Where I've been lately

Today was my first day posting here in over a month. While I was "away," I was deeply immersed in cramming for a comprehensive exam for my master's degree in American history at Hunter College. After plowing through most of the books on a long bibliography of recommended reading for the exam (a task that took up my entire summer), creating endless pages of notes and charts and grids about the books, and getting agitated and nervous, I finally took the exam and passed. Now all that remains to be done is a language translation exam (more studying...ugh) and two semesters of reading and research for my master's essay, which I hope will be on anticommunism/McCarthyism and college libraries.

It's good to be back blogging. I must admit that while I was off studying, I also created a password protected wiki on pbwiki that is intended to be a training tool for staff new to reference work in the library where I work. Since it is password protected, I can't show it off directly, but I do hope to get some screen shots of it up soon. This summer, as I was training some librarians on the nitty gritty of service and policy issues that reference staff need to know, I noticed the trainees were making lots of notes on handouts I gave them. It occurred to me that they might as well as make notes on a reference training wiki so that our collective wisdom could be shared.

The wiki now has over 300 pages in it. There's a separate page for every single service we provide (everything from "3-Hole Punch" to "ZIP Drives.") There are also pages that serve as "See" references (the "Videocassettes" page gives a "see" link to the "Videos" page). As new pages are added to the wiki, the software behind it automatically adds the page title to an index of all pages. You can navigate either by using the search box or by scanning the A-Z index.

In offering this wiki just to the staff being trained over the summer to work at the reference desk, I was able to see if it might serve as a general reference manual for all staff in the library. I hope to introduce it at the next meeting of the Information Services Division here to see if my colleagues want to use it and contribute to it.

If it flies in Information Services, then I might invite Access Services to participate in the maintenance of the wiki so that it could serve the needs of all staff involved in public services (reference, instruction, and circulation). There have been many times that I've been asked at the reference desk policy questions about circulation matters that only the circulation staff knows; it would be nice if sometimes I could refer to a wiki jointly maintained by reference and access services staff to answer those questions instead of referring the patron to the circulation window.

In the next post that I do on this reference wiki, I'll try to get some screen shots up and offer more explanation about why I selected pbwiki out of the many wiki products available.