Assignment 1 Part 3 (Wiki) post

I am recommending developing a wiki for the Phoenix Public Library.  The Phoenix Public Library primarily serves the residents of Phoenix, Arizona.  Residents of Maricopa County (which Phoenix resides in) are also allowed to become members of the library for free through a partnership with the Maricopa County Library district.  Phoenix Public Library serves over 1 million people annually and has a wide demographic ranging from babies to senior citizens, homeless to upper class, and multi-ethnicity populations. 

Current programs that would benefit from development of a wiki site would include:  story time (programs intended for babies through age 9), e-reader trainings, book clubs, computer classes, workforce center programs, and teen programs.  The goal of the wiki would be to provide information about the programs available, store informational handouts from the program, and allow users to correspond with library staff about questions/issues not covered in the training. 

The library is a public library system and continues to develop partnerships with local businesses, schools, and universities in the Phoenix area.  Part of the development of the wiki would allow users to have a central location to view programs and resources available to at the library.  This could easily be distributed on handouts that currently go to local organizations.  The benefit of creating a wiki in the community would be once a customer (patron) bookmarks or subscribes to the wiki, they would receive the latest updates available at the library.  These customers would then be able to be free advertisers of the library as they would promote the resources to their friends.  The library has 17 branches across the Phoenix area.

The budget for the library for the 2013-2014 year is $36,249,000.  The budget has four categories which include:  personnel, contractual services, interdepartmental charges, and supplies.  As the library has seen a slight decrease in budget from the 2012-2013 year, the wiki would need to be a free access site and require current personnel in the technical services department to moderate and set up the wiki.  As the wiki is considered a social network tool, this would be plausible as part of the three year strategic plan for the library is to implement more social networking access for the library to draw in more customers.  Another part of the strategic plan mentions 24 hour access to the library and the development of a wiki would allow current customers to have 24 hour access to resources for the library.

Library requirements for wiki:

1)       Free

2)      Secure

3)      Set-up:  Allows for links, pictures, subscription option to updates

4)      Moderator – Allows one or a few people to act as moderators that can remove unwanted comments.

5)      Allows for comments by user that can be monitored by moderator.

6)      Allows for daily updates

7)      Allows for link to current Phoenix Library Website

Wiki Selection to Use:

After looking at wikimatrix.org, I initially picked the top 25 wikis to review based on the sites suggestion.  After comparing various features for the different wikis, I would recommend using PBwiki.  PBwiki had a lot of the features needed for the initial goals of this project.  PBwiki is free, has no storage restrictions, easily accessible, and can be used on different technology platforms.  PB wiki also had the security features which allow different access levels to be given to people.  Finally PBwiki is able to work with a lot of add on features including calendars, pictures, links, etc. 

From personal experience, PBwiki is very user friendly.  It is easy to use and has good layout structure and tutorials to help users.  For the initial concept of marketing programs and sources, this would be an adequate site to use.  If the wiki proved to be successful and additional features were neede, a subscription wiki may be required.