Newspapers Project, UMD Libraries
9:50 AM - Introduction to Chronicling America, Deb Thomas, Program Coordinator, National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), Library of Congress
10:20 AM - Introduction to National Historic Trust Library Collection, Doug McElrath, Manager of Special Collections, UMD Libraries
10:35 AM - Overview of the University of Maryland's Digital Collections and postcards, Jennie Levine Knies, Manager, Digital Programs and Initiatives, UMD Libraries
10:50 AM - Introduction to editing Wikipedia, Donald Taylor, Wikipedian-in-Residence, Historic Maryland Newspapers Project, UMD Libraries
11:05 AM - 12:30 PM, Editing time
12:30 noon - 1:30 PM, Refreshment provided
1:30-1:45 PM - Guided editing exercises using the Summer of Monuments Project, Leo Zimmerman, Project Manager, Wikipedia Summer of Monuments, Wikimedia DC. Here are some items we might discuss.
1:45 PM - 3:45 PM, Editing time
3:45 PM - Wrap-up and post-edit-a-thon survey

Goals

The Chronicling America edit-a-thon will offer a selection of prepared projects for attendees to work on:

Use Chronicling America sources to contribute to the Summer of Monuments project by researching the history of America's National Register of Historic Places monuments.
Create and/or expand articles pertaining to newspapers digitized by the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project

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

Requested articles

Articles to create

Newspapers

The American Republican and Baltimore Daily Clipper Y Y
The Baltimore Commercial Journal, and Lyford's Price-Current
Baltimore Daily Commercial
Civilian and Telegraph Y
The Daily Exchange Y
The Maryland Free Press - FYI for the editor who works on this one, there are three newspapers using this name in the US Newspaper Directory (from Rockville, Hagerstown, and Annapolis).
Pilot and Transcript Y

Newspaper editors

Articles to expand

Additional edits

File:Suffragette starves herself out of jail.jpg (added to Marion Wallace Dunlop) Y
File:Longview Park.jpg (added to Longview Park Conservatory and Gardens, Rock Island, Illinois, and May Day) Y

Resources

Web access

The Library will have wireless guest accounts for participants. Please bring your own laptop.

Free databases

Paid databases

The following University of Maryland subscription databases will be available to those onsite or who have UMD login credentials:

Access databases with your public library card: The Baltimore Sun and some other newspaper archives on ProQuest can also be accessed with a Maryland Library card. Here, for example is a list of databases accessible with a card from Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library system. Here is a similar list for members of the PG County Library. If you live in Maryland you can get a library card in either of these systems and in most others around the state. If you live in the District of Columbia or Virginia you can get a library card in PG County and some other systems in southern Maryland.

Books Online

Baltimore: Its History and Its People. Vol. 3, Biography. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1912.
Green, Duff. Facts and Suggestions, Biographical, Financial, and Political, Addressed to the People of the United States. New York: C. S. Westcott & Co.’s Union Printing Office, 1866.
Leigh, William, Jr. “The Press of Baltimore.” In Baltimore: Its History and Its People, edited by Clayton Colman Hall, 702-14. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1912.
Lowdermilk, William Harrison. History of Cumberland, Md. Washington, D.C.: James Anglim, 1878.
Scharf, John Thomas. History of Baltimore City and County, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day: Including Biographical Sketches of their Representative Men. Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881.
Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland. Annual report. 1887.
Van Arsdale & Company. The Strangers Guide to the City of Baltimore. Baltimore: J. D. Ehlers & Co., 1875.
Williams, Thomas J. C. The History of Washington County, Maryland, From the Earliest Settlements to the Present Time, Including a History of Hagerstown. Baltimore: Regional Pub. Co, 1968.

Archival and manuscript collections

Clara Barton Papers
Davis Family papers papers (Historic New Market, MD)
National Trust Library Historic Postcard Collection (digital collection)
- See Category:National Trust Library Historic Postcard Collection for postcards already in Wikimedia Commons. Ask University of Maryland Libraries staff for assistance if you want to use a historic postcard from the collection that has not been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey (Prints and Photographs Online Catalog)

Basics on editing Wikipedia

Help:Cheatsheet - quick guide to Wiki markup
Editing - The Basics has .pdf handouts and videos
Wikipedia Training, Includes a one-hour training for newcomers, and more extensive pages for teachers and Wikipedia Ambassadors
Wikipedia Tutorial is a hands-on approach that walks you through various aspects of Wikipedia editing

About Chronicling America

The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is a joint program between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC) to provide grants to one organization in each U.S. state and territory to digitize that state's newspapers. After the local organization has performed the work of scanning their newspapers, making an OCR transcription, and marking it up with the necessary metadata, the digitized newspapers are then made available to the public via the Web through the Library of Congress's Chronicling America newspaper database.^[1]

