Wiki Wiki, What??

“Wiki Wiki… What…” was my first thought as I began looking over the material for Assignment 1 of my Applied Technologies course. Twitter? Not unknown to me. Blogging? I hadn’t tried it, but I've read enough blogs to understand the concept well enough. A wiki? This one was new. Originally, I thought a “wiki” was a part of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I had never thought of “wiki’s” existing in other forms, especially not as a tool for libraries. I guess that just goes to show how tech savvy I really am.

For the sake of creating an imaginary wiki for a library, I would choose the college library I currently work for, the Nassau Center Library and Learning Commons of Florida State College at Jacksonville. However, I would include the other six library and learning commons branches from our fellow campuses. As a whole, the college serves over 57,000 students. Also, since each library has its own budget, a free wiki would be ideal for such a collaboration. The reasoning behind a staff-only wiki, covering so many library branches, is unification. As an institution, FSCJ strives to present itself as “One College.” Each campus has its own distinct personality, but bringing the libraries together through a wiki would give librarians and assistive staff a place to share ideas, knowledge, policies, procedures, etc. For instance, I know myself and several of my coworkers have called the campus that handles all ILL requests numerous times with questions on how to fill out forms, or manage odd requests that we’ve received for our materials. Furthermore, as I have had the opportunity to visit our other libraries, I always notice a plethora of great ideas in action, causing me to wonder why all of the libraries are not doing the same.

So, my wiki would be a place to gather all of the FSCJ libraries’ collective knowledge, to share ideas, to unify policies and procedures, for each library to answer FAQ’s, and to have a place where information about individual campuses can reside in one place. Specifically, I would have a calendar with not only public events that are on the college’s main website, but meetings and happenings internally that are not always shared campus to campus. Also, since students take classes at more than one location, they tend to ask questions about tutor and library staff schedules for multiple campuses at once, which can be difficult to locate without a good deal of searching and/or phone calls. So, all schedules for tutors in the learning commons, and other branch specific information, would be in one orderly place available to circulation staff as a quick reference regardless of location. Furthermore, instead of each campus having its own Dropbox (cloud device) for forms and documents, all would be available as a downloadable PDF on the wiki. Similar to the collection of frequently used forms and documents, a section of the wiki would archive all previously made “libguides” regardless of which branch created them originally. In addition to being a one-stop resource for library documents and procedure information, I would make a space available for the branches to share pictures, success stories, and ideas with each other. With this type of collaboration, I feel that individual libraries would still retain their particular styles or personalities, yet at the same time, each branch would be able to provide better services as a result of the shared knowledge.

To meet the goals, budgetary needs, and to allow collaboration of over 100 staff members the wiki would need page history since so many people would be working on it, WYSIWYG editing capabilities for the less tech savvy employees, professional support so the wiki does not become a responsibility of FSCJ’s IT staff, a separate host so the wiki does not interfere with any one campuses’ server, no personal domain and no corporate branding since it is for staff use only. Based on the libraries’ needs, GeniusWiki was the best option, meeting all of the criteria, and having extra features, such as database storage to support a large quantity of material and it is a wiki intended personal or team organization.