Thing 10 Wikis

I had such a good time when I was in France this Fall that I thought I'd keep posting some pictures from my trip, as I make my way through the rest of the 23 Things. This one is from Notre Dame, about dusk, in mid-November.

Before I get into Wikis, I just wanted to note that I've taken advantage of some things learned earlier and with the encouragement of my colleagues at the Charles Babbage Institute have installed a Meebo chat window on the home page to our unit. Now anyone can chat with us during regular business hours. The startup was actually quite amazing. Within 5 seconds of going live with chat I had someone asking me a question. I still have no idea how they found us so fast, but I'm guessing (since it was a colleague in another service unit) that as soon as we went live, they received some kind of notice through Meebo to that effect. Anyway, it was pretty cool and a bit scary as all of a sudden I was carrying on two conversations simultaneously. But its calmed down a bit. In any event, I think this will be a new and useful service. I also had some fun re-sizing the window for chat to make it look a little nicer on our page.

As for Wikis, we have a staff wiki at work. I haven't had the chance (or need) to do any editing on a page, but its nice to understand the concept and how well this tool would work in a collaborative process. At the same time, it is interesting to note that wikis do sometimes tend to have problems with vandalism and folks just generally messing about. On at least one of the wikis I visited, you now need e-mail confirmation before you can edit anything on the site.

The 23 Things wiki was really easy to use. I can really see this as a valuable tool for working with folks from other places. One of the questions I have, which I didn't see in any of the intro stuff, is what degree of privacy one might have on a wiki. I'm assuming, if its a web page, that its pretty much out there for folks to see, but I'm not so sure. Something, anyway, to explore and find out. I'm just wondering, for example (and using the video clip from earlier in this Thing) how many people really need to know about all the preparations for a camping trip. There's probably an "invite" function that would allow or limit who sees the wiki.

Thing 7 Instant Messaging

Here's one that I don't use that much. The main use I make of IM is in the situation I find myself right now: monitoring a reading room. We didn't want the phone ringing all the time distracting our readers (the click-clack from the keyboard is noisy enough), so we went with Meebo as a way to communicate between the Reading Room and the eight units in the building. The problem, however, is that not everyone who should, signs on when there's a patron of their's in the Reading Room. So we sometimes end up calling the unit if there's a question. My unit is just a guilty as the rest. We have a reader here using one of our collections. No one from my unit is currently logged in, so I can't communicate with them through IM.

I know that there's some kind of IM functionality connected with my Gmail account, but I haven't played around with that to see what it could do. As to setting up a work account, I will probably do that shortly, as the CBI did (and which I noted in an early post).

One activity associated with this Thing that I can't do while I'm monitoring the Reading Room is to watch videos. So I'll do that when I'm back at my desk or later in the day.

Chat and Our Web Site

One of my colleagues, Steph in CBI, posted a comment about using Meebo on their web site, so it looks like I'm due for a conversation with her and the chance to strike one of the things off my list of things I need answered.

Another thought--don't lose

I've found it best to get it out of my mind and on to paper (or web) as quickly as possible. There's too much going on and too great a risk of having a thought driven from my mind (like Butterbur the inn keeper in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). Anyway, the thought: what would it take to imbed an IM or chat feature on my web site? Wilson Reference has chat, and we have IM using Meebo to communicate between the main reading room and our workstations. So, what would it take?