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.
3 comments:
Hi Veronica,
I loved your wiki comments - especially the 3C's. So true! Wikis have many benefits - contributors (and management) have to realize their benefit and potential time-savings and commit to using it as a communication tool. I hope that Madison is able to use more wikis in your libraries. I think it's a great idea.
Congratulations on completing the first semester of Project Play! Take a look at the week 10-12 content, too. I look forward to reading about your overall experience with Project Play.
Keep on Playing!
Jean
Hi Veronica,
I agree with your 3Cs, too. Content is the tough one for me. I am very loyal, so I follow through with the contributing part, and I like to think I am innovative, so I support the commitment part - it is the content that is tough (for work, that is). When work is on the web for all the world to see, I feel like I have to double and triple check anything I write for fear there might be errors or that I might offend someone. It is hard! Which of the Cs do you think is hardest?
From a work perspective I think the toughest one for my job is commitment of my contributors. When my work blog started I had a very good group of volunteer contributors and the content they create is stupendous!
But because other work issues top their list in importance, sometimes the commitment wanes.
From a personal perspective, you're right, content is the toughest. It's tough to come up with content and then we do obsess about making sure it looks and works just right!
I don't know how some of the more active bloggers out there in the wider world can come up with so much content.
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