Sunday, March 8, 2009

Wiki research guides

At the academic library where I am interning I am investigating how technology can be used to create library research guides that are more relevant to students and faculty, so I was happy to find information on and examples of research guide wikis. Most of the research wikis I looked at are just personal wikis of the subject librarians and students can't edit them. I found oneat Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts-Boston where faculty and students can update the guides. This seems a good model for research guides because subject librarians often have a hard time finding time to update the guides. This seems an ideal instance when drawing on the "hive mind" is very useful. I also like wikis because they make web editing so much easier (no markup language to learn!) I am also supposed to edit the research guides for the modern languages and I would love to do so on a wiki rather than using Contribute which is a frustrating web editing software that this library uses. I liked the Princeton Public Library's Book Lover's Wiki of the wikis I looked at. I will be visiting it to discover new reads for my pleasure reading.

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad you mentioned the "hive mind" - this is what I think is so valuable about Twitter.... but I think you missed Twitter it was last week's class... I can talk to you about it...

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