Wikis

I actually knew a little about wikis before I started this exercise. I'd subscribed to several wikis about children's literature several months ago. My favorite is from the University of Calgary (http://wiki.ucalgary.ca/page/ChildrensLiteratureWebGuide). This wiki used to be a traditional website, but since they've converted to a wiki, there are postings by teachers and parents on creative ways of teaching with children's literature. Changing to wiki format added a great dimension to this site.

Exploring the wikis on the training list just made me realize how much information there is out there. My favorite discovery was the site http://www.quintura.com/. This is a visual search engine for kids! I'm going to explore it further and hopefully recommend it for Kidsville.

This format could be useful to libraries in so many ways. The local scholarships wiki seemed so useful--that kind of information was always so hard to track. Now the information could be posted on a wiki and made available to everyone. In children's work, a topic that frequently comes up is "labels" for book spines that identify specific categories of fiction. For example, some locations are hit with an assignment on historical fiction and librarians request spine labels to identify books that meet the criteria. We've always been reluctant to do this because there would be as many labels as there are assignments and patrons would get confused, but a wiki would be a great solution.

Now I'm going to play with the PBwiki.