Wikis, wikis, wikis!

I've just visited

Mintwiki (Created by The Mint Museum Library, North Carolina, USA)
This wiki provides information on the permanent collections housed at the Museum. Examples of these include collections on African Art, Chinese court robes, performance masks of Mexico and platform shoes.

Wookiepedia

This wiki is for Star Wars fans everywhere. It is an extremely detailed online encyclopedia covering all aspects of the Star Wars Universe. Examples of entries include:

• The "Quote of the day"
  
  
• On this day - important events listed in chronological date order and


• Did you know? - brief snippets of information e.g. Did you know that hermit crabs existed in the galaxy?
  

Library success : a best practice wiki

This wiki provides up to date information on all things library related. The sections on training and developement for librarians and on technology would be of particular interest to anyone trying to keep their skills current.

What use could a wiki be to libraries?

Wikis would be a really good way to answer to that famous question "What could you recommend I read?"

You could have both library staff and library member suggestions. Books could be arranged in different categories e.g.

• Fiction - Genres such as: crime, fantasy, sci-fi, humor, romance, historical, world (different authors from or writing from a particular countries viewpoint)


• Non Fiction - Subjects from A to Z.
  

You could also have suggestions listed for different audience groups, for e.g, child, young adult, speakers of different languages, book clubs, etc.

Why do I like wikis?

Wikis are great in that they allow interested parties to contribute their own information, viewpoint, etc. at any point in time and from any place. They can be as simple or as complex as desired and can use all forms of media to provide the information.

A little something for the Acquisitions & Cataloguing teams

While searching the web for blogs with a library related theme I came across two, which might just interest the Acquisitions and Cataloguing teams of any library.

1. For the Acquisitions teams:

http://awfullibrarybooks.net/

This site contains a collection of books (many submitted by fellow library colleagues) which are still found in public libraries today and which are considered questionable as to their current relevance. Why haven't they been weeded?

Another section "Why libraries weed?" invites readers to share their thoughts on weeding and I know the Acquisitions Librarian at my workplace would probably enjoy reading this.

2. For the Cataloguing teams:

http://www.catalogingfutures.com/

This site looks at issues involving the future of cataloguing and metadata in libraries. Anyone currently working in or hoping to gain work in this field might be interested in looking at this site.

Although it does not offer feeds it does allow you to subscribe by providing your email.

** There are many more out there, some serious, some fun looking at all aspects of the library profession and across all levels from the student to the recently retired.

Following instructions does not always work..

I have just created my bloglines account and have attempted to add the 5 feeds to it by following the instructions given in the CommonCraft "RSS in plain english" youtube video.

Was it as easy as following the instructions step-by-step?

NO! Whenever I clicked on the RSS icon (which so many sites did not even have) there was no mention of saving it in bloglines or any other feed reader via the one click access method. There was also no page with code on it as mentioned.

I kept getting a window with the following message:

"You are viewing a feed that contains frequently updated content. When you subscribe to a feed, it is added to the Common Feed List. Updated information from the feed is automatically downloaded to your computer and can be viewed in Internet Explorer and other programs". Learn more about feeds. Subscribe to this feed

In one way this was great, as I could simply see it by clicking on my favourites tab and then selecting the feeds tab and clicking on the feed which I wanted to look at, but was also frustrating in that I was not able to actually use the feed reader of choice to save to.

At this point, I decided to look at the Top 1000 list in bloglines and thought I could easily just select from here. However, clicking on the RSS icon resulted in the same result as previously achieved. Alternatively, clicking on the Bloglines icon kept resulting in an "internal server error" message.

So, I went back to watch the video again and this time when I got the "You are viewing a feed ..." message I copied the URL that appeared for this page, went to bloglines and found the add button in my feeds tab and pasted it to the "blog or URL feed" search field which produced a list of feeds which i was then able to successfully subscribe to!

Note: Although following the exact steps as shown in the video, was not always that successful it did help to give me some guidence in order to play around and find my way to success.