Are you considering about taking the plunge into the globe of internet 2. with your library and creating a wiki? I recently place collectively a successful wiki for my college library and so I would like to share some good results guidelines for how to do it effectively.

1. Which wiki The official hidden wiki are you going to use? This is important because there are hundreds of them out there and they all vary in terms of ease of use, value, and setup as properly as the capability to control who can view your wiki as nicely as who can post to your wiki.

two. Do you want to use your wiki exclusively as a approach of organizing and altering material on your site? Or do you want to use the wiki to let your patrons to interact with every single other?

3. What is the precise purpose for your wiki? To communicate among library personnel? To communicate with your patrons? To let your patrons communicate with each and every other?

4. What content material are you going to consist of on your wiki? Just hyperlinks to other pages on your library internet web site, a searchable library catalog, details about library classes and events, popular books, news and announcements or other products?

5. Do you want to pay for a wiki service or do you want to use a free wiki?

6. Is there a tech assistance particular person readily available to assistance you set up your wiki and to help with some periodic maintenance? If not, do you have a librarian who can take charge of the wiki and its updates and the technological side of preserving a wiki? A wiki is a lot much easier to use and maintain up with on a common website, nevertheless, you can’t just put it up and under no circumstances commit time operating on it.

7. It also helps if you can develop some wiki specific content. In our case we designed topic pages for every of the significant subjects taught at our college and integrated hyperlinks to databases, magazines, books, ebooks, specialized encyclopedias and web-sites for each topic. We also have our library news and policies amongst other products of interest to our patrons on our wiki. You have to have to give your patrons a reason to study the wiki and to use it.

8. Wikis are 1 of the technologies of the future and as more and extra libraries and other corporations start using them, it is to your advantage to study how to use one particular and to decide if it is ideal for your library.