Rebecca Oneill

Background

About Rebecca Oneill

As of September 2023, I am a senior communications officer at Met Éireann. I was the first Project Coordinator and Manager for Wikimedia Community Ireland. I was especially interested in outreach, organising editing workshops here in Ireland, as well as looking at ways to work with Irish cultural institutions through Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I lectured at University of Salford in the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology in Dissertation Preparation, Dissertation supervision, and Professional Development at undergraduate level, and in the Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Curation. My PhD research defined the term "citizen curation", which has begun to emerge online and can be best employed to describe activity online today broadly. By looking at those who are active citizen curators on projects such as Wikipedia, I am interested in how these people view their work, and how professional curators interpret and understand the activities of these citizen curators to develop a definition and visualised spectrum of curation. Having initially studied graphic design, I worked in the National Museum of Ireland for five years as part of the Inventory Project within the Natural History Museum. During this time I completed a Masters with the University of Leicester part time as well as engaging with many training opportunities in collections care, object handling and pest management along the way. Working within the scientific collections helped me rediscover my love of science. My work in the Museum also introduced me to the history of science in Ireland and beyond, in particular that involving women's histories. This has led me to become the WITS representative on the National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology, and I have been a member of the WITS Exec since 2017. I also sit on the committee of the Mary Mulvihill Association.