Monday, January 28, 2008

Blue 2.0: wiki work

Part of Blue 2.0 this week is to create a wiki. We were asked to use PBWiki as our platform.

So tonight I started playing with it. I had a hard time coming up with something to use a wiki for. Some of my thoughts were to use a wiki as a place to store and easily revise cataloging procedures. I could also make a page of Music Subject Headings, but I don't know enough about subject headings to do it justice. Finally, I decided that a wiki would be a great way to keep track of a family tree. So that's what I did.

It's kind of small right now, only a few pages, but I hope to add more soon and let other family members add pages as well. You can check it out here: Kerri's Family Tree. I made this wiki private, I don't know if that restricts access or not even if you have the link. I may have to actually "invite" you to the page.

Setting up an account on pbwiki was pretty easy. Trying to figure out what to put on the pages was a little trickier. Also, I decided to delete a page that I created and it took me a while to figure out how to do that. But I think I got it now.

I can see that using a wiki would be beneficial for collaborative work. I know that the music librarians in the Chicago area set up a wiki for themselves for planning the national Music Library Association meeting to be held there in 2009. I don't know how that is working for them, but it seems like a good way to facilitate communication between a group of people. Probably better than a blog. However, I do kind of wonder if a forum would be a better way to conduct discussions than on a wiki. I'm much less familiar with wikis than I am with blogs and forums. So I will investigate some of the others and play with mine and see how I like them.

Next session: Tagging and online applications.

2 comments:

  1. Kerri, great idea for a wiki. I hadn't thought of using one for genealogy info.

    I just came back from the SLA Leadership Summit. I organized a wiki for local arrangements information for the meeting. It worked really well and I'd recommend it for other professional meetings--for restaurant recommendations, taxi advice, maps, etc. SLA fortunately has its own wiki service so I just used that, but you could probably do a nice wiki with any of the free wiki software.

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  2. Stacey: here's a question about the wiki. If you have an account with pbwiki, can you see the wiki I created? Or is it closed to you as well unless I give you permission to look at it.

    I friend mentioned to me that she was not able to get to it because it is private. I'm thinking of changing my set-up though to not have information on living relatives, just the deceased.

    Although, I am open to suggestions!
    Thanks!!

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