Are you pondering about taking the plunge into the planet of internet two. with your library and building a wiki? I lately put collectively a successful wiki for my college library and so I would like to share some success ideas for how to do it successfully.
1. Which wiki platform are you going to use? Networth is important for the reason that there are hundreds of them out there and they all differ in terms of ease of use, price tag, and setup as effectively as the capacity to control who can view your wiki as nicely as who can post to your wiki.
2. Do you want to use your wiki exclusively as a approach of organizing and altering material on your internet site? Or do you want to use the wiki to permit your patrons to interact with each other?
3. What is the precise purpose for your wiki? To communicate involving library employees? To communicate with your patrons? To let your patrons communicate with every single other?
four. What content are you going to include on your wiki? Just links to other pages on your library net web page, a searchable library catalog, information and facts about library classes and events, well-liked books, news and announcements or other things?
five. Do you want to pay for a wiki service or do you want to use a free of charge wiki?
six. Is there a tech help particular person available to assist you set up your wiki and to help with some periodic maintenance? If not, do you have a librarian who can take charge of the wiki and its updates and the technological side of keeping a wiki? A wiki is a lot easier to use and hold up with on a typical web-site, however, you can not just place it up and never ever invest time operating on it.
7. It also helps if you can create some wiki specific content. In our case we created subject pages for every single of the main subjects taught at our college and included links to databases, magazines, books, ebooks, specialized encyclopedias and web sites for each and every subject. We also have our library news and policies amongst other things of interest to our patrons on our wiki. You want to give your patrons a reason to study the wiki and to use it.
8. Wikis are 1 of the technologies of the future and as additional and much more libraries and other companies start utilizing them, it is to your advantage to learn how to use one and to determine if it is appropriate for your library.