Thing 7: So What's a Wiki??

I choose to look into the BookLoversWiki, http://booklovers.pbworks.com/Princeton%20Public%20Library,  which is sponsored by the public library in Princeton, NJ, and is in essence a peer review wiki.  BookLoversWiki features an index to the reviews and it is seperated out into different genres such as Westerns, Biographies, Autobiographies, etc.  This particular wiki was set up for a summer reading project and seems similar in nature to the 23 Things learning assignment that the PLCMC set up originally with prizes and gifts associated with the project.  What I found most interesting about this "thing" was the fact that it really created a community outreach of sorts, it got individuals reading, and sharing with others their experiences and thoughts of these books.

The actual uses of a Wiki in a library are numerous.  You can look at the PLCMC 23 Things site associated with this particular thing, http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com/2006/09/16-so-whats-in-wiki.html, and see that numerous other wiki's are listed.  I decided to explore the other ones listed just to get a feel for what other purposes the wiki's really served.  There were wiki's created for subject guides, which really is genius because it allows a library to keep constantly adding to and updating these guides and the BIG plus is you don't have to be trained in html.  Wikis created strictly for events, I guess you could equate it to a facebook event that has it's own site; and one library actually even uses a wiki as it's website which in today's economy is a great idea because we're such an internet driven society and so many libraries just don't have the budget to have someone who is trained in html keep up with an actual website. Overall a wiki can serve any purpose a library wants it to from communication with it's patrons about incoming books, and events to showing a patron where things might even be located.  Princeton's wiki was particularly cool because if after you read the review you were interested in the book you could just click on it and would give you the call number and all the info for where the book was located.  Basically the purposes for a wiki for a library are numerous and I've just named a few.