Another wiki-thingy TiddlyWiki
Submitted by alisiawygant on Thu, 2007-03-08 01:54.
Weighing in late on the wiki subject, so a lot of people have made fantastic observations about wikis. I'll throw another one for us to play with out there: TiddlyWiki. This might be old news to some, but take a minute to play with a very portable wiki. it does a lot of the cool things that you expect wikis to do and (here's the fun bit) it saves as a single file, so you can have it wherever you like. Instead of creating new pages, you make smalelementscaled tiddlers, which can be tagged for all the 2.0ness you can handle.
Seriously, though. I have found this perfect for keeping track of my new liaising duties. It's like interactive, linking 3x5 cards (and who doesn't love those). I can create a tiddler for every faculty with their research intersets (and a link to their personal page), one for important resources (with links to the OPAC--or resource if it's not cataloged), one for projects I'm working on, and so on. Very easy, very flexible--like all the good software we've explored.
(p.s. I rather wish this was a wiki, not a blog, because then my vacation and late posting wouldn't be so obvious. Although my stint on the west coast has given me a newfound respect for all you Pacific time zoners who are so insightful early in the morning!)
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Alisia, I got this info from
Alisia, I got this info from my Fastmail weblog and was toying with building a page. I love portable apps and use Firefox portable along with ClamWin portable and this just seemed way too fun not to try. Can u tell me more about your use for it? Thanks!
Rachel S. Kingcade
Well, this is my situation:
Well, this is my situation: I'm inheriting liaising duties from another librarian who is retiring after 20 years. My mission this semester is to try and pull out as much of the knowledge that he has in his head and record it so that next year when someone wants to know which dataset is best for comparing corporate giving in Eastern Europe (say), I won't just stand there looking panicked. So, whenever the pearls of wisdom drop, I would scribble them down on a piece of paper. Or he's hand me a printout of a catalog record and say "Oh, yea, these are really useful for such-and-such-a-class." Then there's the fact that I don't know the faculty, so I'm trying to remember who specializes in what so that in my 30 second meeting in the line for coffee at the faculty meeting, I can mention something actually useful to them.
Long story short: I've also been trying to think of a good use for tiddlywiki for a while, and realized that these little items are perfect tiddlers, and with all of the tagging and linking goodness I can organize them every which way to Sunday. And since it's mine and portable, I can use it how I like and not worry about how other people would search it.
At the moment, this is how it's organized. Tiddlers for the faculty with a pic from their profile, link to their private page, list of research interests, courses they teach, and any personal observations (ex: prefers print, prefers electronic, likes blogs, retiring in x years). I also have tiddlers for the major resources that are highlighted as frequent use and/or hard to find but good. For these I put a quick description (usually how it was explained to me) and a link either to the opac record or the item if there's no record (that way I don't have to update my urls). I've also experimented with having a todo tag or todo tiddler that I can tag with the names of people/resources that need things done. I haven't given it enough use to declare success or failure, though.
After thinking about all of the 5weeks stuff, I wonder if there's a way to include other social software elements--feeds, for example. I'm not sure.
Golly that's a long reply. Hopefully it's helpful!