Organization Monkey

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.

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