Andrea's Blog

Web 2.0 Review – Wikis

October 18, 2009

Wikis are a great way to create collaborative, easy-to-navigate websites that don’t need a fancy layout. Wikipedia, of course, is probably the most well known wiki and it has a great article on wikis for those unfamiliar with wikis outside of Wikipedia. You can also watch this wonderful video about wikis. The Common Craft guys do a great job of explaining everything in plain English.

There are several great wiki services, including PBWorks, Wikispaces, and MediaWiki. PBWorks and Wikispaces are the most similar. They each offer a free, basic edition of their services that allows for creating pages on one wiki and 2 GB of storage. With this level of service, your wiki is open for others to see, but even with a PBworks and Wikispaces account, you must allow users access to your wiki before they can edit your pages. And, of course, you can always upgrade for more services like using your own domain name, SSL security, customized view, or more storage. Check out how the Boreham Library staff at the University of Arkansas has put PBWorks to use: http://blstaff.pbworks.com/. For both services, you can check out their pricing page to see what’s offered with each level of service.

MediaWiki is a bit different from the other two services. It’s free wiki software you can download to create your own wikis. It was originally used by Wikipedia, so you’ll notice the MediaWiki page looks just like Wikipedia. Since MediaWiki is a software package, it’s meant to be used with your own domain and doesn’t really offer the same support as PBWorks or Wikispaces. I would consider this to be for the more advanced user. Here’s a great example of MediaWiki being put to use from Ohio University: http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki/index.php/Business_Databases

I love the idea of using a wiki for patron/visitor FAQs and as a training manual. Currently, I work at a really unique place. I’m at the Lederman Science Education Center at Fermilab, which is part of the Education Office. Although the LSEC started out as an education center for middle school children to learn about particle physics, we’ve slowly morphed into a visitors’ center for anybody interested in Fermilab. We have hands-on exhibits, a gift shop, and a library (the Teacher Resource Center) with math, science, and technology materials for PreK-12 teachers. We provide field trips for students in grades 3-9; high school, college, and public tours of the lab; and we also offer boy scouts and girl scouts help in completing science-related badges. Needless to say, we get a lot of interesting questions and the answers can’t always be found on our website. So, if our tour expert is out of the office, we can’t always provide an answer.

I would be very interested in trying out Wikispaces or PBWorks as a place for staff to easily enter FAQs. The Education Office website is not an ideal place for this sort of thing because we don’t all have access to editing it. When I create news items for our website, I have to get approval from my boss and then it needs to go through the editor before being posted. Any pictures I want added have to be added by our webmaster. Depending on how busy everyone is, it can take an entire day to get a posting up. Dennis G. Van Arsdale, who created the Boreham Library wiki ran into the same problem—campus webmasters had to approve anything before posting to the campus wikis which would waste time and create a lot more work for the webmasters. Right now, if someone has a physics question, I often have to search the Fermilab website for an answer since I don’t have a background in physics. This can take some time and I hate having someone sit on the phone or on hold while I try to find an answer. It would be great to just pull up a “Physics FAQs” wiki page when I get that phone call.

Check out these great resources I came across when researching wikis and libraries. The full text of these articles is available through Dominican University:

Van Arsdale Dennis G. “Staff training as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich: using a wiki for individualized hands-on staff training.” Arkansas Libraries 65(2): 32-36.

Dennis provides a great overview of how the Boreham Library staff put a wiki to use for training purposes.

Saxton, Beth. “Information tools: using blogs, RSS, and wikis as professional resources.” Young Adult Library Services 6(2): 27-29.

Beth provides links to a lot of library wikis. They are specifically for young adult services, but could certainly translate to other areas of the library. She also has great information on blogs and RSS.

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