Thing # 16-Wikis

For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at some library wikis and blog about your finding. Here’s a few examples to get you started:

I looked at the following:

Book Lovers Wiki


PL Subject Guides


A best practices wiki


Create a blog post about your findings. What did you find interesting? What types of applications within libraries might work well with a wiki?

Here's the blog post about my findings. I think the concept of sharing information in this way is fascinating. Perhaps most individuals in their deepest of hearts really do want to help others. The sharing component of the internet sort of speaks to that. Having knowledge shared in this way also expands our definition of who holds knowledge. The old way of thinking about knowledge pointed to older, wizened experts who spoke from on high to the the tiny little masses who gleaned the tender morsels of knowledge thrown down to them. Today's definition of knowledge expands to include the tiny little masses. Today's definition of the masses recognizes that the masses also have knowledge. I think this might be helpful to the library industry because it expands who can help patrons/users find knowledge. Encouraging patrons to form and use wikis could be one way to put these ideas into practice. I'm sure there are many many others.