The wonder of wikis

First of all, a confession - I LOVE wikipedia despite all the negatives about bias, vandalism and ill-informed opinion it is a fantastic one-stop shop not only for overviews of subjects, but also for trivia and fascinating facts. For those of us who can't remember the name of the actress who played Magenta in the Rocky Horror Show, a quick click into Wikipedia is all you need, without having to trawl through endless Google hits. I liked the SJCPL site very much, and thought - again - how Fitches, wikis, Delicious, Intranets etc. are all really intertwined - how useful it would be for us to load up a guide to say, APA, Dewey, etc. on our homework computers. And the "most asked for" local knowledge and resources - genealogy, a list of local JPs, Plunket locations and hours, pre-schools, etc. etc. And what about, in election year, a list of polling stations?

Book Lovers wiki had a very inviting front page and an enticing book review which led to me submitting a Request for Purchase to Collection Management. Nice and easy format, not too technical. I also had a look at the Electronic Resources Wiki from the University of Huddersfield (well, a Pom has standards!) To me this didn't seem any different from a NZ university library intranet, requiring individual student logon to access just about everything, but maybe there were some interesting bits that WERE publicly available, I just didn't find them.