Week 7, Thing 16 - Wikis and more...

As a CCPL staff member, I'm familiar with wikis. We use them for the various teams that we have and there have been lots of opportunities to make use of them to communicate and share ideas with a large group of people. I am very excited to start using the wiki that is being created for idea sharing (among other things) for story time presenters. So often ideas are reinvented, simply because someone at one branch tried something and then someone at another branch thought that something similar would be a good idea. Because they weren't in the same story time at the same time, efforts are doubled and time may very well be wasted. But I digress...

For this Thing, I took a look at several of the wikis suggested. I really like the Book Lovers Wiki over at Princeton Public Library. What a great way to share personal reviews with other folks that like to read the same kinds of books. I like how they have the reviews divided by genre, so that folks can get some book ideas from the mystery section, for example. It looks as though the wiki needs to be updated. They still have information about last year's summer reading program. That, I supposed, is one downfall to wikis. If they are not maintained and used on a regular basis, they become "old news" pretty fast. The good news is that they can be updated fairly quickly, simply by adding a new post that says "we're back on track and moving forward" (or something like that!).

I also took a look at the ALA 2006 New Orleans wiki, which is organized and very easy to use. I like how they have various links to conversation strings for lots of different things: the conference itself, where to stay, the city, dining, and all kinds of things that would be useful to someone attending the conference. I'm sure they create one each year, which is a really great way to communicate with the many people that attend ALA each year.