SINTO wiki

I have to confess that I can't claim that this image is relevant to librarianship in South Yorkshire! It is a piece of sculpture in a quarry on the coast of Jersey.

We ran a repeat of the Social Computing course yesterday and I was inspired to try including some pictures on my blog. Sheila Webber in her Information Literacy blog always includes photos of flowers so I thought I would try the same.

The SINTO wiki continues to be developed. I have updated the page for Social Computing and added a page about library blogs. I have also created a page for School Librarians. With these and the other wiki pages I hope that people will add their own material.

Since the wiki was set up in March there has been an average of 28 visitors every week. Anyone can post a comment on the wiki (as with this blog) but users are also invited to register with the site. You can then become a Registered User or a Writer which gives you the ability to add new pages and edit existing pages. This of course is the whol point of a wiki - it is a community web site to which any member of the community can contribute.

This may be a difficult concept for librarians to accept! It's not just that the technology is new. A role of librarians is to preserve documents, whether they are books or websites. We don't like it when users add comments or make changes in library books and we are suspicious of Wikipedia where there is no permanence or authority for entries. The idea that a website can be changed and rewritten by anyone ( at least anyone in a defined community) goes against our instincts.

The benefits I hope are obvious. Expertise is spread throughout the SINTO community and it should be shared. I would like you all to see yourselves as part of a community that extends outside your own library. I hope you will contribute and will encourage your colleagues to do the same.

New features on SINTO Wiki

The SINTO wiki continues to develop. As I mentioned in my previous post I have created a page for library & learning centre buildings which will focus on new builds and refurbishments in our area. I hope that librarians will use this to share information about new developments.

Also, Gilly Pearce has added a page about the SINTO Social Inclusion Group and one on the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. This lists information about events and activities in our area and nationally. We hope it will be a useful source of information for anyone working on similar projects and that people will add information about what they are doing.

I hope that everyone reading this will circulate the information to their colleagues and also that you will register with the site and encourage your colleagues to do the same. The wiki is intended to be a facility for the entire community of library workers in the area

Purpose of Sintoblog

Dear diary
A bit misty this morning so I made myself a bowl of porridge for breakfast.......

Well that's the problem with blogs. They are on-line diaries which are of interest to the writer but possibly of limited interest to everyone else. The Social Computing course has inspired me to set up Sintoblog - but what exactly would its value be to SINTO members?
I assume that people are not interested in what I had for breakfast and even an account of what I do at work is of very limited interest (except to my boss). You are all busy people with limited time to read my postings so what would be of interest and relevance to you?
I can think of two things. First it could be a source of information about SINTO events and activities - but we already have ways of keeping people informed of these (e.g. e-mails and the web site). On the whole I think that people want focused information about things of interest to them and not a general diary. On the other hand it might alert people to things they did not know about - the famous "unknown unknowns".

The second area is a forum for alerting people about general professional issues and developments and discussing their implications. This would be a CPD service and might be of interest to Chartership candidates and new professionals. In my role as SINTO director I possibly have a bit more time than most front-line librarians to read professional journals and news sources and to comment on them. Would that be of interest to SINTO members I wonder? The only way to find out is to try it.

Then there is my Wiki. That differs from the blog in that it can be organised by subject rather than a chronological diary. I don't just want to duplicate the web site so the issue is how to use the Web 2.0 aspects of a Wiki to give added value. My initial idea is that I will use it for the SINTO Groups and for follow-up to training events to provide a forum for discussion and exchange of information when people can not meet face-to-face.

The key is will people be bothered to read these new services on a regular basis and will they respond? Is there a SINTO community out there that is interested in sharing information?

Let me know what you think or I'll go back to describing my breakfasts.

Carl