Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Week 7, Thing 16 Learn about wikis and discover some innovative ways that libraries are using them

I really enjoyed learning about wikis. I'm a little iffy about some of them. For example, while I enjoy looking at wikipedia, I know that just about anyone can edit the content and you could find false information on that site. Presumably there are people that monitor changes made to make certian that malicious attacks have not occured. Usually, I use wikipedia as a springboard for finding the information from a more authoratative source.

The book lovers wiki developed by the Princeton Public Library is really nifty. With the ease in which anyone can write a review, it encourages the staff as well as the customers to create entries that could potentially benifit other users. This would be something that our system could do. We often have book reviews in our monthly Branching Out publication. While these efforts are great for other staff members to read, why not allow the public to see reviews such as these as well? We could get more bang for our buck!

I am also thinking about proposing utalizing a wiki format for my game's website. Lately, our site had become woefully out of date because only one or two people have the authority to edit the content. If everyone who is a member of our chronicle had access to editing content, I'm sure that the page would practically maintain itself.

Libraries could definately use wikis for any information sharing thing that is very fluid. Currently, our CCD blog had loads of valuable information. Some of that infromation sharing might work better as a wiki (such as items offered to be floated to other libraries). That way, the flow of good ideas would not be blocked by the ability to access and share them.

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