Wikimania: Libraries and Wikis
I’m in the Wikis: Enabling Library Knowledgebases session at Wikimania.
I’m not exactly going to do live blogging of it, but I’m realizing I’m so far behind on telling you about Wikimania, that I might as well get started on this one.
Meredith Farkas already told us all about Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki and how it’s taken off.
Mary Chimato is talking now of her medical library’s adoption of a wiki and how people have been contributing to it and helping it grow. Once they got the wiki going, many staff members realized how they could use it for various useful purposes.
Ellyssa Kroski tells us about the wiki her library staff began for tough reference questions. Her staff realized they lose information when they refer an inquiry to someone else in the library, then never learn the answer themselves. The wiki is one attempt to close that gap and record the knowledge for future use. Some people had a difficult time understanding the purpose of the wiki. Marketing the tool and its purpose is important.
Maureen Clements of two of National Public Radio’s libraries (Oh! So that’s how Scott Simon knew about Wikimania! ha ha ha) is up now explaining what they’re doing with their six-month-old wiki. She started out in the Broadcast Library and transfered to the Reference Library. When she began her training there, she started noticing they were getting a lot of the same questions over and over. To help them deal with these repetitive inquiries, Maureen suggested using wiki technology she learned about at Internet Librarian. The wiki’s login is connected to people’s logins to the intranet, so they don’t have to log in twice. The sound engineers even have a portion of the wiki where they can talk about equipment and stuff.
Several of these wikis are on intranets, so I can’t link to them.
The audience numbers about thirty-five people and includes a mix of librarians/archivists/students/info professionals and people who are in other professions.
