Talk:University of Maryland Libraries

Article needs updating

It has come to the attention of me and some fellow librarians at UMD that this article is rather out of date and includes some outdated information that may be confusing or even misleading to readers. For example, Patricia Steele hasn't been the dean since 2015. Some libraries have merged and changed names, so the current listing of libraries looks a little misleading.

While it would be ideal if members of the community updated this article, some librarians and myself have been exploring simply making the edits ourselves (including contacting our local Wikimedia chapter). Because these are relatively minor edits (ex. updating the name of the dean), we believe that this conforms to Wikipedia's COI policies, but I still want to make sure that these edits are as transparent as possible. -B bradley26 (talk) 16:51, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Renovations/Edits Needed Here

There are several aspects of this article that are badly in need of updating and correcting. I'm going to try and get to as many as I can, but I want to start with a talk page list of what needs to be fixed. Apologies to anyone reading this who is more used to Wikipedia's etiquette, as I'm not sure whether lists like this are exactly what talk pages are for, but I hope having a list here at least has the potential to be helpful to someone coming across this later and finding some of these problems still here.

- Grammar and Formatting Changes: these are easy, but I think make sense to save until the end. Referring to the University of Maryland Libraries as "the largest library" rather than "the largest library system", for example, is an easy fix, but I want to fact-check that before editing the grammar.

- Fact-checking, Missing Sources, Updates: Most of the article has sources properly cited, but there are a couple of unsourced claims that need checking. The claim that this is the largest library system in the DC-Baltimore area, for example, might be true but it isn't something I'm comfortable claiming without a credible source. Additionally, the Terrapin Learning Commons section appears to have been left unchanged since 2012, and almost certainly needs updating.

- Link Rot: This is a huge issue on a lot of articles, which is why the Internet Archive links are so preferred. Here it's especially bad partly because UMD's official school newspaper, The Diamondback, moved from diamondbackonline.com to dbknews.com at some point, so all Diamondback links before that point are dead. I'm hoping they will have older articles available on the new site, but if not that may be an issue. By my count, 21 of the 50 sources are no longer available at the links cited in the article.

- Removal of Unnecessary Information: This is the part I feel the least confident on, since it's usually bad practice to delete other people's contributions without good reason. Still, there are some details included in the article that seem unnecessary to the purpose of an encyclopedia entry.

-- Does this article need to specify who the Shoemaker Building was named after?

-- The fact that McKeldin Library is open 24 hours on some days is an interesting fact, but I'm not sure whether the level of specificity present in the current article should be there. It seems unlikely anyone would go to Wikipedia to check the operating hours of the library instead of to the library system's website, which the article already links multiple times.

-- The number of floors in McKeldin Library. If it were the tallest building on campus, or the tallest in College Park, this might be important enough to include in the article. Given that to my knowledge neither of these have ever been true (Centreville Hall has 8 floors and a basement, for example), I don't think this level of detail is beneficial to the article as a whole.

Additional Disclaimer: I am an alum of the University of Maryland, College Park. I am not an employee, I am not currently attending the university, and I don't have any ongoing financial connection to the university, so I don't feel that my edits here violate the Conflict of Interest policy, but please let me know if I'm wrong. Thanks! NoticeMK (talk) 19:04, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Edits thus far:

I'm most of the way through combating the link rot. 17 of the 21 unusable sources have been either replaced with an archive link or replaced with more up-to-date information.

In terms of fact-checking and updating, I believe the Terrapin Learning Commons section is the only thing left to mess with. I decided to flag a couple claims as needing a citation, since they're relevant to the article and likely correct but I wasn't able to find a reliable source for them. In the case of the claim that this is the largest library system in the DC/Baltimore area, the only publicly available source I can find is an uncited one on UM Libraries' page, and it doesn't appear to have existed until well after this article did. In the hopes of avoiding Wikipedia:Citogenesis, I've marked it as needing a citation.

I think the grammar and formatting changes are pretty much done, but I may be missing something.

In terms of unnecessary info, my understanding is that removing other people's contributions is often not in the spirit of Wikipedia, so I've tried to minimize this. The only information I outright removed was the number of floors McKeldin has, only because I can't see how it would be relevant to an article about the library system. Feel free to undo that change if you want to :) NoticeMK (talk) 05:39, 16 May 2024 (UTC)