Scholarly Communication Issues

Anne-Marie Deitering and Rachel Bridgewater set up the Librarian Instruction Wiki for the Oregon Library Association's Library Instruction Round Table (OLA/LIRT) and used this article, titled "Stop reinventing the Wheel: Using Wikis for Professional Knowledge Sharing," to chronicle their process. They chose a wiki in an effort to eliminate the gatekeeper effect that can occur in other forms of knowledge sharing and chose to limit the number of barriers for those contributing (i.e. they did not make it a members only site). Their feelings were that they were dealing with a group of people who may never meet or interact with each other, but who still had an abundant amount of information to share and this technology provided the best opportunity for these geographically disperse group to share their knowledge. They use this article to weigh out the pros and cons of several wiki engines; ultimately choosing MediaWiki partially because it is the engine used by Wikipedia. The information they put out there regarding their selection criteria will be useful for anyone wishing to attempt a similar project in the future. Also of use are their implementation techniques, which were heavily dependent on feedback from their future user group, and the ultimate outcome of the project. The wiki was officially launched in the summer of 2005 and had immediate positive feedback and was written up in several journals and websites. However, since it's unveiling, use of the wiki has flagged. This could be blamed on the lack of publicity since its initial launch, but the schedules of those contributing the wiki and what the feel will be gained from it are also important factors to take into consideration. The authors are re-evaluating the use of the wiki and hopefully will see a rise in use of it with an increase of publicity in the future.

You can click here to take a look at the Library Instruction Wiki.

-- posted by Lauren Seney