other libraries could contact their local chapter or select people in their organization that could lead this initiative); and the right environment to let librarians creatively do what they do best: share.
Keeping the Fire Going: Leveraging Strengths and Collaborating
From what we have seen, many edit-a-thons are initiated by institutional perspectives, which can be powerful if the institution holds a collection many are passionate about, or a community that usually engages with these types of events. Since our main purpose was to engage our own library community and ensure the continuity of the project, we thought of a different strategy: find a sweet spot between the strengths of our collection, the research areas at our university, and the expertise of our librarians. Following WIR Kelly Doyle’s idea, that Wikipedia can be an attractive outlet for research-based activism (Doyle, 2017), we came up with three edit-a-thon subjects: Haciendo y deshaciendo el género [gender issues], La lucha por la memoria [social movements], and De voz en voz [indigenous languages]. Each of them, led by librarians who built partnerships within El Colegio de México’s academic programs and other institutions. But more importantly, each one of them leveraged our teams’ strengths: Reference librarian, Camelia Romero—who is an expert in gender thesaurus (Romero Millán, 2017) and has cocreated a digital collection for the history of gender in Mexico (Cano & Romero Millán, 2020)—was in charge of the gender edit-a-thon. Among her activities, she was in charge of engaging the Gender Studies Program at El Colegio de México (COLMEX) and curating a selection of books and documents for the to-be-created articles.
Furthermore, this edit-a-thon would not have been possible without our collaborators: the Librosb4tipos Collective, which is devoted to disseminate the writings of woman authors; the Colegio de Etnólogos y Antropólogos Sociales A.C. (CEAS, College of Ethnologists and Social Anthropologists), which has a special task force devoted to feminist anthropology; and the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which has a science outreach program devoted to sharing the research of women scientists. Librosb4tipos’s donated Jane Austen books that
