#10 Wikis (2)

Am exploring the library wikis.

The Princeton Book Lover's wiki is nice for picking up more reviews for Reader's Advisory and would be nice to have for my own library. (If I had all the time in the world to read and review books. Of course this is nice because other people are doing it and I can access the reviews.)

The subject guide wiki is great just for the first page listing alone. I'm always try to come up with subjects that I'd like to write guides for. Of course I've been thinking about "paper handouts" all of this time, but a wiki filled with subject guides would wonderful--and neverending! Instead of a one-page subject guide, I could create a wiki filled with ever-evolving information.

But of course, the patron needs to be shown how to access the wiki on a computer. And there are still plenty of folks out there who prefer paper handouts to online information. But it would be great to have both!

I see that the "Best Practices" wiki is having problems with vandals and requires email identification now.

The staff wiki is cool. I would love to do something like that with our Circ staff--but they are very reluctant to do library tasks that aren't directly and specifically helping the patrons. "I" know that it really is for the benefit of the patrons but staff just thinks that it's wasting time. (They don't like team-building exercises either.) We only are able to have one staff meeting a year--sometimes two, so I have them hooked up to email so we can at least share procedures and ideas with eachother, but they have been very reluctant to use email to communicate and will discuss things via email only if I send them a "please reply to this email" message. We have had Circ staff hooked up to email for 4 years now and still only about half of them will voluntarily respond. I hope that they are at least reading their email!

I can see where having a library wiki would be very useful. And if our library ever has a blog I'll be sure to add it to the Library Bloggers Wiki.