For the National Library of Scotland, however, the real benefit has been in areas far beyond correcting the quality of transcriptions, areas that had not even been considered at the start of the project.
The first of these was that Library staff experienced a huge amount of satisfaction and enjoyment from taking part in the project, with colleagues regularly tweeting about the interesting books they were working on and expressing their pride at being involved in the project in internal Library and Union lockdown surveys. For many, taking part in the project provided them with something tangible to work on, something to achieve and contribute to when their work environment had changed so dramatically. 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. For the digitization team, who ran the project, the work had a secondary effect by giving them opportunities and responsibilities in a completely new area. Staff whose normal role was to digitize books—an important but often repetitive task—were given responsibility for different parts of the new workflow. One person, for example, became responsible for developing the internal guidance and training new staff as they joined the project, while another was responsible for liaison work with the Wikisource community on standards and workflow. A third member of the team took on the responsibility for file upload, which allowed them to learn to use the Pattypan tool to bulk upload files to Wikimedia Commons. These new responsibilities gave staff in the digitization team more confidence in their ability and raised their awareness of the wider digitization workflow and the impact digitized collections can have.
Furthermore, the project has helped to increase staff awareness of and engagement with Wikimedia projects more widely. All staff who
