Tiki Wiki is my main wiki: Searching for a library wiki

I have chosen my place of employment, a small academic library, as a model for creating a wiki service. When selecting a wiki for my library, I considered several key facts:

·         The population of the university my academic library services is approximately 3,000. These are students, faculty and staff members. Although we do service community patrons, the amount of community patrons that hold library cards are relatively small (approximately 300) and community users can only check out books from our Main Collection. Due to these limitations, my wiki search will be geared toward finding a wiki better suited for the university than one suited for the surrounding community.

·         This wiki will be for an Academic Library.

·         This library services patrons who speak a variety of different languages. The most popular languages on campus are English, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Other languages are also present, such as Russian, French, Chinese and German.

·         The budget of this library is very small. Due to bad economic conditions, the library’s budget has been slashed.

Tiki Wiki is my wiki of choice for several reasons. Number one, it’s a free and open source and generates emails and newsletters which will help the library stay connected with patrons who don’t normally visit the wiki on a regular basis.  “Major features include a robust wiki engine, news articles, discussion forums…blogs, file and image galleries, bug and issue trackers (form generator), a links directory, polls/surveys and quizzes, FAQs, banner management system, calendar, maps, mobile Tiki, RSS feeds, category system, tags, an advanced themeing engine (Smarty), spreadsheet, live support, shoutbox, inter-user messaging, menu generator, advanced permission system for users and groups, internal search engine, external authentication support, and much, much more (WikiMatrix).

So check it out, you get newsletters, surveys you can conduct, emails and newsletters to notify and update people with, discussion forums, blogs…it’s a dream that can have a major impact on a library if used correctly.

Reference

Tiki Wiki. (2012). WikiMatrix. Retrieved from: http://www.wikimatrix.org/show/Tiki-Wiki-CMS-Groupware