After watching a
Webinar hosted by Ellyssa Kroski, blogger at
iLibrarian, I was inspired to set up an example knowledge base for my department.
I was intrigued by the way wikis could be used for project management
and the sharing of information. My department is moving towards more
collaboration, but we don't currently have a centralized way to
disseminate and share information for departmental and group projects.
In
this Webinar, Ellyssa mentioned several wiki platforms and demonstrated
PBworks. I am not personally a fan of the PBworks layout, so I decided
to take a look at some of the other platforms. I looked into Wet Paint,
but the parent company seems to have changed into a gossip Web site. I
liked PmWiki (the library I worked at in grad school used that
platform), but as far as I could tell the platform needed to be uploaded
to the library server. At this point, I just wanted to create an
example wiki, so I wasn't ready to ask our systems department to add a
wiki platform.
In the end I settled on Google Sites, as I could
easily create something and have it hosted for free. I chose a simple
template with a left navigation bar (I prefer clean simple Web sites)
and customized the background photo. I thought about what I wanted
included in the wiki and how to organize information into a small
number of categories. For my top level of categories, I chose Courses,
Projects, Resources, and Training.
Under the Courses heading, I
listed all of the departments that we provide instruction for, with the
idea that each instruction librarian could include a short summary of
the instruction he or she provides for that department. I didn't want the information to be a repeat of what we already have on our Web site
or in our LibGuides, but rather a centralization and summarization so
that information can easily be found in one place. For example, I
summarized which classes I provide instruction for and included a link
to our SACs LibGuide that provides a more detailed account of what I do
semester by semester as well as links to course LibGuides
which include PowerPoints and materials.
Under the
Projects heading, I created pages for department, shared, and individual
projects. On these pages, we can update our progress on our projects
and also see what others are working on in order to collaborate and
share ideas if we are working on similar projects. There's also an
ability to add comments, which I found useful. I saw that the PRIMO
site of the month focuses on Endnote, so I added the link as a comment
on our Endnote Update project page, so I would remember and so that my
coworker could see the link too.
Under the Resources heading, so
far I've included links for interesting articles and travel tips.
My coworkers often e-mail interesting articles, but I find that they
get lost in my e-mail if I don't add them to Endnote or another program.
I thought that if someone had an article to share with the
department, he or she could add a link to it on the wiki. I'm currently
categorizing the articles by subject, but I imagine this could become
cumbersome if many articles are added. I included travel tips as
my department travels to satellite locations to teach. Right now, this page contains tips like when teaching in Seoul, you can take the KAL
Limousine bus from Incheon Airport into the city. Finally, I included a
training page in case we want to move our training materials online.
Overall,
I felt that Google sites was easy to use and somewhat customizable. One
thing I didn't like, however, is that each page did not immediately
include a "last updated" time. While you can add a recent activity link
to your site's side bar, you must manually type in when the page was last
updated .
What do you all think? Have you set up wikis/knowledge bases
for your library or your self? Which platform did you use? What kind of
categories did you use to divide your information?
