Week 7: Wiki's

Exercise 16: I visited the St. Joseph Public Libraries wiki and liked the autobiography section. In this area you can create your own biography and they have resources available to help you do this. There is a link to a book called "Your autobiography : more than 300 questions to help you write your personal history" which has call number information. When you click the link it takes you directly to St. Joseph's catalog of books.

Wiki's can be edited by anyone and aren't reliable sources of information. I use Wiki's as a starting point when I doing any type of research. At the ending of Wiki's there are usually links to more reliable sources. Since the author's of these Wiki's took the time to do some research and post it for me to see I piggy back off their efforts and continue my research with their suggestions. This cuts my research time down considerably.

I think the library should use Wiki's to encourage local historians to write about island history. Wiki's allow different authors to add to existing articles and I think that the history of these islands are available in a piece peice manner. You get some information from one historian and another one has the finishing piece to the puzzle. For some reason Virgin Islanders don't record their history and its very difficult to find information. Current events can also be posted into a Wiki. Any articles that are found relating to a particular topic can be listed on the Wiki page.

Exercise 17: I checked out the PBwiki and added my blog to the favorite blog list. I added three movies to the favorite movies list. I followed Bethany's lead and added a link to my movie slections from the imdb movie database. I noticed that your are able to save the lists on this site as a pdf and see the last person who edited the page.

I think we can use this technology in various departments within our unit for supply lists. As a person needs supplies they can post it on the list. Since the list is open to everyone with the correct password a complete supply list for a department can be compiled.