Friday, July 30, 2010

Wikis and add-ons and plug-ins....oh my!

This week relatively easy for me. I've created wikis before for collaborative projects while I was in grad school. Using them was so much easier than having to email documents and presentations back and forth. We also have a youth services wiki at my library where people can post booklists, programming ideas and calls for help. Unfortunately, it's not updated very frequently. It could be such a handy tool (especially for new librarians like me!), but I don't think there has been much push for more consistent use of it.

The wiki I created for this week is on WetPaint. You can view it here: D's Reads. I've used WetPaint and PBwiki in the past and see positives and negatives with each. I think WetPaint is super easy to use and that the navigation is easier to use. However, the free version contains a lot of advertising on the page, which can make it look cluttered. PBwiki is also relatively easy to use, but I don't like the navigation structure and find adding pages to be a little bit more difficult.

As for the plug-ins and add-ons...they're neat, but I don't know that I have much use for them right now. I did customize my Firefox browser at home and wish I had found Zotero while I was still in college and had tons of resources that needed organizing and citing. However, uber-customization just doesn't matter that much to me. All of our library computers use Internet Explorer anyway, so I wouldn't really benefit from any of those things professionally anyway.

1 comment:

  1. Wikis can be great fro sharing ideas. I have found that there has to be a mandate in order for staff to use one.

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