We touched upon Mashups and API in Week 8 of the Web 2.0 101 CE.

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Use a Wiki

Free online applications like MediaWiki and PBWiki make this brainstorming and collaboration tool even more valuable. Observe these dos and don’ts.

Document, don’t discuss. Wikis are best for storing shared group knowledge — tutorials, style guides, agendas, meeting minutes, and so on. They’re not mailing lists or forums.

Learn the markup. Only wiki n00bs post big blobs of run-on text. Take a few minutes to learn how to add links and create readable bullet points, section headers, and paragraphs.

Sign your name. Many wikis allow for anonymous contributions, but your fellow collaborators will appreciate knowing who said what. Plus, users with a reputation for
making valuable contributions are less likely to get their edits rolled back than an AnonymousCoward.

Encourage participation.Inform colleagues that if they don’t participate in the wiki, you’ll be forced to have a — ugh! — long, boring meeting.

Compose offline, then cut and paste. Others may want to modify the file while you’re writing.

Who out there in library land uses a wiki?
For starters, there’s the Hospital Librarian’s Wiki, sponsored by the Hospital Libraries Section of the Medical Library Association, as well as UBC’s HealthLib Wiki, which has had over 300,000 page views since its launch in 2006. Meanwhile, the American Library Association has ReadWriteConnect, a wiki listing all of ALA’s blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts, and “next generation” online tools. There’s over 30 wikis available. Where’s yours?

Want more information?
Check out Brenda Chawner & Paul Lewis’ 2006 article WikiWikiWebs: New Ways to Communicate in a Web Environment from Information Technology & Libraries for an overview of wikis and their applicability to libraries.

**Wiki (wik’e): A collaborative website workspace that multiple people can edit together, share files and documents, and collaborate.

23 Things/Learning 2.0 is a set of self-directed exercises designed to let all library employees explore the new social software tools on the horizon in a fun, hands-on way.   Because Blowers created this program to share, libraries across the country, whether public, academic, or special libraries, have taken up the mantel and created their own versions of the 23 Things/Learning 2.0 exercises.

As the Learning 2.0 course is self-directed, even solo librarians can work their way through the exercises, though working through the exercises at the same time as your peers can be helpful, especially when it comes to bouncing ideas around and getting feedback.  One idea to consider is forming a Learning 2.0 community with other librarians in your area.  Perhaps even MLA Sections or Chapters might consider hosting a Learning 2.0 course for members. Distance is not an issue.

In collaboration with one of my colleagues in Jacksonville, Florida, Ann Farrell, I am currently in the midst of hosting a Learning 2.0 course for my library system (one week to go!).  We’re spread out over 4 states and over 20 libraries, so an online course was a good option for including all of our staff.  To make this course relevant to medical library staff, we modified the 23 Things substantially, both to customize it to our library system and to introduce more medical social software applications, such Connotea, PubMed mash-ups and third party tools, medical videos and images on YouTube and Flickr, and etc.  We also had a great session on medical librarian and medical blogging, taught by David Rothman.  Blowers has given the library community a great pattern to work from, but you can really make it your own.

What has this program done for my library system?  Time will tell, but already our library staff, both the librarians and library associates, have come up with dozens of ideas to improve library services and make their own jobs easier.  We’ve also had a lot of fun, and that’s what’s really important.

You can now easily post articles to sites including Cite-U-Like, Connotea and Facebook, using links conveniently placed at the foot of the new navigation box.

But before you yawn at yet another example of the inescapability of trendy social networking tools, let’s break down how this can benefit you and your library constituents.

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Why the double standard? Is it because anyone can watch videos on YouTube? Or perhaps it’s because YouTube now accounts for 10% of Internet traffic, and unfortunately, alot of that is bandwidth-hogging dreck. Clearly, there’s a need to open dialogue with our IT departments. Just explaining how YouTube works or suggesting how to limit its use responsibly is a move towards embracing the full potential of this technology.

http://www.mlanet.org/ 

Congrats MLA Headquarters and MLANET Editorial Board on a job well done.

Bart