Thing 16/Week7

I looked at the SJCPL subject pathfinder wiki and within that I clicked on "edit" under several of the subject headings, only to come across the message "You have to login to edit pages". And at the top of the page there is a button that says Edit (librarians only). This is obviously then a wiki controlled by authorised librarians. I am sure that we could use the same sort of system at ACL (and please excuse my ignorance if we already are :-) but I don't think so because I haven't seen anything on our website that says "Edit", which seems to be a wiki hallmark. Also looked at Princeton Public Library Book Lovers wiki and passwords are needed there as well to be able to edit etc...members of the Book Lovers Summer Reading club can have their book reviews posted and also respond to others' reviews. I found this interesting because although the wikis are subject and open to editing, there are still controls on them...you have to register (i.e. be authorised) and have a password to edit...it is not necessarily a matter of just anyone stumbling upon a particular wiki who can edit and change them etc. The Library Success wiki was interesting too and its wording "because of vandalism problems, e-mail confirmation is now required..." - that confirms what I read previously, that wikis are vulnerable to being vandalised. From Library Success, I linked to the Help pages at Wikipedia with a lot of information on wikis, including editing. I can see those files being useful at some point. Also found the Library Technology Training wiki interesting...looked informative and easy to understand and I am actually thinking about creating a wiki for use within my extended family...not sure for what purpose yet though :-)Ideas as to what types of applications within libraries might work well with wiki? Well, I was thinking Millenium help files....easy to update? (by the experts) and us ordinary staff members could just add our tips and things that worked for us on there :-)...and I reckon lots of other training could go on a wiki too. Libraries are constantly changing in terms of rules and software etc so I think it would be great to have something that is easily and quickly updateable. I like the Book Lovers wiki at Princeton Public Library...and booklists, like recommended authors in different genres would work well on wikis (I think)...I am sure there are more because from what I have learnt about wiki, they work well with constantly changing information etc and in libraries we have a lot of constantly changing information...