I have really enjoyed this lesson about wikis and have learned a lot. For one thing I didn't realize that the term, wiki, originated in Hawaii. When I lived overseas, we used to take the wiki bus around the compound where we lived. It went fairly fast and beat walking most of the time. It was kind of interesting to make this small connection...but I digress.
I loved the BookLovers wiki from Princeton. It is a very dynamic way to share what's hot in reading and I got some ideas for my personal reading list. I was wondering what the purpose was for providing raffle prizes to the reviewers. If that was the only way to keep the wiki going and dynamic, maybe it is not such a useful tool. I can see participating in a wiki like BookLovers and encouraging our customers and staff to do so...it would help build a sense of community. I also like the idea that Meredith Farkas was proposing about annotating the catalog using a wiki.
Being part of our Children's Services team, I can get very excited about starting a wiki for the team to share ideas and tips, especially on storytimes! We are spread out and it is difficult to get everyone together as often as we'd like. This could be the answer to that challenge and is definitely worth examining further.
After looking quite a lot of wikis, I can see the free form nature of this tool. As I see some ways to use a wiki, I would be more comfortable with some more structure, i.e. using templates to set up the entries. I think it would be easier to sort through what could become a large amount of information. I did look at the Montana Librarians wiki and noticed that quite few did not have any recent entries or posts. I would be interested in knowing why...
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I think an important thing to remember is that we're all still learning here and some of these tools are still pretty much in the experimental stage for how and if we're going to be able to make use of them.
It probably is hard to keep a wiki going. Basically, you have to keep people coming to the site to check for new content and to add their own. It seems that the more successful ones have a group that both monitors content and keeps them going by maintaining contact with contributors.
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