Are you thinking about taking the plunge into the globe of internet two. with your library and creating a wiki? I not too long ago put collectively a effective wiki for my college library and so I would like to share some success guidelines for how to do it effectively.
1. Which wiki platform are you going to use? This is essential for the reason that there are hundreds of them out there and they all vary in terms of ease of use, price, and setup as well as the capacity to control who can view your wiki as properly as who can post to your wiki.
2. Do you want to use your wiki exclusively as a strategy of organizing and altering material on your website? Or do you want to use the wiki to allow your patrons to interact with every other?
three. What is the exact goal for your wiki? To communicate between hidden wiki ? To communicate with your patrons? To let your patrons communicate with each other?
4. What content are you going to contain on your wiki? Just hyperlinks to other pages on your library web web page, a searchable library catalog, facts about library classes and events, popular books, news and announcements or other items?
five. Do you want to pay for a wiki service or do you want to use a no cost wiki?
six. Is there a tech assistance particular person obtainable to support you set up your wiki and to assist with some periodic upkeep? If not, do you have a librarian who can take charge of the wiki and its updates and the technological side of preserving a wiki? A wiki is a lot much easier to use and keep up with on a typical site, nonetheless, you can’t just put it up and never invest time functioning on it.
7. It also helps if you can develop some wiki specific content material. In our case we produced topic pages for each of the important subjects taught at our college and incorporated hyperlinks to databases, magazines, books, ebooks, specialized encyclopedias and sites for each 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 explanation to read the wiki and to use it.
8. Wikis are one of the technologies of the future and as additional and much more libraries and other companies begin using them, it is to your benefit to find out how to use a single and to make a decision if it is proper for your library.