Are you thinking about taking the plunge into the world of net 2. with your library and making a wiki? I recently put collectively a effective wiki for my college library and so I would like to share some achievement ideas for how to do it effectively.

1. Which wiki platform are you going to use? This is crucial mainly because there are hundreds of them out there and they all differ in terms of ease of use, value, and setup as properly as the capacity to control who can view your wiki as well as who can post to your wiki.

two. Do you want to use your wiki exclusively as a approach of organizing and altering material on your site? Or do you want to use the wiki to let your patrons to interact with every other?

3. What is the exact purpose for your wiki? To communicate between The original hidden wiki ? To communicate with your patrons? To let your patrons communicate with each other?

four. What content are you going to incorporate on your wiki? Just links to other pages on your library web website, a searchable library catalog, details about library classes and events, well-known books, news and announcements or other products?

5. Do you want to pay for a wiki service or do you want to use a no cost wiki?

6. Is there a tech assistance particular person out there to enable you install your wiki and to assist with some periodic maintenance? If not, do you have a librarian who can take charge of the wiki and its updates and the technological side of maintaining a wiki? A wiki is a lot simpler to use and preserve up with on a typical internet site, nevertheless, you can’t just place it up and in no way devote time functioning on it.

7. It also helps if you can develop some wiki specific content. In our case we developed subject pages for every single of the key subjects taught at our college and incorporated hyperlinks to databases, magazines, books, ebooks, specialized encyclopedias and websites for each and every subject. We also have our library news and policies amongst other items of interest to our patrons on our wiki. You will need to give your patrons a explanation to study the wiki and to use it.

8. Wikis are a single of the technologies of the future and as much more and a lot more libraries and other companies start applying them, it is to your advantage to understand how to use a single and to choose if it is right for your library.