Saturday 15 March 2008

On Wikis

I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia. I so often find the information I need there. With all the inherent difficulties of allowing 'anyone' to add information. It is still fantastic. My faith in the essential goodness of people is restored by projects such as this Project Gutenberg and The Human Genome Project. How bad can humanity be if we care enough to give our time, knowledge and expertise for free?

I was less familiar with the use of Wiki's although I have heard of people using them to collaborate on social projects ie the example about organising a camping trip. Until I saw the example of a community using their Wiki to highlight interesting places to visit. A travel directory compiled by one person or even a group of people can only go so far. It is limited by what the person or group has seen, heard about and experienced. What about some of those out of the way places off the beaten track which are none the less worthwhile?

The process of the collaboration is the greatest strength of the information. It's funny how something that seems so scary in the beginning. What - create a document and allow anyone to change it? We seem to spend our whole lives trying to stop people amending and changing our words. Microsoft has spent lost of money and programming time trying to make Word able to be used collaboratively. I know what I would rather be using!

I think one area that could really benefit from a Wiki is Family History/Geneology. Many of our Genealogy customers start at the same place and ask the same questions. A Wiki could help provide answers to some of these 'early' questions.

We have a group that volunteers to assist people with their genealogy questions. This acknowledges that the field of genealogy is so varied and complicated that few library staff are ever going to be anything more than proficient in helping customers with their inquiries. Most of these volunteers have been researching for years and are well passed the beginning stages of research. I think it must be frustrating for them to help so many 'newbies' with little to no experience. A Wiki could help them guide newbies more easily. Additionally, a Wiki could be used to document resources which can help with particular questions.

Finally, without being to mean spirited, sometimes our genealogists get so excited about the information they find that they want to tell the story to someone. Perhaps a Wiki could be a means of sharing those stories?

I'm sure there are many other possible uses including use as a staff only tool. I can really see us using this one.

On RSS & Newsreaders

Firstly, I have to 'fess up. Every morning - while I have my first coffee of the day I have a look at the Sydney Morning Herald - at work. If I am ever asked to justify the time spent. I guess I can say it's to keep up to date with current issues which may convert themselves into reference requests at the service counter. However, the truth is I like doing it.

Now a much better use of my time might be logging on to Google Reader and having a glance at the targeted information that the web has grabbed and brought to my computer for me. With the time I save I plan to have look at a few feeds I have put in a folder called fun!
So what I like about RSS is that I can easily have a quick glance at information likely to be of interest to me. It sits and waits for me to have a convenient moment.

I selected a range of sites including my beloved Sydney Morning Herald. For fun I subscribed to Snopes - I can't get enough of those Urban Legends! I also subscribed to several promising looking library sites including Unshelved library cartoons. Librarian's Internet Index, Librarian Avenger and Librarian Central. I like the strategy of looking at a few sites and whittling them down the the ones I really like.

As to how we can take advantage of RSS? I guess we can either be users of or creators of. Perhaps we can even be both. I can see a use in pushing out information to staff or customers. An RSS feed could be a very effective 'What's On' type of tool.

As far as being users of we can recommend useful feeds to our colleagues. We might even find it appropriate to recommend some feeds to our customers. An RSS feed of current news would be of interest to many of our customers.

I would like to say I would use RSS feeds on my children's web page. But I would be nervous about recommending any content that I have no control over. I would have to stick with content pushed out from companies and institutions I already trust.

Isn't that the Net all over?