Chemical Heritage Foundation Adds Wikipedian in Residence
Mary Mark Ockerbloom will help CHF share its collections of images, artifacts, and digital volumes with users of Wikipedia.
Mary Mark Ockerbloom has joined the staff of Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) as Wikipedian in Residence. She is one of just three women to hold that position in North America.
“We are very excited that Mary is able to join the CHF team for this assignment,” said Shelley Wilks Geehr, director, Roy Eddleman Institute at CHF. “We have huge collections of images, archives, artifacts and digitized documents to share with the world and Mary is helping us to do that more effectively.”
Wikipedians in Residence work on site at an organization, and are usually financially compensated by the institution or a Wikimedia chapter. Rather than being an in-house editor, a Wikipedian in Residence helps members of the host organization build skills in working with the encyclopedia, and helps the host organization and the Wikipedia community to develop productive relationships that will continue after the residency is finished. The Wikipedian in Residence model was first piloted at the British Museum in 2010, and is promoted by the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) initiative to cultural and scientific organizations worldwide. American institutions adopting this model include The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
About Mary Mark Ockerbloom
Mary Mark Ockerbloom has degrees in psychology and computational science, and has worked in the areas of artificial intelligence, education and digital archives. She has been involved with two successful startups: Carnegie Learning Partners and Wordnik.com. She considers herself a "knowledge engineer": "part student, part teacher, part consultant, part model builder, and part programmer." Mary’s involvement in Wikipedia grew out of her interest in women writers. She maintains "A Celebration of Women Writers" website, which lists more than 19,000 women authors and 10,000 freely readable books. She has republished 379 books online as part of the Celebration, focusing particularly on women travelers, utopian fiction, and Newbery award winners.
Neil Gussman
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The Chemical Heritage Foundation is a collections-based nonprofit organization that preserves the history and heritage of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related sciences and technologies. The collections are used to create a body of original scholarship that illuminates chemistry’s role in shaping society. In bridging science with the humanities, arts, and social sciences, CHF is committed to building a vibrant, international community of scholars; creating a rich source of traditional and emerging media; expanding the reach of our museum; and engaging the broader society through inventive public events.
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