picky about wikis

During our group chat the issue of the insitution being comfortable about having an open wiki came up.  As many of us know, institutions and universities like to have control.  I was thinking about how wiki's might be implemented into my library and also found this to be a concern.  For some aspects, I could see having an open wiki to be a good thing, for others, I would suggest logins.

Open wikis:

BI sessions 

For our instructional BI sessions, we sometimes create a special webpage just for the students of that class.  If we created it to be an open wiki, then in theory the students could contribute to the resources guide.  However, with the acception of the grad students, I don't see the students taking advantage of this.  Perhaps the teachers might add some resources though...

FAQ Page

I think it would be useful to allow this page to be open to questions, maybe more a submitting box where the staff can then answer the questions.

Staff only accessible wikis:

Subject Guides

Our subject guides do not get updated regularly, mainly because you have to go back into the html, submit it to the dept. head who then uploads it.  If the html coding works on your computer, it might look funny when it's uploaded because of some glitch, which delays the updating and the original uploading of new guides.  We often get a notice when databases are added/dropped/or links change, but rarely do I get a chance to go through this process to update the page.  A wiki for subject guides would be wonderful!  And I imagine that we would feel better about the integrety of the resources if only the reference staff had access to updating them. 

It would also be useful to have a searchablility function for the students since right now there are no cross references for similar words (i.e. there is a subject guide one ethnic studies, but you have to go into the guide to know which ethnicities.  So if the student were looking for african studies, they might not realize there is a subject guide for them).  Also, since we already have a large number of subject guides, I think I will choose a wiki model that allows both html and the wiki language.  It will make transfering all those files so much easier!

Ready Reference

Since the themes of questions often change (like during tax season or based on certain class assignments) it would be good to put this online.  We currently have a print version of commenly asked questions to copy and paste into our online chat and email, but some of the instructions could use revision and we are missing important topics all together.

Staff Help Page

A lot of us newbie librarians wish we had more knowledge about the interworkings of the library at the beginning of our job.  We also wish we knew more about the other departments (policies, etc.).  Therefore it would be useful to have a collaborative space for all staff to contribute necessary FAU library knowledge.