Wikis

Well, I'm rushing to get this finished since Beth is leaving town and Nichole is quitting her job, but I doubt either of them will feel badly about missing this particular post.

I've been thinking about using Wikis in Technical Services lately, since we do seem to be trading information back and forth. I've got a lot of notes to myself about various procedures that I keep as Microsoft Word documents that I can pop open and look at and some of those have been shared with the other catalogers here. One of them, for world language shelf location prefixes, is one that occasionally gets added to (usually when Jan gets a DVD in a language that's not already included on the list). I haven't been keeping up with her additions so when I got a few new children's items that were in Tamil, I sent out a message to the other catalogers asking if they had any objections to me using "Tam" as a prefix. Naturally, it turned out that Jan had created one already, different from mine, and it just hadn't gotten added to my list. (Oops. Doesn't exactly make me shine, now does it?) And there are other lists like shortened Dewey numbers for our music sound recordings, cutter numbers for classical composers, cutters for makes and models of automobiles, cutters for books about Microsoft software, as well as notes we routinely give to new catalogers, that could probably live on a web site/wiki.

But I have concerns. I'm just not sure how secure something like that would be, having all that fuss about changes to Wikipedia made by people with an agenda certainly gives one pause. And I'm not sure whether it would be more convenient for me to use a web site than just a document file already on my computer. Or whether the formatting that I can use in a Word document could be cut and pasted into a Wiki (I haven't taken the time to really look at/play with the features-- maybe later this week). Etc.

Minor concerns? Not so much to me. Easily addressed? I'll have to take more time to poke around before I'll know.

I certainly agree that it can be useful for shorter term projects. The camping list video was very short term (but, frankly, not that important). We've had some projects (for lack of a better term) which were written as Word documents that were sent via email and I used the "track changes" feature to make comments before I sent them back and that's the sort of collaboration where I think a Wiki could be used. But my changes probably shouldn't replace the originals without there being some discussion, right? I'm not sure I trust my power/judgment to that extent. Trust someone else? That's even riskier.

My feeling is that lots of the kind of work-related materials I'm thinking could fit on a wiki need to be fairly permanent. I think we'd need to have limitations on access and passwords. And backups/history. So I'm a little more cautious about using Wikis for that type of work. Maybe I'll change my mind after I've had more time to explore/play with them this weekend.

Thanks for reading.