Wikis...wicked!

Well, there I was, just reading the Lesson 9 page of our Library Challenge. Suddenly, an interesting link caught my eye, so I clicked, and that led to more clickable links, and two hours later I have read so much interesting stuff my head is spinning. If this were a labyrinth and I had to find my way back by retracing my steps, I would be lost forever. (Luckily, I can find the place from which I started by going back to my "Bookmarks," but I might never see again some of the places I passed along the way.)

I was lost the longest in the LIS (Library and Information Service) wiki. There was a list of Articles of Interest, and also a list of Areas for Development. I saw things in both lists that caught my eye, so of course I had to click and read. I read the discussions about cell phones in libraries (so that I could find out that there is no definitive answer) and about laptops for patron check-out (although this is primarily being done in academic and not public libraries).

Some of the categories in Areas for Development were weblogs, digitization, Library 2.0, and RFID (which I now know what is). I followed the links to all of these, read the main wiki pages, looked at the discussion pages, clicked on other links contained within. I found one weblog I liked so much I added it to my RSS feeds, something I haven't done since I added my first feeds the week we studied about it (and luckily I could still remember how to do this from Lesson 3).

So, here is the link to the Library Computer Guy's blog, and although he's blogging from Oklahoma, I think some of his observations of working in a public library are universal. http://librarycomputerguy.wordpress.com/

I also ran into this podcast on his blog, which thanks to Lesson 6 I knew how to share with you. (I didn't know it was going to run for nearly 20 minutes when I first clicked on it, but I found the speaker so interesting that I listened to all of it.)

The speaker, Howard Rheingold, talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

On a final note about wikis, I am a small contributor to a wiki project that started here in Butte, Montana. The goal of the project is to document every property in the National Historic Landmark District of Butte-Anaconda (over 6000 individual properties). We do historical research, mostly at the Archives, about the buildings, original owners, historical uses, architects, etc. We add all this content along with photos or whatever else. In the hopeful end result, a user will be able to look at a map of the historic district, click on any building, and up would pop a photo/ basic info page. From there one could click on additional links to go into as much (or as little) detail as one wished. I think it will be a very cool thing.