Week 7, Thing 16

Although I was somewhat dubious when I began this exercise, after looking at a few wikis I am convinced that they can play a good role in libraries. SJCPL's Subject Guides, Princeton's Book Lovers, and Meredith Farkas' Library Successes wikis all showed me a specific situation in which wikis can play a useful role.

SJCPL's wiki seems to me to be a good instance of applying a team approach to maintaining a library's website. While BCPL takes this approach to it's Intranet-based policy file, with a wiki, it could do the same with its subject pages, like SJCPL does. This would allow for quicker, rolling updates to the site, and take pressure off of the webmasters, allowing them to concentrate on major site changes rather than content changes.

Princeton's wiki provides a great way to get customer actively involved in the Readers' Advisory process. While many libraries have a place within branches for people to contribute recommendations of their own (i.e. a bulletin board, notebook, or table), this web-based approach allows customer to do the same thing from the comfort of their homes.

Library Successes applies the collaborative/best practices concept in a much wider scope, beyond local meetings or associations. At least in theory, it allows librarians worldwide to contribute and learn form each other.