wikis in use

at my library i chair the wiki task force, which was charged in june of 2006 with identifying what wikis could/could not do for the library. the task force put together lists of possible uses for a wiki for each department in our library. we put together the lists using a wiki, of course, to give ourselves experience using the software to see what it was actually like to use. the task force used pbwiki to collaborate, and the results are still available at http://wikitaskforce.pbwiki.com/.

while making the lists of possible uses it became clear that we all wanted a centralized storage area for procedural documentation. in addition, we identified certain things that we look up all the time, like the phone number list, a policy on x, etc. these things seemed natural to develop in a wiki, so the report from the task force was that not only was a wiki feasible for us, we decided to build one.

the health sciences libraries wiki became a creative hot bed of development, with a task force member in each department figuring out which procedures should be posted, how to update them, and what the training needs were. our university provides access to a wiki that is password protected. we looked at other wiki options but decided that this was the best tool for our purposes at the time. each department revised documentation, wrote new documentation, uploaded files and created pages. the wiki is now two years old and still in active use.

Posted in wiki | Comments Off on wikis in use

drug name generator

pill the generator blog pointed me to this new drug generator. it’s funny, but not as funny as the postmodern essay generator.

Posted in drugs, monkeys/bananas, titter | Comments Off on drug name generator

wow, wikis!

michelle kraft and i are co-teaching week 2 (focusing on wikis) of the 8-week online continuing ed course offered to medical library association members. the major discovery exercise for the week is that each participant creates his own wiki. michelle and i have been impressed with the variety of approaches and ideas the participants have in how a wiki can be used. the goal for the week is to simply start a wiki but many participants have gone to town and really developed a topic and worked with the tool.  here’s a link to the list of wikis that have already been created for the course. warning: over 700 people registered for the course, so the list is likely to get quite long! mla 2.0 101 wikis

my favorite wikis created for the class so far: Penguins, Scholarly Publishing in Biomedical Research Science and the NIH Public Access Policy, Devilishly Handsome Dog Productions

Posted in wiki | 1 Comment

Taking the course I’m teaching

i’m a member of the medical library association’s (mla) social networking software task force, which i mentioned a while back.  we’re teaching an 8-week, self-paced, online-only course to members of mla, focusing on the different social networking tools out there.  i’m co-teaching two of the weeks but i also registered to take the course.  i haven’t used all of the tools we’ll be discussing and it seemed like a fun idea to set time aside for myself to explore them.

week one focuses on blogs and rss, which i’m well familiar with for my own use.  we’re still young in the use of a blog at my library but i am pleased that we are promoting our resources with this tool.  one of the things i’ve always said about libraries is that they don’t promote themselves effectively.  staying current with and using the available, mostly free technologies is a step in the right direction.

Posted in library, social networking | Comments Off on Taking the course I’m teaching

mla is in chicago this year

the annual meeting of the medical library association is in chicago this year. i’m wondering what chicago will be like with a bunch of medical librarians running through it, if this is what it looks like now. look out, chicago.

Posted in library, monkeys/bananas, titter | Comments Off on mla is in chicago this year

pre-internet blogging

i sort of half-laughed at today’s non-sequitur comic.  it’s odd to think of someone standing on the front stoop of his house, reading his writings aloud through a megaphone.(*)  blogging, or writing down what’s important to you in a public forum, can be risky because it makes you accountable for your ideas and opinions.  it also makes you relevant to what’s going on in the field of librarianship because people find out who you are and what you care about.

since i wrote the blog post on usage statistics i’ve had two library vendors contact me to talk about the problems they’re having in building tools to help librarians gather statistics.  how fantastic is that?  now we have a conversation going about something that’s important to all of us, and if we solve the problem we did it as a team.  that’s a pretty powerful possibility, and all it took was the commitment of one person to write down what she cares about.  why isn’t every librarian blogging?

* actually, that sounds kind of fun.  we could broaden it to make it an annual campus event with every department participating, each broadcasting through a megaphone what’s important to them.

Posted in library, writing | 1 Comment