Week 6: Wide World of Wikis

What is it about the word "wiki" that makes you want to play with it? WikiWikiWIKI. See also comments on this post.

Anyway. I've been reading wikis since the dawn of Wikipedia. I didn't contribute to one until CHPL launched its YA programing one. Mostly, we put common documents there such as volunteer forms and the list of which branch has which "permanent set" of graphic novels. The YA librarians did use it as a collaborative work space to brainstorm and vote for which paperback series we wanted cataloging to approve as ones to catalog with the series title.

YALSA uses wikis -- I'm guessing when a group produces the page/product, so everyone can contribute easily. Sample: Teen Read Week. As the consumer of this info, I don't care about the format. Similarly, what's cool about St. Joseph County's subject guide wiki is the content more than the form. We already post subject guides on our homepage; if we like the way that works now, there's no need to change. If, however, many reference staff folks said they would update guides on the fly, then we might want to change to a wiki and keep our guides up-to-the-minute.

For this lesson, I enjoyed contributing to the CHPLearning wiki -- I like pbwiki's interface and tools much better than the one we use for YA Programming! I easily created new pages and edited my work. I had been working away for several minutes before I realized I was still in Firefox, my preferred browser, something our current wiki can't tolerate.

I like to work collaboratively, and whether we use a wiki or some other cool tool, I'll be on board.