What Can a Wiki Do for Researchers???

I was absent from the webcast last week and am writing this in response to the archived version I listened to this weekend.

I've thought a fair deal about how an external wiki would work for the Archives, and how it would be better than a traditional webpage. Honestly, even after listening to Chad's energizing presentation, I still don't know. We don't do formalized instruction in the Archives, something I would like to change, nor do we have a fast-paced reference desk. That said, I did latch on to one part of his talk: creating subject guides on-fly-fly from email reference questions. This is something I've half-heartedly and aimlessly tried to do because I feel like we reinvent the wheel a lot with our reference responses.

As I see it, there would be two uses for an external wiki for subject guides: for staff doing research for reference inquiries and for researchers to be more proficient in their searches. There are 5 archivists in our shop and all work the desk at least 6 hours/week. Some have been here for many years, and some, like me, can measure their time in months. I guess what I am trying to say is this: some of our staff have more institutional memory than others (like me); this guide would probably be much less useful to them. At the same time, our collections, literally, grow daily, and I think we all get into patterns (ruts) in the resources we use and searches we do. Really, the only way to see what someone else has done or gems someone else has found is to sit next to them-- obviously this is not really a practical means of learning... We keep reference notes that document our questions and (sometimes) our searches & search results, but, really, it isn't like being there. So I think using a wiki as a database of searches/results would be cool, though I don't know if it would work. The main obstacle I can see is that very few staff members would actually use it, which really would make it a place for me to keep my own notes, perhaps not as useful for the good of researching humankind. Another benefit could come from the use by the student workers who staff the desk at times, and I think they might love it, and may even use it to keep track of their own prickly questions and fun finds-- but maybe they wouldn't...

What about users who are not professional archivists? We all have dreams of making researchers more self-sufficient, teaching them about primary resources and making them feel more confident in their research. How could a subject guide be improved? What would the benefit be to putting a guide in a wiki rather than a flat webpage? I suppose I go back to Chad's on-the-fly reference driven subject guides. Now, I have to say for the sake of saying it: no question is ever the same. That being said, there are some that are quite similar and some that use the same materials to answer a question that is only a slight variation of the one before it. I guess this comes full circle, or at least in a circle back to the end of the last paragraph, about full staff participation. I think for this to work in our office, everyone would have to use the guides and everyone would have to update the guides. If this happened, and I stress the need for constant updates, this could be an amazing research tool and an amazing analysis, really, of our collection.

Alas, I don't have high hopes, but you never know. And I have been known to have fleeting moments of eternal optimism-- especially when the sun is out and my nails are dirty from digging in my yard!