Keeping up with RSS feeds and discovering more about Wikis

Only just got back to my blog today, and at the same time, had a look at my rss feeds on bloglines – oh no, what a lot there are, but there’s so much good information there.

Came across another good site recommended by the inimitable Sarah Houghton-Jan
(LibrarianInBlack - I’m starting to sound like a fan aren’t I?). It’s called 25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians and is written by Jessica Hupp. The list includes many of the types of social networking tools we’re covering in this course, but also goes a bit further – which of course what the course is about – encouraging us to expand our knowledge, our horizons, and up play along with our curiosity factor……

I also started having a look at a variety of wikis today. I particularly liked the idea of WorldCat – haven’t had much of an explore previously.

There’s such a great range of ways that wikis can be used in a library environment to help patrons, and that started the brain buzzing about what we could introduce…..

I really like the idea of using Wikis to collaborate, sharing the invormation. The Library Instruction Wiki is a great example of this - there’s space for collecting Web links, hand-outs, and success stories about providing information literacy instruction – we should all be heading this direction – their subtitle is stop reinventing the wheel, and I’m a great believer in that :0)

One of the other really interesting wikis I looked at as part of this weeks learnings was the full Library Success: A best practices wiki. This is a great site – lots of room for expansion as it covers areas such as organizing collections, professional development, programming, services to specific groups, selling your library and much more. It’s great to see that that NSW content is so prominent in the Services in a Multi-lingual Environment section. I have a feeling this is a site that has been encouraged in the past by Ellen and Victoria, so I think it’s high time we all made a commitment to getting some other great NSW resources up there.

Another site I looked at is one created for library users - it’s the Book Lovers Wiki at the Princeton Public Library. It is a wiki of categorized and rated book reviews contributed by readers and it appears to be linked to the Summer Reading Program as well as obviously being promoted through Princeton’s book groups. Definitely a path that we could easily head down in our own libraries,(after making the big decision about external or home hosting).