In this article Kate Watson and Chelsea Harper aim to provide information for library services on how they can successfully use the technologies of blogs and wikis to communicate with their users. Rather than focus on what these technologies can be used for this article focuses on developing and managing these technologies. It is valuable to talk about this aspect of using these technologies to give an idea of how to best use these technologies.
The authors tell us that while it is easy to start using a blog or wiki to communicate with your users, it should be done only after a lot of planning has taken place to allow it to become a successful part of your service. It is important to plan and test any of these technologies internally before allowing them to be used publically (Watson & Harper 2006). Helling (2006) agrees with this and tells us of the importance of researching what is currently being done in other places and using their experiences to better your own service.
Use of these technologies needs to be managed properly. To do this it is important to have a clear mission. A strategic plan should be set up that is complete with policies relating to the use and content of the technology, these policies need to be publically available. Policies are used to control the content, maximise compliance and reduce liability. Create a management team and ensure that all employees are trained on the policies and guidelines (Watson & Harper, 2006). This is good advice as having clear policies and guidelines available ensure that all staff are aware of the proper use of the technologies.
It is important to ensure that content on these technologies is updated regularly. The authors tell us that blogs or wikis that are not updated on a regular basis question how important the use of that particular technology is to the organisation that is hosting it (Watson & Harper, 2006). It is important to update the information regularly so that your users are not seeing out of date information.
Blogs give users the ability to leave comments; this process can help with communication between users and staff. This means that there needs to be a willingness from staff to respond to comments left or remove comments if they are not appropriate (Watson & Harper, 2006). One way to ensure that these technologies can be kept updated and comments responded to is to make sure sufficient staff time is allocated, this could be something that is addressed at the planning stage and included in policies.
While this article looked at issues that have been left out of other articles in relation to this topic, there is not really much detail given as to what blogs and wikis are, there is assumed knowledge that the reader will already know about them.
In this article the authors discuss the need for policies and guidelines in relation to adding content to these technologies. They also discuss the need for staff members to be willing to remove inappropriate posts from blogs (Watson & Harper, 2006). However it is not mentioned that entries on a Wiki can be edited by anyone. With wikis anyone can add new pages, edit existing pages or even delete them. There is a need for saved copies of pages to be kept to allow for recovery of pages should it be needed (Kajewski, 2006). In my opinion this would have been useful information for those who are not currently familiar with the technology.
Overall this is a useful article giving advice on how to go about planning to implement these technologies into your library service. However some areas such as telling the reader what blogs and wikis could have had more detail given.
Reference List
Helling, B. (2006). New library, new technologies, new services. Retrieved September 5, 2008
from Crawfordsville District Public Library Web site:
http://www.cdpl.lib.in.us/CIL2006/cil2006helling-text.html
Kajewski, M. A. (2006). Emerging technologies changing our service delivery models [Electronic
version]. The electronic library, 25(4), 420-429.
Watson, K., & Harper, C. (2006). Using blogs and wikis to communicate with library clients.
inCite, December, 2006. Retrieved August 27, 2008, from
http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2006/12/print.html?ID=138
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