PLA Blog

I had the opportunity to run this idea by about 10 PLA committees on Sunday, January 21 at ALA Midwinter in Seattle, and everyone had really, really positive feedback, including volunteers to contribute people power and content, and ideas on related programs at the upcoming PLA conference in Minneapolis. You may have also seen a snippet about this in the January/February issue of Public Libraries magazine.

So, the public library association is contemplating putting together a wiki. Now, in an age where wikis are sprouting up like weeds, we’re looking to create something unique, useful, and inviting to public librarians, while striving to avoid too much redundancy and overlap with, but also driving traffic and activity to, other library/librarianship wikis.

The current, nascent concept entails building an living, breathing encyclopedia of public librarianship (not a wiki of or about the Public Library Association, but a wiki sponsored by the Public Library Association). The plan is to create a base information organization structure, with categories that can speak to patrons, friends of the library, trustees, selectmen, librarians in other types of libraries, library school students, potential librarians, and Joe and Jane Patron, and to populate that base category structure with seed content from many different corners of PLA.

The next step is setting the wiki free to the internet wild where public librarians can grow and prune the wiki as necessary with more current content contribution. Links to other blogs, wikis, and articles can serve as bibliographic references, further reading, and examples, while keeping the content of the wiki encyclopedic and balanced in nature. The Public Library Association, as the sponsoring organization, would be in charge of creating guidelines, style guides, and just overall general management and monitoring. You, as the public, will help keep the wiki living and growing.

So our questions to you are:

• As a public librarian, a graduate student, a patron, an administrator, a friend of the library, or even just an onlooker, seeking information specifically about public libraries and librarians, what would you be looking for in an encyclopedia/almanac/pathfinder/ of public librarianship?
• What kind of information about public libraries and librarianship would you seek that you can’t readily get your hands on right now?
• What about Wikipedia, which is powered by the MediaWiki software, do you like or dislike? Is it easy or hard to use? What do you think would be better?
• What about Wikipedia, as an editable encyclopedia where you can search, navigate, and edit content, do you like or dislike? We’re looking for comments on the layout and usability, and not a discussion of judgments about Wikipedia itself.

Please post your answers to these questions, and any comments you may have about the proposed project, as comments to this post, so that they can be incorporated into the development of the project.

In the meantime, have a look at the other wikis librarians should know about:

• Wikipedia
  While Wikipedia does give some librarians the heebie jeebies, the peoples’ encyclopedia can be used as a helpful resource of information (especially current events), and a good starting place for research. Librarians can easily get involved with creating and editing articles on Wikipedia by creating an account.
  
• Library Success Wiki
  Have a best practice you want to share? Looking for best practices in libraries? Check out this wiki. Just create an account, and you can add to or edit any section you like. This was a big favorite with the PLA committees I talked to.
• Library 2.0 Wiki
  A very beta wiki (the home page is very blank) about the Library 2.0 concept. The best place to start is the Links page, but there isn’t much other content on the wiki overall. Librarians can help build it out by creating an account and adding content. I’m hoping that the creators of the wiki will add more content and perhaps flesh out the current pages to tell librarians what they can do to help.
  
• Oregon Library Instruction Wiki
  “A collaboratively developed resource for librarians involved with or interested in instruction. All librarians and others interested in library instruction are welcome and encouraged to contribute.” An *excellent* source of instructional content for all types of libraries, with a nicely laid out home page to help librarians learn how to be involved.
  
• Blogging Libraries Wiki
  A collection of links to libraries with blogs, categorized by type of library. If your library has a blog, create an account to list it there. Or, if you want to see what libraries are doing with blogs, this is a good site to visit.
  
• Library and Information Science Wiki
  Also very beta, this wiki of library science presents a good start for organizational structure.

Tags: ALAMidwinter2007, conferences, PLA, PLA Blog, wikis

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.