I am currently employed as a library assistant at the Georgia Campus of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in Suwanee, GA. We are an academic medical library with a small, but focused, print collection that is primarily organized using the National Library of Medicine classification system. We also check out anatomical models, study rooms, AV material, and offer many electronic resources, including, but not limited to ebooks and journals.
The library is currently staffed by one full time librarian and two full time library assistants. Our library currently serves the faculty, staff and over 400 students in the Doctor of Osteopathy and Biomedical Sciences programs. Beginning in Fall 2010, we will welcome our inaugural class for the Doctor of Pharmacy program.
We currently use PBWorks as an intranet, so I would like to develop a wiki that allows our staff to communicate news, announcements, policies, and procedures of the Georgia library with our patrons. I am happy with PBWorks and find it very easy to use, but I decided to examine some of the other wiki options using WikiMatrix.org. I was overwhelmed by all of the choices, so I used the Wiki Choice Wizard to help me select a wiki to use. The wizard found that I “want a hosted offer with WYSIWYG editing and a page history available in English using your own domain” and returned 16 results. I then compared the results and decided on using Wetpaint because I really liked the layout and also that it is free, offers ad-free sites for educational institutions, and has unlimited storage and bandwidth.
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Before using Wikimatrix, I had no idea there were so many different Wiki sites! I also found myself a bit overwhelmed! Wetpaint seems to be a fairly popular one for libraries (the fact that it's free is one of many good points).
ReplyDeleteI am a little curious though, what percent of patrons at your library do you think are likely to use a wiki?
That's a good question. I would like to believe that we could get a relatively high percentage of our patrons to use the wiki, especially since our school is so small. This makes it easier to communicate with everyone about new things going on in the school. At the same time, I wonder how many of the students are even familiar with the library's regular website.
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