Week 12 Readings

Allan's article on using wikis to manage library instruction programs seems like a no-brainer to me.  He cites two advantages to library instruction wikis:  sharing knowledge and cooperating in creating resources. Having taken the Library Instruction course here in LIS (which I'd highly recommend, actually), I have a new appreciation for the work that goes into lesson plans and handouts.  Why not share these materials to take advantage of individuals' areas of expertise and to help distribute the workload?  The article offers Web sites for a few commercial sites for creating your own wiki--I don't know if these are still around, though, after three years.  

Social tagging is interesting to me, in that it allows the user to create his or her own subject headings for things.  But I'm on the fence about whether it's a good idea for librarians to "give up the reins," as Arch puts it, in controlling vocabulary.  Based on my own experience using del.icio.us, I can appreciate the problem of variation in tags--I never remember if I've run all the words in a tag-phrase together, or if I've separated them with an underscore, or if I've abbreviated a term, or used caps or lowercase--my own tags are a mess! I can see where a folksonomy created by library patrons, if left to their own devices, could create a kind of chaos!  (Loved the term "spagging" for "spam tagging"!)

I enjoyed reading the article on "Weblogs"  for its background information and history.  Having spent the term contributing to my own blog, I could really understand the pros--fostering collaboration, focus, and communication; simplicity; practicality, for its time-stamping and organized trail of discussion--and cons--the reader has to go to the blog (unless he or she signs up for notification or RSS feeds.  I can certainly see how blogs could be used in the library--either among coworkers, as a way to facilitate training, or among patrons, as an extension of reference services.  I've actually really enjoyed keeping my blog throughout the term.  I'm just not sure the world needs me to keep mine up after this term is over given the millions that are already out there!  :)

Jimmy Wales on the Birth of Wikipedia was a very informative video.  I learned a lot about this Web site that I use every day.  It's operated by thousands of volunteers, funded by donations, has over 600,000 articles in English (and that's as of 2005), was a "Top 50 Website" that was bigger than the New York Times.  His "chaotic" model costs about $5000 a month for bandwidth.  I liked how he said, "It isn't perfect, but it's better than you'd expect," and I guess that's how I've come to view Wikipedia--as a starting point. Wales discusses how the Wikipedia Foundation handles controversies, how they handle quality control, what types of software tools they use, and how they are governed.  I thought it was very interesting at the end, when he said that teachers are finally beginning to use Wikipedia, and that he sees free-license textbooks as the next big thing in
education.