- Eleni Gogas and Donna Fed­dern, Escon­dido Pub­lic Library

Eleni:

About Escon­dido PL
– medium-sized library with no pre­vi­ous intranet
– city main­tains sites and servers
– just used a net­work drive in the past
they have an awe­some trad­ing card for the library

Phase 1 — pre-wiki
– net­work drive issues
– infor­ma­tion on the drive was very old
– took 15 min­utes to search for some­thing on the drive
– city intranet was too for­mal
– wanted to improve inter­nal km; many employ­ees are approach­ing retirement

why a wiki?
– col­lab­o­ra­tion, infor­mal­ity, and trans­parency
– want staff to par­tic­i­pate and get out of the ver­ti­cal struc­ture
– eas­ier to use and find infor­ma­tion
– web man­ager is unable to main­tain two web­sites (bottleneck)

pick­ing a wiki
– WYSIWYG
– free to afford­able
– bet­ter search­ing
– web-based (wiki farm); needed a 3rd party to host it because they don’t have access to the servers
– pass­word pro­tected
– wanted indi­vid­ual staff pro­files, wanted staff to be part of the dis­course and have a face on the site
– easy to setup, use, and learn
– blog­ging

decided to go with JotSpot
– free + matched all cri­te­ria
– key­word search within doc­u­ments
– group direc­to­ries app
– RSS & email reminders

issues with JotSpot
– Google acqui­si­tion (no new users, future?)
– main­tain back­ups on net­work drive
– exist­ing JotSpot help group

other wiki-farm options
– list on wikipedia
– PB Wiki
— they used this for their online ref­er­ence rolodex
– wet­paint
— exam­ple of Nancy Pearl Book Lust wiki
— poten­tial issue that they show google ads, though
– wik­ispot
— they use it for their e-gove ref­er­ence por­tal
— a lit­tle more com­plex, no WYSIWYG editor

other intranet options:
“web con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems” — twiki, joomla
– but require direct access to your server and require programmers

Phase II — wiki setup
– orga­nized wiki: staff needs
– build frame­work
showed screen­shots
– “impor­tant stuff“
– depart­ments
– staff devel­op­ment
– com­mit­tees & boards
– “post it” page where staff can post fun stuff

was dif­fi­cult at first for non-techie staff, but once they were given instruc­tions and train­ing, they caught on and were able to do it

Phase III — train­ing (in process)
– showed off wiki at an all-staff meet­ing
– trained super­vi­sors first to help
– techno­pho­bia: fear of edit­ing web­sites; peo­ple think they can’t edit the pages because it’s per­ma­nent; teach them they can roll­back changes
– let them play — no policies/rules
– use wikis for other library-related work

put out a call on the wiki, with a sign-up sheet on the wiki, vol­un­teer to sign up to write an arti­cle about an author (“author spotlight”)

Phase IV — imple­men­ta­tion (never-ending, really)
– des­ig­nate go-to peo­ple for trou­bleshoot­ing
– develop guide­lines (not so much poli­cies); want it to remain infor­mal; don’t want peo­ple to think they’ll get in trou­ble for post­ing the wrong thing
– dep­tart­ment heads respon­si­ble for their infor­ma­tion
– keep train­ing staff, keep remind­ing them about it in email
– on-going process, think of it in terms of the long term

issues and trou­bleshoot­ing
– bugs: you get what you paid for (free)
– make sure you have back­ups just in case
– fear of change from some staff; just keep encour­ag­ing them
– staff interest/participation
— now set­ting up a com­mit­tee and del­e­gat­ing tasks
– time: more than a year (approx­i­mately)
— have to invest time in set­ting it up, even though it’s easy to use

cool tools
– Good­wid­gets: flash photo wid­gets
– FD’s Flickr Toys slideshow & other photo edit­ing tools
– Wid­get­box: weather, games, news, cal­cul­taros, and way more
– Jing: screenshots/casts from any­thing on yoru desk­top
– stats counter: siteme­ter, etc.

