linking from Wikipedia to digital collections content

Ann Lally, who spoke at last week's Northwest Archivists meeting, wrote (with Carolyn Dunford) an article describing a UW program to establish Wikipedia links to UW Libraries digital collections. The authors describe the motivation behind the linking effort:

The idea for this project grew out of our reading of OCLC's 2005 report Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources [1] which states that only 2% of college and university students begin searching for information at a library web site.

This is an important fact to keep in mind when considering the future of the ILS (or, consider it a post-IUG reality check).

Also, the authors noted the heavy indexing of UW digital collections content in Google prior to the Wikipedia linking effort. Wikipedia linking is simply a complementary means of enhancing access. Their discussion underscores the importance of building sophisticated assessment tools into digital search/retrieval/presentation systems.

This article (and Ann's speech) inspired me to investigate the level of Wikipedia indexing for current Northwest Digital Archives content, without a systematic linking program in place. I found a large number of Wikipedia entries referencing NWDA finding aids. A couple of examples: Nike, Inc. (Bill Bowerman Papers); Annie Heloise Abel (Annie Abel-Henderson Papers).