wikid

This was a fun assignment. I'd used wikipedia many times but never taken the time to read about it's history or how it operates, though I had a general idea. After reading/watching the assignments I explored the French version, reading about Racine's sister city, Montelimar, France. On the wikipedia article there were links to all Montelimar's sister cities and I linked to Racine (still in French). I noticed that there was no photo, but rather a mention that they would welcome a photo so I emailed a couple of people at the RCCVB who went to Montelimar last year and suggested they might want to send/post one. In perusing the list of "Residents Notables," I was amazed to see the name "Max Hardcore--pornographe." Surely this was a cruel joke! Mais, non! The porn star's name also appears on the English language edition and further exploration on the internet seems to corroborate his Racine roots (though one place said he was from Racine, Illinois, which doesn't exist). By that time my internet searches were starting to return some rather questionable hits, so I went on to the safer ground of the assignment, looking at Racine county communities articles, and found a link to RPL on only the city of Racine article. Were there more I missed?
I decided to try creating a wiki, using pbwiki. The one I did was a planning tool for a program the HOLA team is working on for Hispanic Heritage month. While those of us in the library could have used googledocs for this, there are a couple of people in the community who will be involved in the planning and since they don't have google accounts a wiki seemed like a better way to go.

I like the idea of a library creating a community calendar, events, info-sharing, wiki. Always was disappointed that the library world has not been more of a leader in this type of activity. Seems like we should have been there to take up the slack when Party Line folded, but, no, we let the JT beat us to the punch with Glad You Asked. YPR created a community calendar, beyondyourdoor.com, but the posting wasn't as open as it could have been and apparently it didn't catch on--or perhaps it caught on too well with lots of postings that the YPR community wasn't interested in, since it is basically defunct--still exists but only Racine Theater Guild and RAM have anything posted in June and the rest of the summer is completely empty. Of course this sort of project doesn't run itself. Somebody has to be creative to get it off the ground and also have the time to maintain it, supervise postings, and weed outdated stuff. Would that be one of us?

Finally, a calendar

Been trying to access the calendar all week, but even though Melissa had posted it when I contacted her earlier in the week, it wasn't showing up in my calendars. Today, with her here, we straighted it out, and I made an entry for RefUSA training, sending an invitation to Melissa and Jill, just for practice. I think this has great potential for PR--sending invitations to people, groups, organizations, every time we schedule a public event in one of our meeting rooms. We'd need to organize mailing lists of people/groups interested in particular topics. Would they be able to view the information without a google account??? Would the message of the invitation show up in their email? Or would this only work for people with gmail? Comments please.

It's all about sharing

This seems to have great potential, but I'm wondering how it will really work. As per usual, I tried to follow the instructions, but there were a few things that didn't quite work out. The instructions told me to log in, but when I hit the link in the AIT lesson instructions it was already open. I couldn't figure out how to see previous versions? And if people don't sign their name, like we are apparently doing in the sample doc (and who wants a signature after a revision anyway), how do you know who made what changes? If this were a "real" document we were working on together and someone made a drastic change that the rest of the group didn't like, how do you get back to the previous edition--or even know who made the outrageous change. How do you prevent someone you've collaborated with from making changes after people have agreed on a final document--or after you, as the original author, are satisfied with the final draft? I couldn't find the revisions tab referred to in the AIT instructions, nor the drop down menu referred to in Google Apps help. Also many of the people I would want to collaborate with on projects outside of the library don't use google docs, so is there a way to share with them other than cutting and pasting and sending as an attachment?
It was fun to create a new slide (sorry for being piggy--I did two) though I had to feel my way.