LIBR 246-12: Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools (Fall 2008)

I have to confess that I have wiki fever. I love creating wikis, adding pages, uploading files and images, and deciding how I want to organize the various pages and content. Over the summer the other circulation technician and I migrated our physical manual into a wiki. It gave me some great experience. As we approach accreditation in the spring, our library director is requiring the rest of the staff to create policy/procedure wikis (Oh, no! What have I started?!). Some of the staff is a little reluctant in tackling this new technology.

According to the article, Thinking about Wikis: New Communication Review, some of the factors for a successful wiki are:

This week, I want to share a wiki I drool over. It's the wiki for the University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries. You can find it here: http://staffweb.hsl.washington.edu/

This is such a comprehesive wiki and such a fabulous resource. I created a wiki for my circulation department at my library. I'm happy with it, but it pales in comparison to this one! As you can see, there are links for various departments, policies, procedures, and more! I hope you all enjoy exploring it as much as I have!

Why do you think so few libraries are allowing patrons to add to library wikis?

Librarians are territorial!

I think it is time we faced facts: Librarians are extremely territorial. I have never seen a group as a whole who marks their area of domain as aggressively as librarians do. This includes both academics and lawyers. The fact that researchers and catalogers typically snipe each other is just an easy example.

Grow Your Wiki is written by Stewart Mader (and contributors) who used to work for Atlassian as a wiki evangelist. Atlassian is the company that makes Confluence, an expensive enterprise wiki platform. This blog is associated with the Wiki Patterns site (whose companion book is written by Stewart) you'll be looking at this week.