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Has anyone heard of TWiki ? Apparently, they're certain kinds of Wikis. More at http://www.twiki.org/ . Indeed, there's a veritable alphabet soup of Wikis out there: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml . (cpb)

We might want to consider blogs, too. For a list of what other libraries are doing, see http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/links.html
At the very least, blogs seem to provide an easy way to present 'What's New!' info to the public. (jla)

I agree, and maybe this discussion should actually be on a blog or a bulletin board system, rather than a wiki--but this will certainly do for now. Anyway, one concern with blogs (and wikis) is how and who would be charged with keeping it stocked with "compelling" content. Any thoughts on that? (jdc)

Yes--with regular old Web sites, there isn't as much pressure to keep things fresh, at least on a daily basis. And while wikis (and group-oriented blogs) theoretically provide the opportunity for the development of "compelling" conversations--a good recent example of this being the Becker-Posner blog ( http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ )--you kind of need to have good conversationalists to begin with in order to keep the momentum going. I think it's probably much easier to have a successful wiki or blog if the people involved in it are actually interested in writing, and writing frequently. Otherwise, it can devolve into a chore. So, interesting writing, interested writers: a couple of elements for success in wikis and blogs. And probably a third element: an interested, engaged, responsive audience. (I'm sure I'm not setting the bar too high!) (cpb)

There's a relevant article in the latest 'Ariadne' - http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tonkin/ Making the Case for a Wiki - which discusses both technical and 'human' issues. From the article: "Be warned: with only rare exceptions, if you cannot imagine your target group conversing comfortably together under normal circumstances, the chances are fairly slim that they will imagine they can either … much less online." Success here might depend on having topics many of us care about: e.g., perhaps a Wiki discussion of Wilder's 'Chronicle' article, http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i18/18b01301.htm Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions would have been more open and less fractured than what occurred on various Heard email groups. (jla)

To modify a bit what I said above about wikis and blogs needing compelling conversation(alist)s: actually, I think that may be more true for blogs than for wikis. After all, the first "precept" of the http://wiki.library.vanderbilt.edu/lits/index.php/PmWiki/PmWikiPhilosophy PmWikiPhilosophy is "Favor writers over readers": "At its heart, PmWiki is a collaborative authoring system for hyperlinked documents. It's hard enough to get people (including Pm) to contribute written material; making authors deal with HTML markup and linking issues places more obstacles to active contribution. So, PmWiki aims to make it easier to author documents, even if doing so limits the types of documents being authored." While blogs make it easy for writers to post their thoughts, they're also intended to be read and reacted to. I think that's less the case with wikis. So making the LITS Web site into a wiki makes a lot of sense. (cpb)