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wikis and other collaboration tools

In our library (Sandia National Labs) some teams collaborate using MS SharePoint.  We have an "umbrella" site for the entire Technical Library and there are subsites for various teams, such as reference, user education (marketing), knowledge services, process improvement and the technology roundtable.  It's this last group to which I'll report my learning from this class.  Our company purchases licenses and provides tech support for users of SharePoint.  I am the site admin for 3 of those sites.  Getting everyone to use them is a problem shared with the proponents of wikis.  This type of commercial software has lots of bells and whistles that a wiki does not.  I know that in most academic and public libraries there are great advantages to choosing free and easily managed wiki software.  I am not sure whether I am going to recommend wikis for our library teams, however, since we are lucky enough to have corp funding for the purchase (and IT support) of commercial tools.  On a similar note, I probably would not recommed wikis for communicating with our library customers.  Since we have a library staff member to manage our website, we are able to change things practically on the fly.  The web admin uses Dreamweaver which is also supported corporate-wide.  The library webpage is a subsite of our corporate intranet and we have corporate server space and IT support for it.  So even though the web-pages are more complicated than maintaining a wiki, the site does not really cause us any severe pain.  Our library web page is actually visible to the public.   http://infoserve.sandia.gov/  We don't provide services to the general public, so we don't really need ways to collaborate with outsiders. Internally we can receive requests through email and via web-based forms (plus phone, fax, IM and walk-in). We have many available communication channels.  Do we need another one?  Probably not right now.   I believe that changing any of the webpages to wiki format would cause the staff more work instead of less work.  The possible exception is to change some of our extremely dense "Subject pages" into wiki-based pathfinders with RSS feeds to keep them frequently updated. *That* would save us some work and provide a much more "current" website.

Sounds sensible to me. Your

Sounds sensible to me. Your workplace has a functioning system; there's no need to disrupt it.

Like the RSS-feed idea, too -- that could be a winner.