For those who have been following this blog knows that my library has been working to drag our university faculty into the 21st Century. On Thursday, my coworkers and I met with several professors on the use of Wikis. They want to learn how to use Wikis to communicate with each other (and students) and share note and ideas. One of my coworkers gave them examples on how Wikis are used in other departments at MUSC and how it has helped them.
The MUSC Library also has a staff Wiki, where we post information about our departments, events and future plans. It is a good way to keep track of what is happening in our departments and keep all of the information that we have in one place.
I came across a journal article a few days ago called "Using Wikis in Academic Libraries" by Samuel Kai-Wah Chu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong. In his study, where he interviewed librarians at 48 universities around the world, only 33% (16) of them were using Wikis for work and 8% (4) were planning to use them in the near future. Since it looked like many of the university libraries were not using Wikis and/or had no plans to use them, many of them used blogs and other ways to share information.
I think Wikis can be beneficial to academic libraries because staff members can share information among each other without sending out a lot of emails back and forth. And if they have a question or needed to find some information that happened at a meeting, they can refer back to the Wiki to find that answer.
Another reason that Wikis can be beneficial is because librarians and other staff members can promote Wikis to faculty, staff and students. They can show them that sharing and discussing information among each other can benefit everyone involved. Academic libraries should embrace Wikis, not only to benefit themselves, but the university or college as a whole.
Author's note: The journal article can be found in the March 2009 edition of The Journal of Academic Librarianship.
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I enjoyed reading your comments about wikis in the academic library setting. When I went to the LISSA symposium recently, one of the panelists discussed how she used Facebook a lot to communicate with the other library directors in SC. After reading your post, I think wikis might work really well for this small group of professionals as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was preparing for an interview at a community college recently, I created a wiki for my free collection. However, Victoria and I chatted about how students should also learn how to create their own libraries using tools like this. They need to learn how to become information literate but also how to contribute to the information world themselves. This would be another free way to publish ideas and keep academic costs down.
Thanks for sharing!