Donna:

some issues they are fac­ing right now
– build­ing ren­o­va­tion
– mov­ing to a “mar­ket­place” model for the library
– chang­ing job descrip­tion
— needed a place to com­mu­ni­cate with staff about all of these things — another rea­son for the wiki
– using the wiki for train­ing, includ­ing RA train­ing
– cre­ated a tuto­r­ial for their online cal­en­dar
— room reserve tuto­ri­als, etc.

really like the blog­ging aspects for brain­storm­ing and shar­ing arti­cles, ideas, etc.
asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion helps between meet­ings
hasn’t done train­ing yet for para­pro­fes­sional staff, but using a new blog to com­mu­ni­cate with media staff
have a secu­rity alerts blog where they post pic­tures from the sur­veil­lance cameras

why the wiki works for them
– eleni does ref­er­ence, cat­a­loging, and web devel­op­ment, so she can’t be the only per­son respon­si­ble to update the site, so it’s great that every­one can update it now
– staff are excited to post meet­ing min­utes, etc.
– sim­plic­ity works, although they do want to make it a lit­tle flashier
– staff loves search capabilities

for the future, they want to be even more cre­ative about how they use it
don’t like the city’s intranet because they have to wait for the city’s edi­tor to update it
they live in San Diego County and lost 75 homes in the area; many staff were evac­u­ated, were stay­ing with friends, pets were scat­tered; were closed for 3 days
– any­one with inter­net access could have posted staff updates dur­ing the fires
– com­mu­ni­cate with work fam­ily, but hadn’t inte­grated enough quite yet

want to make the site more brows­able, too

ques­tion: another library in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion at a city that doesn’t want infor­ma­tion on 3rd-party servers
answer: we’re call­ing this our “wiki” and not our “intranet” so they don’t even know

ques­tion: i know free is good, but are there prod­ucts you know of that you would have paid for that are really good
answer: if you have server space, joomla is really good; same with twiki; social­text; may still need pro­gram­mers, though

ques­tion: can you tell us more about the staff pro­files and if they have suc­ceeded?
answer: cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment is about to start tak­ing pic­tures of all of their staff and updat­ing everybody’s infor­ma­tion; they have 87 staff mem­bers so they don’t know some folks very well or don’t know what all the pages look like

ques­tion: how much time per week does it take in admin­is­tra­tive work:
answer: eleni works on the wiki an hour a day, mostly see­ing what peo­ple are post­ing; does this maybe 3–4 times a week; train­ing takes the longest, espe­cially because they have two branches

ques­tion: do you have plans to include your friends, foun­da­tion, etc.?
answer: already included the com­mit­tees and boards (min­utes right now, plan­ning to add pro­files), but do plan to expand to those things, yes

ques­tion: how do you man­age secu­rity on site?
answer: not every­one is log­ging on right now, but cer­tain staff mem­bers have the abil­ity to restrict pages; encour­ag­ing them to keep their con­tent open, though, for trans­parency; when man­age­ment team meets, they have some staff issues they don’t want every­one to see so use the “share” but­ton where you can choose who can see the page (by indi­vid­ual or group)

ques­tion: you showed a pic­ture of a prob­lem patron — is that a poten­tial lia­bil­ity?
answer: dis­cussing this inter­nally via email right now; only do this for peo­ple who have com­mit­ted a crime in a library, the kind of per­son they need to call the police for if they come in; don’t keep many pho­tos, based on inci­dent reports

ques­tion: same ques­tion about the pic­tures of chil­dren
answer: they do get per­mis­sion to post these, although they’re more lax about the teens; Flickr pic­tures of chil­dren are set to pri­vate on Flickr; eleni and donna are the gate­keep­ers and require per­mis­sion slips

pre­sen­ta­tion will be avail­able at http://www.library.escondido.org/wiki.ppt

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