Week 2 - Wikis - March 17-23

The class assignment below for this week is copied from http://sns.mlanet.org/snsce/?p=8 , and my comments about the discovery exercises are in blue text beside the questions.

Welcome to week two of Web 2.0 101. In this week’s assignment, we’ll cover Discovery Exercise:
Step 1: Wikis can be used for many different reasons; document management, group collaboration projects, knowledge base, and internal communication. Check out the various wikis created by librarians to discover how you might use one at your workplace.

University of Minnesota Libraries Staff Wiki - Internal communication among library staff as well as a document respository. This is a good model for a library staff wiki.

UBC HealthLib Wiki - Knowledge base collection for health librarians. interesting

Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki - Collection of business information resources available through Ohio University Libraries. interesting

Step 2: Join the class wiki at http://mlawikiclass.wetpaint.com/. OK, I joined and added this blog to the class list.
Step 3: Create and design a basic wiki based on a potential use. For the purposes of this class we will be using WetPaint http://www.wetpaint.com/. Go to WetPaint and create a wiki by clicking on start your own wiki.Tip: Your wiki can be on anything you like. However if you would like to create a wiki for library use, check out some of the wiki examples listed on Step 1 for inspiration. OK, I set up a few wikis, one called "eLibrary" at http://elibrarywiki.wetpaint.com/ . I hope this can serve like the UM library staff wiwk for internal communication among Bon Secours eLibrary staff and as a document depository.
Step 4: One of the great things about wiki is the easy way it fosters group collaboration. Go to the class wiki, http://mlawikiclass.wetpaint.com/ and contribute. Post a link to the wiki you’ve started. Post a link to the blog you created in Week 1. OK, I did this.
Step 5: Go to the class wiki or mla-hls wiki and find a page which you could contribute information towards and add to it. OK, I added a comment on the class wiki about a bug on the wiki list page.
Optional Step 6: Go to the blog you created in week 1 and add the MLA Web 2.0 101 Blogs page and the MLA Web 2.0 101 Wiki page to your blog’s Blog Roll. OK, I did this.
Step 7: What is the difference between a blog and a wiki? A blog is like diary or journal in chronological order that can be a private or group document. A wiki seems to be more collaborative and a rapid way for a group to plan together or prepare a document. What sor of things might be better suited for a blog and better suited for a wiki? Memoirs, diaries, travel logues and journals are probably better for blogs. Group projects that require much interactivity are probably better suited for wikis. One of the wikis I created for this assignment is for our Applied Research Council/Evidence Based Practice (ARC/EBP) team in the hospital for the nurses to collaborate on research and evidence based practice. The wiki will be a much better tool for them to use than creating and maintaining an intranet site with our intranet site editing software that is obsolete and difficult to use. We can post a link to the ARC wiki on the hospital intranet. The wiki is far easier to use than our intranet site and far more interactive, and will make it easy for our nursing staff to participate in ARC activities.

Week 1 - Blogs and RSS

I am starting this web log as an assignment for the MLA continuing education class, Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools. I hope that I can continue this web log after the course is over, and use this medium as a way to publish useful information about my experience in developing and operating an enterprise, digital medical library for a fairly large, nonprofit health care system. I am not one for keeping a diary or journal, so I only plan to post to the web log when I feel the information could be useful for other medical librarians working with digital libraries.

The first assignment included setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to 5 RSS feeds, including one journal's table of contents feed and one PubMed search. First, I set up a Google Reader account to aggregate RSS feeds. Since I am a member of our hospital's Applied Research Council on Evidence Based Practice, I decided to search for RSS feeds on the topic, "Evidence Based Nursing." Then I subscribed to the following RSS feeds that I discovered with the 'search and browse' function in Google Reader, and I grouped them in a folder labeled, Evidence Based Nursing.

Evidence Informed Nursing Practice Rename
http://einp.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Evidence-Based Nursing & Midwifery
http://evidence-based-nursing.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Evidence-Based Nursing current issue
http://ebn.bmjjournals.com/rss/current.xml

Nursing Research: Show me the evidence!
http://evidencebasednursing.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Wikispaces : mla-hls
http://mla-hls.wikispaces.com/page/xml/home?v=rss_2_0

I couldn't figure out how to subscribed to an RSS feed for a PubMed search in my Google Reader account. However, I have created automatic PubMed search updates for library patrons using in My NCBI.

How do I think RSS feeds can be used for our digital medical library? I plan to explore RSS feeds about Evidence Based Practice and integrate the data into the program for our hospital's Applied Research Council (ARC/EBP). Our library is currently providing automatic PubMed search updates and journal table of contents updates through My NCBI. Perhaps we can expand this service with RSS feeds from publishers and other sources.

How do I think patrons could use RSS feeds? Automatic subject search updates and journal table of contents updates to keep nursing policies and procedures up to date is a practical application, and we are currently providing this service. It will be interesting to discover new uses for RSS feeds by library patrons and digital libraries.