Here a Wiki, There a Wiki, Everywhere a Wiki, Wiki

I did the actual assignment for the Wiki week on the first day of the week - posted MPL's link into the City of Madison Wiki Entry and re-posted it when it didn't seem to work the first time - but didn't actually blog about my efforts. So here I am blogging...

I do think Wiki's can be very useful for library work and wish that we all had more time to create the content necessary to make a Wiki that's appealing and utilitarian. One use I know we've thought of at MPL is to create a circulation manual with a wiki. Because Madison has multiple locations and the circ staff is never all in one place at one time, communication of policy changes can be tough. A wiki would allow live changes to a policy and everyone would have access to the latest, most recent information. In a broader sense, the same would hold true for libraries who wanted to make a wiki their library web site.

The beauty of a wiki is that anyone can make the changes as they occur. Contrast that with the old/current way of distributing memos, emails, even phone calls. In all of those cases the person seeking the information needs to be able to find it in a timely fashion and has to know that it's the most up-to-date information.

The trouble with wikis is that you need to have the 3 C's in place before you can get started. Having run a library blog for over a year now I can tell you my theory of the 3 C's. The C's are Commitment, Content and Contributors. If you're missing any of the three, a wiki (or a library blog) won't work.

• Commitment has to come from the people running the wiki but it also has to come from the powers-that-be in your location. Because the C's take staff time, management needs to be behind the effort before it can even get off the ground.



• Content sounds so obvious, but without content a wiki is pretty useless. And by content, I don't mean a few lists of things or your intentions to add things at a future date. Adding content needs to happen before a wiki is even shared and it needs to be updated regularly and continuously.



• Contributors may be your toughest C of all. You'll find that people will volunteer with all the best intentions in the world and then their other work duties intervene (this has certainly happened to me) and suddenly contributing to the wiki moves further and further down the list of things they may need to get done on any given day. If this happens often enough, suddenly your content evaporates. A way to balance the very real fact that other work will most definitely outweigh the wiki for importance is to get as many contributors as you can and to try and create a structure for their posting to the wiki. perhaps they need to commit to once a week or every other week, of if it works better to commit to being responsible for a particular area of the wiki.

Whatever is decided for a library wiki, staff needs to make sure they have the basic ground rules worked out before getting started.

When You Say Del.icio.us, You've Said it All

I used the sloganizer to come up with a title for this post and had to decide between this one and "the gods made del.icio.us". I decided that while the techie people who designed the social bookmarking site are probably pretty smart and special, I don't think I can quite classify them as gods yet.

I've become familiar with tags over the last couple of years but truthfully can not find a use for del.icio.us in my repertoire of web tools personally. I know all the arguments but really have few bookmarks that I need to take with me from computer to computer and the ones I do need I can generally either remember or find as necessary. And while I did set up an account as part of this week's assignment, I wasn't able to add the buttons to my work computer because it requires installation and only the automation gurus are able to do that. Without the buttons on the toolbar, adding links becomes much harder.

That's not to say del.icio.us isn't of use to libraries. In fact our library is working on converting our web page links into del.icio.us (as an aside I have to say that typing that name each time is sort of a pain - can I just call it Delish?) bookmarks which would hopefully be editable by anyone on staff once they are set up. That would mean that if I found a cool new consumer site, I could add it to our reference links/Delish bookmarks rather then having to contact the library web masters.

Will I use my personal Delish account? Doubtful. But it was fun to explore it a little more and the whole idea of tagging in this weeks' assignment.

Everybody's Doing the LibraryThing

I had fun setting up my LibraryThing library and will probably continue to add titles.

That being said, I've been using LibraryThing as a Readers' Advisory tool for a while now. What works great for that purpose is the list of books suggested. So if a customer tells me they liked Richard Russo's Empire Falls I search that in LibraryThing and see what other books are suggested based on those who've listed Empire Falls in their library. Explaining it takes far more time then the actual searching and when I use the results in conjunction with other resources, it works very well. I find it especially useful when I'm looking up books I'm not familiar with. Invariably, I'll find a title or author I am familiar with in the results list.