The University of Maryland Libraries' Historic Maryland Newspapers Project is a recipient of an NDNP grant and in its two years has digitized nearly 110,000 pages of Maryland newspapers, including Baltimore German-language newspaper, Der Deutsche Correspondent,^[2] as well as a handful of English-language newspapers from Baltimore and Western Maryland. On July 21, 2014, NEH announced that it would award the University of Maryland $290,000 of funding to digitize an additional 100,000 pages as part of the NDNP.^[3]

University of Maryland Libraries' Historic Maryland Newspapers Project has employed a Wikipedian-in-Residence, Donald Taylor, for the summer to conduct a study of what might be done to make Chronicling America a more useful source for people making contributions to Wikipedia, as well as how Wikipedia might be used to make the nation's newspapers more available to the American people. Your input into this study is encouraged during the day's event.

RSVP

Please indicate your intention to attend either by editing the appropriate section below. Alternately, you can join the edit-a-thon on the DC WikiMedia Meetup page for the event.

Will Attend

Taylordw (talk) 05:47, 16 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
DC_Elliott (talk)
ecaringo (talk) 17:47, 16 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Levjen (talk)
jenkinsk
Aluberht (talk)
Monumenteer2014 (talk)

Maybe Attending

Regrets

Will Attend Remotely

Users who are unable to attend in person can view our morning speakers and chat with us and each other using Adobe Connect chat room created for the event. To join our online meeting click here.

--KingJeff1970 (talk) 16:42, 31 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
--Mmespino (talk) Melissa Espino & Pat Reakes from the University of Florida
--Digitaleffie (talk) 18:27, 13 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
--MHBeals (talk) 09:13, 14 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
--extabulis (talk) 12:58, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Getting There

Via Metro:

The Green/Yellow line Metro includes a stop in College Park. The Green train stops in College Park all day. The Yellow line only stops in College Park during rush hour service, 6:30 AM-9:00 AM and 3:30 PM-6:00 PM. You can use the Metro Trip Planner to determine travel times.

The College Park Metro stop is about a mile-and-a-half from the University of Maryland campus. The University provides a shuttle to and from the Metro station that runs every ten minutes. The shuttle is number 104 and it picks up in the circle right at the top of the station escalator. See the University Department of Transportation Services page for more information.

Metro Bus:

The University of Maryland is serviced by the following Metrobuses:

C2 - between the Twinbrook and Greenbelt Metro stations
C8 - between the White Flint and College Park Metro stations
J4 - between the Bethesda and College Park Metro stations
F6 - between the Fort Totten and New Carrollton Metro stations

The buses all pick up and drop off at a station on Campus Drive, two blocks from Hornbake Library.

Driving:

The University of Maryland campus faces Route 1 / Baltimore Avenue and is two and a half miles south from exit 25A off the Capitol Beltway (I-495).

Campus Drive runs through the middle of campus and right in front of Hornbake Library. You can access Campus Drive from the east side of campus by turning off of Baltimore Avenue / Route 1 at the campus main entrance at the intersection of Baltimore Ave., Paint Branch Parkway and Campus Drive. If approaching the University from the west side of campus, access Campus Drive at the intersection of University Boulevard East and Adelphi Road.

See the Google Map of the University for more information.

Parking:

Visitor parking is available in the Regents Drive Parking Garage just north of Hornbake Library. Rates are $3.00 per hour, with a $15.00 per day maximum. See the University of Maryland, Department of Transportation Visitor Parking page for more information.

Parking is also available off campus at the College Park city public parking garage at the corner of at Yale Avenue and Knox Road at a rate of $.75/hour. The public parking garage is about a ten minute walk from Hornbake Library. See the College Park Downtown Parking Garage page for more information.

Post Edit-a-thon Report

At the end of the edit-a-thon, participants will be asked to complete a brief survey about the event. The results of the survey will be summarized here as a part of the post-edit-a-thon report to assist future edit-a-thon planners.

A the presentations were recorded and are available here.

Notes

^ "About Chronicling America". Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. n.d. Retrieved 16 July 2014.
^ "Historic Maryland Newspapers Project". University of Maryland Libraries, Digital Collections. n.d. Retrieved 16 July 2014.
^ "NEH announces $34 million in awards and offers for 177 humanities projects". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 30 July 2014.

[1] "About Chronicling America". Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. n.d. Retrieved 16 July 2014.

[2] "Historic Maryland Newspapers Project". University of Maryland Libraries, Digital Collections. n.d. Retrieved 16 July 2014.

[3] "NEH announces $34 million in awards and offers for 177 humanities projects". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 30 July 2014.

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