Friday, July 25, 2008

Blogs and wikis Roundtable wrapup

In addition to the resources I discussed at the RoundTable Wednesday, several other good applications of blogs and wikis in libraries were mentioned. Here are just some of them, and if I'm leaving any out (I was writing a lot down!) please post them in the comments.

*Librarian's Guide to Guilford County

*Booklover's Blog: readers advisory from the staff of the Greensboro Public Library

*Mint Wiki (The Mint Museum Library)

Non-specific examples included using a wiki to edit policy documents, an internal professional development blog (with required posts by librarians after returning from conferences), a lunch and literature blog, a wiki for a staff manual/job descriptions, consumer health topics wiki at a hospital library, best practices staff wiki.

Some of the other salient discussion points:

*Interesting discussions about "tech timidity." In some environments, the librarians are the tech-timid. But more and more frequently, the librarians are actually the advanced users, and our patrons are the tech-timid.

*Blogs and wikis are seeing more and more use by librarians, but generating user feedback or content is difficult. Promotion may help, but probably you just need the right sort of project that really gets people participating. In general, you can't expect users to be as enthusiastic about creating content as you.

*Many had concerns about security (spam posts or comments in a blog; vandalized wikis). Modern blog and wiki software has ways to combat this and it's less of a problem than it might seem, but it's not negligible.

*Privacy concerns - having this content be public raises issues with privacy. Is it fair to require students to reply to a blog post, when this puts information online? This has to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Some communication needs outweigh the privacy needs, sometimes a blog or wiki is indeed not appropriate.

*Many questions about platforms. People mentioned support for Blogger and Typepad, PBWiki and WikiSpaces. But there are many other platforms available.

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