Week 7, Thing 17: Wikis

Wikis can be really useful as an online guide to something. For libraries, it could be computer procedures, customer service procedures, policies, links for continuing education, almost anything. I like the idea of subject guides in a wiki, except that the beauty of digital information is that it doesn't have to put things into rigid categorization (Everything is Miscellaneous is a great book for librarians to read! Really fascinating.). The booklovers site is a great wiki, one that patrons could participate in as well as librarians, contributing reviews and other book content to a local site (though a book review blog intended to be used by librarians and patrons alike I started a couple of years ago didn't work very well at my library). Generally anything that could be in its own small encyclopedia could work very well in a wiki, and the genius of it is open participation--many minds are smarter than one.