Activity # 16: Wikis

The first thing I think of when someone says "wiki" is Wikipedia. Right after that, I think of Nancy Pearl's website, Book Lust: http://www.nancypearl.com/

I used to be fairly active on Blook Lust, so much so one of the moderators had mentioned I may like to run a book discussion group there. That never did pan out, which is probably for the best. I'm already too busy!

I set up a page for my library at Book Lust, and also added an author interview or two, and a list of favorite books. But it's been so long since I participated there. It got squeezed out of my life, like so many things did when I started grad school.

Nancy Pearl is, of course, the uberlibrarian we can only dream of being! Her site should be more popular than it is, at least as of the last time I was there. Maybe it's grown since then, but I did enjoy reading Nancy's musings about her reading.

I love the concept of Wikis. The downside and upside are the same, anyone can contribute. Those with less than honorable intentions can leave insulting comments, but I really think the majority of people who use wikis are genuine and well-intentioned.

As for libraries using wikis, I went over to the LISWiki site: http://liswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

It's set up very similarly to Wikipedia, and it looks as though it's still pretty new. There's not a tremendous amount of content there. I looked under the heading of "cell phone use in libraries," a pet peeve of many librarians. That links to relevant articles. Once they get more content this should be another great site to visit, for research and general info.