My Wetpaint Wiki on Vampires and Paranormal Popular Culture :)

http://kanderson77.wetpaint.com/

What types of wiki implementations do you think would be particularly effective for your/a library or organization

We use a wiki for many different day to day needs at my branch. We use Google Sites for our wiki because we have a Google account and have our Community Room reservation calendar on Google Calendar and it's nice to have every thing interconnected. One of the things we use our wiki for is managing the status of ILLs. Using a list page on Google sites the staff member who manages the ILLs for our branch keeps a list of all submitted ILLs and their status, whether they have been submitted, rejected, picked up, etc. This is helpful if someone wants to know the status of their ILL and this staff member is not there. I have been learning how to check out ILLs to patrons and I can enter content on the ILL page so that other staff members know when an ILL has been picked up or returned or whatever.

One of the reasons that we chose to use a wiki is because at each of our information desks, Adult and Children's, we have one computer that is not on our private library network. This computer can not check staff email or access the system intranet. Using the wiki to bring together the important stuff that happens at our branch has had it's ups and downs. It is difficult for people to use a new tool when they are used to, for example sending out mass emails to let everyone know about something. I have been trying to use the Announcements feature on Google Sites to meet this same need as a mass email but it hasn't quite caught on.

It would be nice to have common reference questions on our wiki like Ellyssa suggested, I think that would be particularly useful at our branch, especially when we have staff covering breaks at a desk they do not normally work at. I tend to feel a little lost when I'm on the Adult desk and I'd like a list of common questions so that I would feel more confident when I am helping patrons there. I'm sure that other staff members feel the same about the Children's desk ;)

I would like to use a wiki to more effectively notify staff members of schedule changes. Right now, our branch manager uploads Word documents to our wiki. It does log when the file was uploaded and keeps track of previous versions but there is no way to know what changed unless you open it and even then it's hard to know. I'm not sure of the best way to do this though. Perhaps a page for the schedule where it is changed directly on the page and staff members would get emails when the page is edited? Now, I just have to get the Branch Manager to try this...

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