wiki overview

The library wikis listed provided several good ideas of how to use wikis. After looking at the wiki Library Chick I thought that wikis can be used effectively for continuing educational. The wiki Library Success A Best Practices Wiki proved that wikis are an effective tool for librarians to learn more about specific sites and the library profession. The SJCPL Subject Guides has several subject guides and shows that collaboration through wikis can provide great resources. I would think that these would be particularly helpful since electronic resources can change frequently.

The other wikis made me realize other great ideas as well. The Book Lover's Wiki shows how patrons can become involved in the process while the Bull Run Library wiki shows how several departments or even Friends of the Library can use a common outlet. Finally, I did not expect to find the ALA Conference wiki very interesting but it may have been the wiki that called for this format the strongest. Many people may have different incites (in this case some people may have particular experiences in New Orleans) that would make a collaborative tool very useful.

The one question I would have is how much resistance other libraries found from either IT departments or from upper administration since wikis, or other web 2.0 tools for that matter, would not likely follow any web design guidelines for an organization. Has it been to much for organizations to run an public site without the generally followed header, footer, font, or other format rules of the standard website?