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.