Due to financial difficulties I will not be presenting at the LITA National Forum this year as planned. I will still be at Internet Librarian - so don’t miss my session on how we have used a homegrown wiki to foster collaboration (and participation) on our Intranet.
Just a reminder that the unofficial wiki is up and running - and waiting for people to start entering information. This will be my first year at LITA and my first time in TN, so I don’t have much to contribute, but I’d really like to see some veterans participating in this collaborative project.
Last week was my birthday so I had some time off of work and then some time catching up at work.
I’m also on the board of directors for our township’s adult education program and we’re desperately trying to build onto our class offerings, but unlike the other area night schools, ours is not supported by the school district. So I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to come up with class ideas and finding local businesses we can contact.
Lastly, I was working on moving the LITA National Forum Wiki over to Wetpaint. I’ll be honest, for a few days I was worried I had made the wrong decision. My first shock was that Wetpaint didn’t allow me to see the code for my page. I emailed my contact and he said they wanted to make the site accessible to everyone - which I’m totally for - but I responded by reminding him that almost every WYSIWYG editor I’ve ever used allows you to see the code so that you can troubleshoot. The next shock was that there wasn’t any functionality to add a table - and without the ability to see the code you’re stuck with what you’ve got. So I emailed again and learned that tables will be available within the next couple of weeks.
Despite these two problems, Wetpaint has some interesting functionality. First (although I haven’t tested this out) it has structure. What do I mean? Well, I mention in my article about our Intranet that I wrote our wiki software myself because I wanted to be able to have an organizational structure - this page goes under this page - an understandable site map. Well Wetpaint has that. It also has a menu to all of the pages so that you don’t have to rely on links from one page to another.
So, my first thoughts were “Oh no! What have I done?!” but now I’m going to stick with it. And next time I’ll make sure to play with the product beofre I accept a tempting offer to move everything. There is a ton of potential there - and remember it’s much newer than the other sites out there so it’s still growing.
Please update your links/bookmarks and if you’re attending the conference I hope you participate in this wiki, it will really help a lot of new people who will be attending the conference.
Spead the word! I have set up an unofficial wiki for the LITA National Forum which will take place in Nashville, TN this year.
This will be my first year attending - and presenting - and I feel a little lost with the whole thing. I know that other conference wikis have helped me get organized so I thought I’d take the initiative this time and set up this site to share with everyone.
There’s not much there yet - since I’ve never attended this conference, so if you’re a veteran please contribute and help the newbies like myself!
[update 7-1-06] Wiki moved to another site - read here - and remember I still love PBwiki, I just wanted to try something new.
