Gavin Willshaw

“ Although no large-scale analysis has been undertaken, a sample of five randomly chosen Scottish chapbooks on Wikisource was viewed an average of five times per book, which, if expanded to cover the 1,000 chapbooks already published on Wikisource, would suggest around 5,000 page views per month for the entire collection, a figure that adds to views on the Library’s Digital Gallery site, and may well be higher because of Wikisource’s superior search engine optimization (SEO) . ”

“ It gave people who didn’t work with the collections on a day-to-day basis a much better sense of engagement with the Library and the materials it holds for the nation, and also helped them feel more connected with colleagues they hadn’t seen since before the national lockdown.
Added to this, the Wikisource project has also given people opportunities to develop their digital literacy and skills by introducing them to Wikimedia projects and teaching them how to navigate the sites, contribute to open-knowledge initiatives, and learn how to use basic HTML and mark up for the first time. ”

“ Typified by the use of woodblock illustrations and covering a range of subjects such as murders, disasters, love stories, and biographies of famous people, they were staple reading material for much of the population in a time before modern communication systems were invented (Hagan, 2019) . ”

“ In developing the steps outlined above, the project showed it is possible to set up an end-to-end workflow to successfully improve transcription errors using Wikisource and reupload those transcriptions back into the Library’s repository, which improves the search function of its digital collection. e project can be deemed a success: it has been estimated that at its peak there were more National Library of Scotland staff working on the platform than all other Wikisource editors combined ”