Friday 27 August 2010

Wiki world

I have to confess I think Wikipedia is amazing. I am aware of the problems, I know it is unreliable or at worst downright inaccurate; it will never replace proper research. But it is also gives a list of past Neighbours characters, with biographies, which in my book means it can't be all bad. It is also so ubiquitous that I have to say I've ignored the possibilities of other types of wikis, although I have used them successfully for work. The graduate trainees have a wiki on CamTools to manage the Catalog website, this works well: we keep an up-to-date rota and list of changes that need to be made, and a list of who's done what each week.

I was excited to read about the Library Routes Project on this week's Cam23 blog as I hadn't heard about it before. Reading about other librarians' career histories is really interesting for me as someone about to start working towards my library school qualification. I will definitely be exploring this in more detail! Also the wiki format seems part of its success; people provide their own information, hearing the many different voices is what makes it so interesting.

Also the different things wikis could be used for had never really occurred to me before. I really like intranets: I think it is often useful for staff to be able to access more detailed information that wouldn't be put on a library's main site, and a wiki could so easily be set up for this purpose and could be kept up to date easily. I can see a lot of potential for using wikis when you want to create long running, constantly changing and collaborative resources and projects.

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