Wikis!

When I first heard about wikipedia, I must admit that I was doubtful about its usefulness, but after reading about it in a variety of places, I started using it and became a convert. I particularly like it for popular culture kinds of things. For example I had been wondering for years whatever happened to Patience and Prudence (the singers, not the character traits). You never hear their songs played on Oldies but Moldies radio stations and I had started to think that I had hallucinated them. Then I heard John Waters talking about a CD that he has put out "John Waters' Love Songs" and one of their songs was on it, which got me thinking about them all over again. So I looked on wikipedia and there they were! This is getting a little off track. At the last library where I worked, we turned our version of Passport into a wiki and were really pleased with the result. So I had used wikis before "23 Things," but I found it very interesting to look at the samples in our exercise. I liked the simplicity of the wiki for St. Joseph's County Library, although it took a couple of tries to get out of the wiki and into their catalog when I decided I wanted to see more than just their chosen selections. I have always thought of wikis in terms of plain vanilla styles, so I was very impressed with the book lovers' wiki from Princeton Public Library. I usually think of blogs for readers' advisory, but I think the wiki worked really well and think it is a very classy site. By the time I got to Bull Run's wiki, I was starting to get impatient again and I just ran through it quickly. So I am not sure how they intend to use it as they move out of "work in progress" status. It looks like they have a lot of information in one place, but I don't know how easy it would be to find any particular thing. Then I went to the Sandbox wiki and posted my thoughts on going to the Farmer's Market in the fall. I have thought for some time that wikis might help us organize programs like SRP. It would give us the ability to put everything in one place, enable people to add their thoughts about programs and would help clean up email. Maybe 23 Things will help me make that argument with others.