Project Play Semester 1

I couldn't consider myself finished with Semester 1 until I'd carried through on my intention to create a Wikipedia entry for my hometown. I'd come across the entry for Ginger Beaumont, an early Major League baseball player who'd lived in Honey Creek for many years, but the link put him in the Honey Creek in Sauk County. I couldn't fix that until there was an entry for the Honey Creek in Walworth County, where I grew up.

The problem that held me back for some time was that the entries I found searching online continued to scramble the data for the two towns. I sent for information from two books via interlibrary loan, which gave me some history on the early settlers. I also located the latitude and longitude online, added a population estimate from Rand McNally's Commercial atlas & marketing guide, and could list Ginger Beaumont as a notable person. I then added Honey Creek to the entry for Spring Prairie, Wisconsin, and fixed the entry for Ginger Beaumont.

To my surprise and delight, it took less than 24 hours for someone else to add to it, linking to an article with more information under the Notes section. I will be watching to see what else I might learn from other people's additions.

Other tools I have continued to use on a personal level are: LibraryThing, where I still enjoy adding my books as I find time; Bloglines, to which I already subscribed; and I've tried to fall into the pattern of adding and accessing my bookmarks through del.icio.us instead of the individual PCs' browsers. Our library intends to add at least one blog to our website, and I've proposed using a wiki for a project among librarians, but I don't know if they will do it that way once they start work. My own goal is to continue to try more things instead of keep putting it off until I find more time. That extra time never seems to appear and there's so much out there to play with and explore, much of it free and very useful.

Wikis

For the purposes of this week's assignment, I added North Fond du Lac's Public Library as an external link to the North Fond du Lac entry in Wikipedia, but what I'd really like to do are fix are the entries for my hometown. An early baseball player named Ginger Beaumont lived for many years in Honey Creek, a fact you would learn from his entry in Wikipedia, but the link for Honey Creek, Wisconsin takes you to a town in Sauk County. There is no entry for my Honey Creek in Walworth County, which has existed since 1836. Since it's an unincorporated community, I wouldn't be able to get the same depth of demographic information as the Sauk County page, but the Spring Prairie, Wisconsin page has an external entry to another little community within the township. I've sent for two books for more background on the history of Walworth County's Honey Creek so I can create a page for the community and return Ginger Beaumont to the Honey Creek he knew and farmed.

One use of Wikis for library staff is for cooperative projects, either staff within our own library working together or staff from multiple libraries. Instead of sending group e-mails, which may or may not be read by all, or which may not be received if someone forgets to reply to all, the work can be found and edited in one place. Everyone has the same working copy and can make their contributions as they find time. I also like the library and community sites that let users make changes, though I do like the log-in features that add some responsiblity for the changes made rather than let edits be done freely and anonymously. There's a lot that can be done with Wikis and with the software and often the hosting free, it's well worth exploring.