MLIS 7505 Assignment One

Rhiannon Shoults-Wilson
MLIS 7505
Dr. Oguz
24 May 2009

Assignment 1

Part One:

I created my class blog at http://rhi-lib.blogspot.com. I customized my settings, including having comments emailed to me and excluding my blog from search engines. I also customized my layout by changing some colors, rearranging and removing items from the sidebar, and adding script that lists recent Delicious links in the sidebar. I posted a link to the blog's RSS feed to the discussion board.

Part Two:

I decided to create my standalone RSS feed to list entries from the Athens Regional Library System's "Featured Genres" column. I did this through RapidFeeds as directed. It is located at http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/23631/. I posted this link to the discussion board.

Part Three:

I already use Google Reader and subscribe to several library blogs, as well as the MLIS Program's feed. I added a few new blogs from the suggested list, including Information Wants to Be Free (Meredith Farkas's blog), and Cliff Landis's blog. I also added the feeds from my classmates' blogs that they have posted to the discussion board. I created a new folder for these, labeled "mlis 7505."

Part Four:

I decided that my imaginary library is a mid-sized public library (service population approximately 200,000 people) that wants to create a wiki to contain general subject guides. An example of the type of wiki they are envisioning is the St. Joseph County Public Library's subject guides wiki.

I visited WikiMatrix, and began their comparison wizard. I decided that, even though this would be a staff-edited wiki and not subject to public vandalism, a page history feature would still be useful for editing, and was thus necessary. I decided that, as staff would be trained on updating the wiki if they were not already familiar with it, a WYSIWYG interface was not necessary. I decided commercial support wasn't strictly necessary. As the wiki will be run by a small community of users in one location, I decided localization wasn't necessary. I decided the flexibility and security of running the wiki software on the library's hardware was preferable to a wiki hosted by an outside service. I decided to go with a database system, for its search capabilities. I decided Open Source software was important, both philosophically and to reduce costs. I did not restrict based on programming languages.

The wizard left me with 44 choices, so I scrolled through the comparison table for these. I removed the software that was still in early development - I use such software in my personal life, but I do not want to try to implement a professional project with it. I removed software that did not run on Windows, as that is what our library computers use. I removed software that did not include a preview function, which I thought was important. I restricted to software that had the most common editing features, such as revision logs, and minor changes. I removed software that did not have support forums.

After doing all this and browsing through pages, I ended up choosing TikiWiki. It has all of the features we might want for the wiki and, since it has CMS components, would enable the library to easily include non-wiki elements, such as RSS feeds and forums, if they chose to in the future.

Part Five:

I logged into my Google Docs account, created a new document and typed this up. I then shared it to my blog.