“Blogs.” “Web 2.0.” “Social software.” “Social networking.” These are the phrases gaining increasing currency in the news, in business, in people’s lives. But how many of them are truly useful to the librarian? Try “Wikis.” Wikis are the social media software choice for more and more librarians across the nation and the world.
The wiki, an easy-to-operate, easy-to-teach and nearly instantaneous way to collaboratively author a website, has become the librarian’s virtual tool of choice. We know this because many of the members of our 50-person Educational Advisory Board are librarians and they universally agree that wikis are the most exciting and relevant development they have seen in a long time.
When you think about it, how useful, as a librarian, is a tool like a blog? Or a MySpace account? Personally, they may be quite useful, but professionally, perhaps not as much. A wiki on the other hand can be used for a multitude of tasks and projects.
Let me give you a few examples of what librarians are doing with PBwikis. All examples come from librarians themselves.
- A policy manual for reference staff
- A site for attendees of quarterly meetings of the Virtual Reference Special Interest Group
- A site to help launch the start-up a chat reference service that is shared among four different colleges in New York City
- A wiki of website URLs and summaries for use by librarians who do digital reference
- A wiki for use by our tutors
- A wiki used by the circulation staff to keep their policies and procedures up to date
Says one librarian, “Use of wikis does indeed seem to be growing. In the past few months alone, I've been contacted by librarians at John Jay College and the Metropolitan Museum of Art who wanted to replicate my library's wiki for reference staff.”
Here are some librarian-run PBwikis.
A little about the company:
PBwiki is the world's largest wiki host and provider of wiki software. It has 150,000 users, 30,000 of whom are educators and librarians. It is a very lean business, which just received a significant capital investment of $2.3 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and has acquired a competitor, Schtuff (though using their own revenue, not the funding). The fact that PBwiki is very popular not just with individuals and businesses, but with students and teachers can only have helped. It is a high-growth area and investors know it.
PBwiki Links
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