Library wikis

Wikis... love 'em and hate 'em.

I used to be a big wiki fan. At Broward County Library I made a wiki for the Business, Law, and Government department. (It's a long, funny story that can't be told in a public forum :)) It served as a link depository for the many resources we needed to tell our patrons about. A few of the librarians were brave enough to try editing pages, and a couple actually figured out wiki coding and made nice pages for their sections. So, for that application (no website, no tools, no training, no support, totally under-the-radar) it was a Good Tool.

The library wikis out there are good at what they do... Meredith's ALA wiki was a breakthrough that showed the library community the value of the tool. Best Practices has also found a niche. I like 'em.

Going forward? I suspect the tools we will use from Google next week will make wikis look - hmmm, so 90's? If you want a shared workspace, collaboration, an easy to use interface... a wiki may work, but other tools might be handy too once they work "in the cloud". As the platform improves, the apps keep getting better. New tools like Adobe's AIR are coming. You'll need more techie chops to hack Air than to paste up a wiki, but the result will be more robust with a richer interface.