Week Seven - Part One

I'm almost all caught up! Let's see... today's Tuesday. If I can get this posted within a couple of days I'll be up to Week Eight, along with everybody else.

This week's task is to learn about 'wikis' and how libraries are using them.

I'm no stranger to the concept of a wiki; when I'm investigating some topic I often use Wikipedia as an introduction to it. Of course, it's important to do so in a cautious way, bearing in mind that any given contributor may have some ideological axe to grind. But usually I find Wikipedia to be a quick and useful summary of the basic facts around a subject.

Looking through the wikis suggested in the discovery exercise was interesting. What struck me is that an important fundamental of successful wiki construction is to have a clear idea about what the wiki is actually about and to set clear boundaries on what will be presented. By this I mean the wiki should have an obvious focus on a topic or set of topics. The easily expandable nature of wikis can be a drawback when a particular wiki gets too sprawling, or there seems little logical connection between entries.

For an example let's use the St Joseph County Public Library's Wiki. Now, although individual entries may be well written, I struggled to see what the overall coherent purpose of this wiki is. If it's about 'local information and educational, cultural and community resources' as is stated, why are subjects such as 'pets', 'travel' and 'history-related mysteries' presented? Slowly it dawned on me that the mysteries are set in, or near, the County's geographic area; but there seems nothing particularly locally relevant about the information under 'pets' and so forth.

Despite this minor criticism there's still many things that work about the Joseph County blog, and one can see how it's useful to group a broad range of library resources together under a subject.

I thought the library success blog was well done; I could easily imagine using it to research best practice.