useful wikis

This week’s case studies showed some great wiki ideas. The best of them were the ones that had a clear, fairly narrow purpose. For example, the Princeton book review site (too bad it’s not really running anymore, though I’m impressed the Princeton has added reviews to its catalogue), and bizwiki too. These are great places for a user community to find and contribute information. I was pleased that all of the entries on the Princeton site were of a consistent length and layout. Likewise, the Biz site was fairly intuitive to use too, and a good place to deposit all of those “research strategies” handouts that librarians make for classes, so that they’re available for future use. As for less useful sites, I’d put the Butler reference wiki in this category. I don’t know that students will really take the time to comment, and the resources discussed cover many different subject areas. It is hard to build a community around such diverse interests.

It seems that there are many ways to use wikis in libraries – either with users adding and editing or just librarians. At a newspaper office, wikis are great because journalists and librarians can write their searching tricks for difficult to find information. New resources come up all of the time, and this is a great way to share expertise. In other small libraries, I think they can be used in the same way, with topic headings that colleagues can contribute to, to make sure that people aren’t doing each other’s work over again.  As was said in the Common Craft video, email really is not a great way to coordinate with a group, and everyone ends up with long chains of messages in their inbox that take up space (if they aren’t very quick to delete old messages) and are also not so easy to follow. A wiki is a great way to show where a project is, and what it needs to move to the next stage.

The USC Aiken wiki proved that wiki’s can also have very attractive interfaces, they don’t all have to look like ButlerWiki Ref. As always, if someone is in charge of keeping things consistent and organized, they can work really well.