Finding a Wiki for a Library
Characteristics of Library:
Vande Bogart Library is on the campus of Montana State University-Northern, located in north central Montana, about 35 miles south of Alberta, Canada. The student body population is at about 1200 head count and 1000 FTE. The budget of this library is about $150,000 annually, this number does not reflect staff salaries, but it does include the student workers’ pay. The goal of a wiki for this library would be to allow students to interact with staff on what is happening at the library and what resources students like and can suggest to others.
This library has a very limited budget and that would affect which wiki platform to use. After comparing @wiki, BrainKeeper, Confluence and Wetpaint on WikiMatrix, I feel that the best place for the library wiki would be on WetPaint. Though both @wiki and WetPaint are free, there are added features in WetPaint for education. I also want a wiki that supports corporate branding (any of these would allow that) and WYSIWYG.
If money were not even an issue, I would probably suggest going with Confluence. Confluence by far offers the most features out of the wikis that I compared.
I am not actually going to set up a wiki for my library; that would need to be approved by my library director. I also do not have time to maintain it. Our library is open 72 hours a week and we have 4 full time staff—needless to say, our time is pretty tight.
I ended up choosing MediWiki for this part of the project. Here is the address of my own post: http://brianadamsid.blogspot.com/2012/05/creating-library-wiki.html. I found the number of options on the WikiMatrix site to be sort of intimidating, so I didn't actually compare every one. After reading your post, I looked at Confluence. You're right: it would be a good choice if you had some money to spend. It looks like it has a very clean and contemporary-looking interface.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading my post. Later in the day I realized that subject indexes would be a good use for a wiki in the academic library.
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