The Gilmer County Public Library is
in need of a wiki to support their Summer Reading Program. The primary goals are: (1) to introduce the
teen readers to the technology, (2) to allow teen readers to generate
discussions and book talks, (3) increase participation in the teen population
for the summer reading program, and (3) to promote reading. There is no allotted budget for the wiki
implementation. The branch manager and
children’s librarian are responsible for the summer reading program and wiki
implementation. The program begins in
three weeks and runs the duration of the summer. If the wiki is well received, there is a
possibility to continue to website for other teen related reading promotion.
The criteria for selection: hosted by a company (“wiki farm”), WYSIWYG,
page history, own domain allowing for corporate branding. The facility is also interested in the
ability of RSS feeds (Farkas, 2007, p. 80-84).
Other considerations include ease of installation and use, security and
permissioning due to the targeted audience, budget, and the ability to
customize the look to work with existing library webpage.
The WikiMatrix narrowed the
candidate list to fifteen wikis. A
comparison of the wikis revealed the top two contenders to be Wikispaces and
Zoho Wiki. Wikispaces does provide
statistical reports that would be helpful in determining the success of the project,
however; Zoho Wiki offers an ad-free
service, which is more important for the public library. Zoho Wiki will be used in conjunction with the library Facebook and new Twitter accounts.
Farkas, M. G. (2007). Social software in libraries: Building collaboration, communication, and
community online. Medford, NJ:
Information Today, Inc.
Your Wiki already sounds impressive! I'm actually looking into Zoho Wiki for my library as well for many of the same reasons you have listed. I'm still trying to see how easy it would be for my patrons to use before I commit to using it. Hearing that you may be using it makes me feel a little better.
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