wiki

Wikis

Wikis are a great tool. They have many good things going for them such as ease of use, being web based, anyone can make changes to them and they are very flexible. Disorganization and lack of control are the biggest problems. They are not a solution for all projects.

I like the idea from Princeton Public library of their Bookloverswiki. They use a wiki to allow customers to write reviews of books and make recommendation to others. It would be even cooler if these could be linked in the catalog.

The ALA conference wiki was another good use of this tool. I have experienced that first hand, and got some good information. It is a great way for librarian to collaborate and their information.

IM-ing

Marshall Breeding said the pervasive presence of instant messaging will be ignored only by organizations willing to risk irrelevancy. According the Pew Internet and the American Family Life report, 53 million American adults use IM as frequent communication channel. We cannot ignor IM, libraries need to be on IM.

I think it is great the VBPL is offer IM reference and I hope that the limited hours will not continue. We should add IM to our set of reference tool just as we added the telephone long, long ago.

Bloglines or Google Reader

I set up feeds in both google reader and bloglines. I found Google easier to use. As for a search tool, Technorati was fun to play with. There is a lot of stuff out there. I can see how people get information overload.