Library Success Wiki

A Knowledgebase for the Profession

Internet Librarian 2006

Meredith Gorran Farkas
Norwich University
mfarkas at norwich dot edu

http://meredith.wolfwater.com/presentations/il06/wikipanel.html
October 24, 2006

slides | printable

• Librarians are not great at sharing their success stories
• Where does a new librarian go to get ideas
  and learn from other people's successes?
• Wiki: can collect knowledge from EVERYONE!
• Success of ALA Chicago 2005 Wiki

[image source]

Software choice: MediaWiki

• Software that runs the Wikipedia
• Lots of documentation

Organizational schemes and seeding the wiki

• People don't know what to add to a blank slate
• Gives people an idea what sort of content they should put there, even if there is no "should."
• Wikis can get really messy
• Categories and hierarchies
• Documentation for wiki novices

Spam protection

• Started with a blacklist
• Got hammered by spam
• Bad behavior plugin

Marketing the Wiki

• Very little marketing was done
• Word of blog
• Encouraging people to add their collections
• Encouraging people to create their own topics

 

 

Great! Front page has had over 130,000 page views.

Many very well developed pages.

• Gaming
• Recommending Books
• Librarians who IM

People adding collections

• Web Browser Extensions
• Services for Teens
• Web4Lib Manager's Reference Center (coming soon!)

People adding stuff bit by bit as they discover interesting things or have ideas.

• Start the wiki as a group or find some dedicated helpers
• Have lots of documentation
• Get spam protection (you may need to update it regularly)
• Don't try to control the wiki
• Stay on people's radar
• Have patience!
• Keep track

[image source]

Meredith Gorran Farkas
Distance Learning Librarian
Norwich University
mfarkas at norwich dot edu
AIM: librarianmer
Information Wants To Be Free

This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. Template created by Jessamyn West.

slides | printable