wikis

i am currently on lunch after having attending my first (and second) session(s) of the conference, "Wikis in Action." i was really excited about wikis before i got here, and now i'm even more hyped up about them!

i've been thinking we need to do something to make our resource guides and pathfinders more dynamic, easier to use, and, most importantly, easier to update. as it stands the librarians send me a word file that i then turn into a pdf document and upload to our web site. any time something changes the documents have to be edited and then re-uploaded. very simply, this is a pain in the ass. it's incredibly inefficient, and it's the furthest thing from timely. most of the time the librarians, understandably, don't want to edit and resubmit their documents for one tiny change so they wait until they have a few changes to make to do the work all at once. this results in resources guides and pathfinders that are, like, sooo last month. not good.

a wiki would let us make instant changes to our resource guides and pathfinders. this i knew. what i hadn't considered were all the other cool things we could do with a wiki.

for example, the circ desk has procedural manuals. they are constantly wrestling with putting screenshots into word documents. it seems like every two days they're printing out a new and/or revised page for their manual. if we had a wiki they could go in, edit one screenshot or one sentence, and boom. done.

same goes for committee work. i hate those emails that go around and around until the subject line reads "re: re: re: re: re: re: re: RE: re:".

so, i've got a list of fabulous ways we could use a wiki and a list of possible wiki softwares. i have a feeling we might have to wait to implement a wiki-like substance until after the college has decided on a content management system (which would mean that we wouldn't really be installing a separate wiki software at all since one would be included), but who knows. maybe IT will let us install one as a stop-gap measure.

oops, lunch is over. now i'm off to a session on blogging!

technorati tag: cil2006