Thing 16, Week 7

I set up my first wiki and called it SJA Library Wiki (that's original). After looking at some of the other wiki examples, I can foresee all kinds of possibilities. So far, I've just added two basic links on the navigation bar of the wiki. I've looked at lots of the wiki links and I especially like the wiki developed concerning "library best practices". It is expertly organized and has lots of great information. I can only imagine how wonderful it must be to have experienced librarians collaborating on a site to give all the rest of us a point of reference. I also love the open World Cat. I have it set up as a gadget on my iGoogle page for Library Stuff. It is a wonderful reading reference tool and an example of what a collaborative catalog could look like.

The "Blogging Libraries" wiki was interesting in that it basically created categories of libraries and then provided links to those library blogs under each category. So the wiki was acting in this case as another 2.0 organizational tool. I also really liked the "library instruction" wiki and the idea of not recreating the wheel every time you need some new ideas for library instruction. Most of the topics treated on this wiki were designed for college level instruction but could be adapted to the high school level. The article "Using Wikis to Create Online Communities" was also very helpful with ideas for wiki use in libraries. I can see a lot of possibilities in terms of a wiki as an organizational tool. I was wondering if any school library automation systems have the ability yet to use wiki applications in the OPAC??? To me, that would be the "best use" of a wiki tool in the library as it would allow students to add their own reviews, we could add book cover art, and probably set up categories and tags for specific genres.