Week 12 Reading Notes

Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program: Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons

I think libraries using wiki’s is a great idea. It gives them the ability to share knowledge and work collaboratively in one space. It also eliminates the very annoying multitude of emails about one topic and the dreaded reply all. I find that wiki’s are very useful and would allow for library staff to better manage library information.

Creating the academic library folksonomy: Put social tagging to work at your institution

This article basically reviews tagging apps like Zotero or CiteULike. I like social tagging for research purposes. It completely beats having a huge list of bookmarks, I just wish that Zotero was set up a little bit better, and had more controls. I don’t really like having everything that I’m finding out there for the web to see, but if I could set up controls that some of it could be out there and the unfinished research was still hidden I would like that. 

Weblogs: their use and application in science and technology libraries

Overview of the history and development of blogs. Reiterated many of the things we have already covered in class and through our own blogs, such as there are blogging communities of which many individual blogs are part of.

Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia

I found this video to be very informative. There have been discussions in other classes as to just how Wikipedia’s internal structure worked, and now we know. This clip was filmed in July 2005 and not much seems to have changed regarding Wikipedia’s internal structure since then.

At the time Wikipedia had 600,000 articles written in English, 2 million articles total, and I know that those numbers have grown exponentially. I think it is amazing that as of 2005 Wikipedia had just one full time staff member and it got 1.4 billion page views monthly. That it was (and probably still is) more popular than the New York Times, and that from its mostly volunteer staff comes extensive and accurate knowledge. I feel that even without Jimmy Wales stating that Wikipedia’s internal structure was well organized, that it was obvious; no website like Wikipedia could exist without an extensive and well run internal structure.

I was shocked at how little it cost to keep Wikipedia up in 2005, at $5000 monthly it seems as if the world is getting a major deal when it comes to Wikipedia, and I personally feel that in some ways people need to stop bashing Wikipedia and embrace it. It is just as accurate as other Encyclopedia’s and as such it is a reliable source.

I find it humbling that Jimmy Wales started this project so that everyone will one day have free access to the sum of all human knowledge, to me that is what humanity should be striving for.