User:Tom Morris/London Research Day

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Research Days (or Library Storms) are an idea I came up with to try and build up local communities around editing Citizendium. The idea is really simple - a bunch of Citizendium authors (and anyone else that's interested) goes along to a large academic or research library (in our case, in London) to work for one day (probably on a Saturday) on writing up new pages for Citizendium. Whether it's on philosophy, pop culture, genetics, cheese or Victorian butlers, it's up to you. It'd be great if we could reach the point of doing a Research Day every six months or so. In big cities like London, we can - if the idea takes off - branch out and go to any of the hundreds of niche interest libraries, archives and special collections. In the process, we can help sell Citizenium to librarians, academics, teachers and students.

As we build this out, we'll need local authors and editors to plan what sort of research they want to do at the library we choose each time, so you might want to build out a list of books and resources you'd want to get access to while at the library.

Library checklist

This section is just a list of libraries that I am checking out. Feel free to add libraries that you think I should look at.

• British Library (reader pass required, ID required)
• Senate House Library (ID required, £5 non-reader entrance)
• The London Library (ID required, £10 non-reader entrance)
• UCL Library
• University of Greenwich library
• University of Westminster library
• The Women's Library
• Birkbeck Library (visitors info)
• Lambeth Palace Library
• Imperial War Museum library

Can your library help?

In looking for libraries, we would need one day access to your collections, preferably on open shelving, and with desk space for participants. It'd be very useful if there is also provision of Internet access, computer terminals and a private room or group work area. We are mostly seeking libraries which provide a range of materials that cross a wide range of interests - this means primarily academic and university libraries (Citizendium's audience level is the university student), but also institutional libraries that cover a wide range of interests (see the list of workgroups). A library all about, say, zoology means that someone in the politics workgroup would have nothing to do, but a library attached to, say, a government or religious institution would have material interesting to people in a wide variety of workgroups.

If you could help provide resources, collection access or help in running Research Days or helping the Citizendium project, please feel free to e-mail tom@tommorris.org

I want to write!

If you are interested in participating in a Research Day in London, please add yourself to the list below, maybe with specific workgroups or interests (so we can pick libraries that fit everbody's widely diverse interests). If you are not an author on Citizendium, please sign up (if you really don't want to, you can always e-mail me your interest - tom@tommorris.org )

• User:Tom Morris - philosophy, religion, history of ideas and history of science
• add yourself here

I am not in London but would like to join anyway

• Daniel Mietchen - I live right next to the largest public library in Thuringia and could join you on such occasions. - biology, physics, psychology, science