Wiki Assessment

Library: A Library A State University

Library type: Academic Library

Population Served: 7000 students, faculty, staff and community users. Majority of students are undergraduate but there are graduate programs in business, education and psychology

Budget: Cannot be divulged.  However, line items for staff development and outreach, the two functions the wiki would be most likely to support are limited

Purpose of the Wiki: to improve staff communication

Past history with Wikis: Deployment of a wiki was tried in 2006.  Staff did not adopt it.  They found page creation difficult and there was either no adoption or inconsistent use by upper management.

Using the tools provided on WebMatrix, further questions were answered.  A page history was chosen to allow for information backup in case faulty information was posted or pages were inadvertently lost during editing.

Most of the librarians and staff who would be using this product are not comfortable with mark up languages so the WYSIWYG editor is a necessity

Options that could be introduced without professional support were preferred since the budget could only stretch to the purchase of software or service.

Additionally space on the library server is limited, a hosted service would be preferable

The wiki needs to be easily identifiable as library property and integrated into the existing website if possible.  Therefore, branding capabilities and the use of our own domain are preferable.

Of the 13 choices suggested by WebMatrix, wikis based on open source code were preferred.  The sites could be maintained if the services became defunct, though server space would then have to be found to accomplish the continuation of the service.  Additionally open source code could allow for programming applications the company did not offer.  This narrowed selection to three choices.

Wagn was eliminated because it did not clearly state which operating systems it was compatible with.

BusinessWiki was eliminated because the information in WebMatrix was out of date.  The company is now Video CMS and further information on the product could not be obtained without communicating with a vendor.

MindTouch TCS was a viable candidate. While using it as a software as a service with outside hosting would incur fees the basic code was available as MindTouch Core, a freely downloadable open source program.  This product could be deployed on a stand alone computer and staff could be trained on it before the service was bought to see if it was truly user friendly and to help create staff buy-in or the product could be deployed as is if server space became available to host the service.