Where it doesn't work as well is with the lesser known works or with authors who've got a lot of books under their belt. For the latter the lists will end up containing many of the author's other works and that isn't helpful if I'm looking for further reading.

And while I find the Unsuggester fun the most practical use I can find for it is to use it as something to show customers to get conversation started. And if I were Queen of the Publishing World this is the book I'd provide for LT novices.

My first YouTube Entry

Veronica Franco by Tintoretto

Veronica Franco by Tintoretto
Originally uploaded by rosewithoutathorn84

The first thing I did when I started to explore Flickr was to search the other Veronicas out there in the world. I was pleased to find Veronica Franco as one of the first hits that came up and decided to "blog this". She certainly led an interesting life as an educated woman who was a poet and a courtesan. She even successfully fought for her freedom when she was accused of witchcraft! Go Veronica! If you're interested in more about this Veronica, there's a book about her in LINKcat.

What I like about Flickr is the quantity and the quality of the pictures available. I've created a Flickr account but so far have only used it as a place to store photos that I've used for work purposes (so they're not available to the public). But because they're stored online I'm able to give co-workers access to the photos.

Sometimes I wonder how these web communities stay afloat financially speaking. A web service of this magnitude is a costly endeavor. Do they make their money selling prints? Selling advanced options? There's no advertising to speak of. So I'm curious. Anyone know?

Is There Anyone Out There?

When I thought about what I could write to elicit some comments I realized I should talk about how hard it is to do just that.

In reading other blogs and posting in my own I've noticed that you can never tell which post is going to generate a lot of comment. It could be the post arguing that the world is flat or that dinosaurs still roam the planet generating endless debate. But it could just as easily be the one that innocently says you don't like the actress who plays Kendall on All My Children.

So what I've tried to learn is to just write what I want to write about and try not to angst too much about whether or not anyone is letting me know that they're listening. Easier said then done of course. I know that I've been guilty of checking and re-checking posts I've written to see if anyone has commented. But I've also tried to tell myself that just because no one has said anything, it doesn't mean they haven't read my post. I can believe, can't I?

In an effort to generate discussion for this post I'll ask you what are some of the blog subjects you've seen generate a lot of comment? Seen any flame wars start? Have you ever thought about posting a comment but been too shy to do so?

Feeding the Mind

I considered myself pretty comforatable with Bloglines and Google Reader so I decided to give the Beta version of Bloglines a try. I can see that they're trying to be similar to GR but I don't think they have all the components yet and I missed being able to do some of the things I could do with Bloglines, let's call it alpha.

Once I was done exploring the beta version I decided to try getting my feeds to show up on my blog as a blogroll and experienced one of those "I know I should be able to do this, but I can't figure out how" hours. Leading me to wish I had a Logan to lean on like this Veronica does.

The instructions were pretty basic. Go to your bloglines profile and make sure to change the setting to a public one for access to the blogroll and then use the Bloglines HTML helper to get the code for the blog. Took me a little while with those things, but I thought I had it all figured out. But when I pasted into the additional elements portion of the template in this blog all I got was a message saying my username wasn't active. Huh!? Tried with my old Bloglines account - same deal. How was I getting it wrong?

Turned out I was making an assumption (and you know what they say about those). I assumed that my username would be the first part of my login for Bloglines. Turns out I needed to note the little * next to the username field and pick a username for my public Bloglines persona.

Success at last! My Bloglines feeds are now links on my blog, woohoo! Thanks for the tips and chance to learn Project Player Gurus.

Project Playing

This is my first post with Project Play. Though I'm familiar with some of the things we're going to cover with PP, I'm looking forward to learning more about them. I also know, from reading the syllabus for the semester that there are going to be whole new things for me to tackle.