Wikis

I really like the idea of making a webpage that's the front end of a wiki, like the Bull Run Public Library. There's probably a limit to what you can do with fancy extras, but what an ideal solution for a small organization without the time or the expertise to create and maintain a standard webpage. And with the free utilities out there, you can do it for very little cost. Also, it looks like a webpage and not a wiki. Minor detail I know, but....

I'm all for the concept of popularizing web publishing. That's one of the main tenants of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 - making things very user friendly so people can be self-sufficient and do for themselves. Setting up a blog is as easy as choosing a user name and password which democratizes access to the web as a soapbox. Wikis do the same thing for websites. This is fabulous. People should not have to know HTML to have a webpage. I built a webpage using HTML once, for a class, and rebuilt a site for my first library job the same way and I have no desire to do that again.

You could do all sorts of things in libraries with a Wiki. You could have a wiki catalog with the bibliographic information uneditable but with patrons/staff (depending on who you want to contribute) able to add to that. We talked about a local history wiki that could incorporate the items in the St. Paul Collection and allow staff and the community to add their own memories.

You could do the same with the history of the library. Billie Young said that there was so much stuff that she couldn't put into her book on SPPL that she would have loved to. How fabulous if they could be in a wiki which would, practically speaking, have no limitations on space.