Wacki for Wikis

I'm a huge fan of wikis. I was introduced to the wiki at the Internet Librarian's conference a few years back and instantly fell in love with the concept.

More collaborative and providing more potential depth than the blog, I've been using wikis professionally for some time now. And I love them.

I have one wiki that I started when I first began to create my new department at the library which deals with training patrons and staff. It's just for me. I'm the only contributor and the only reader. Because a wiki is so easy to update and to have internal and external links and is on the web regardless of the computer I'm at, for me, it's a wonderful planning tool.

At first I used it mostly to come up with my department's mission and goals and my own to-do list. The wiki easily accomodated my first drafts and subsequent refinements. But since then, I've used it to collect not only my thoughts, but also materials for presentations and then organize them into a flow. It's convenient, private and very easy to use.

I later created a wiki for the department where we can keep rules, procedures and department notes. The settings allow me to control the access level according to the staff member's individual needs. Some can view only; some view and edit.

Expanding on this idea, I got a notion to experiment with the wiki as a committee. I chaired a committee which had as its charge a goal to accomplish. Everyone involved was "committeed out" at the time. We met once and then experimented with accomplishing our task by exchanging ideas and planning on the wiki. It went fairly well after everyone was comfortable using the tool. I don't know that I preferred it, in the end, to face-to-face meeting, but it was an interesting experiment.

In the near future, I'm hoping to use wikis as an extension of our library's website. I see the tool as an easy way that subject specialists can communicate with patrons without having to learn html coding or have access to the web server. They could create a wiki that they could control and then we'd link to it from our website.

For example, I'd like our popular materials specialist to create a wiki in which she lists new additions to her collection. Within her wiki she could have a page for each media type and/or genre with links to our items in the catalog. Right now the "TV on DVD" titles are very popular and people are always asking, "do you have the nth season of whatever in yet?" With a link to her wiki page with this information , the patron or the librarian helping the patron could easily see if it's here, on order or whatever and easily browse what else is new.

I'm also thinking that book discussion leaders could host a wiki for their group, letting the conversation expand beyond group meeting day. These pages could enrich the discussion by pulling in relevant web resources and possibly audio or video clips.

There are lots and lots of possibilities for wikis. But then, I am wacki for them.