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.

My Background

I am fairly familiar with the Web 2.0 technologies we have been discussing in Module 1. I have created and maintained blogs before, using Blogger, WordPress, and LiveJournal. I use Google Reader daily (I currently have 116 subscriptions, apparently!). I use Google Docs to work on documents, as I do my work on multiple computers. I have edited articles on Wikipedia. I use Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious on a daily basis, as well.

The most interesting course materials to me have been about specific ways that libraries are using these technologies. I read quite a few library blogs and try to keep up with these things, but the class readings have been interesting to me in this regard, as well. Meredith Farkas's presentation, in particular, contained examples of some really interesting implementations, such as the librarian who asks for collection development suggestions through a Facebook page, and the library that has set up a Q&A blog, in which they post all of the feedback they receive, and respond. I am most excited about the opportunities these technologies have to change the ways libraries communicate with their users (for the better, hopefully), and it is great to see this at work.