The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/September-October 2022

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes

Issue 53, September–October 2022

In this issue we highlight new partnerships, a new feature on the Library Card Platform, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

New partners[edit]

The Wikipedia Library is announcing free, full-access, access to new partners:

Edward Elgar: an independent academic and professional publisher with a strong focus on law, business and the social sciences.
E-Yearbook: one of the largest online collections of scanned historical US high school, military, college and university yearbooks.
Corriere della Serra and their archives: one of Italy's oldest and most read newspapers.
Wikilala: a digital repository containing newspapers, documents, journals, and books concerning the history of the Ottoman Empire.

In addition, Ancestry is now available without an application, and several of the Oxford University Press collections that were temporarily unavailable have been brought back online, including Oxford Music Online and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

New feature: Outage notification[edit]

A new feature has been implemented on the Library Card Platform: outage notifications. In the event that a partnership is temporarily unavailable (such as the Oxford resources pending renewal), the "Access collection" button will be replaced with a "Temporarily unavailable" notice that links to a relevant Phabricator task tracking the outage. This feature can also be used to give information or warnings relevant to a specific partner. This feature will hopefully allow for more transparency when a particular resource is not working as users expect.

Watch for this feature on your My Collections page.

Spotlight: Collections indexed in EDS[edit]

The Library Card platform uses a search tool called EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to provide a single search bar for many library resources. By default, collections included in the Library Bundle – those not requiring separate applications and open to all eligible users – are indexed within EDS, when available.

When looking at the My Collections page, you can look for a small magnifying glass icon in the top left corner of a partner card. This icon indicates that that collection is indexed in EDS, in full or in part. The page can also be filtered according to whether a collection is fully searchable, partially searchable, or not searchable via this search bar.

Want to use a collection that is marked as not searchable? Looking for filtering options specific to a particular collection? Interested in browsing resources rather than searching? You can also access a collection directly and use the search features of that site instead of the general library search bar.