The library I decided to look at for the wiki part of the first assignment was the Emory University’s Woodruff Library in Atlanta, Georgia. Its characteristics are:
· Academic/Research Library Setting
· Population Approximately 12,000+
· Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students, Faculty and Staff
· Diverse needs in terms of support for Health Care, Business, the Arts, Law and people from around the world.
The goal of the wiki would be allow students, faculty, and staff to virtually organize and share information on course work, post and discuss announcements that involve the library, student activities, and schoolwork. The wiki would allow for all members of the Emory community to make announcements or create support groups to help them in their educational needs or research. Ultimately, it will be a space where a diverse community can come together and creatively share and learn from on another.
Wiki Requirements Needed: Page History, WYSIWIG (so those with little experience can easily contribute to the content as needed), professional support for help with management, the possibility of hosting its own software, database storage of information (for full-text searching), and be free and open sourced based for cutting down on costs.
With the use of WikiMatrix, (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) and the above requirements, I was able to produce a list of 14 Wikis that could be used. Of this group, I selected MediaWiki since it can support up to 140 languages, which beats the closest competitor by about 100. This is important because many of the students come from countries from around the world and Emory shares an important relationship with the Tibetan exile community and this Wiki was the only one that supported Tibetan. It also allows for the use of Windows and MacOS operating systems and it has been developed with educational and end users in mind. One draw back of MediaWiki was that it is not mobile friendly.
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