Describe main characteristics (identify at least four characteristics [e.g., population served, library type, budget] ) of the library and goal of the wiki.
Athens-Clarke County Library is a public library serving a population of 116,714 people. The Athens Regional Library System has 11 branches (including surrounding counties: Franklin, Madison, Oconee, and Oglethorpe) and serves 222,203 people; the combined annual operating budget is $3,693,807.49. One of the branches, Pinewoods Library, is purposefully located in a Spanish speaking neighborhood to reach out to the growing Hispanic population in Athens.
Identify the library's requirements for a wiki.
The region already has a strong web presence with a webpage that covers policies, events, branch information, and research resources. The wiki would serve as a community and literacy building tool where patrons could work with librarians to post reviews of library materials, form book clubs, and provide supplementary information (such as the order of popular book series) that is not available in the catalog.
The region has its own Apache-Linux server, so hosting is not needed, and indeed, there is no budget for it. For this reason, the wiki also has to be open source. Because of the large population size of the region, a database-structured wiki is preferred to allow for faster searching. Some of the IT staff have experience with Perl, PHP, and Javascript, so those are the preferred programming languages for the back end, but a WYSIWYG in the front end is absolutely necessary to allow non-computer savvy patrons (and librarians) to participate.
Choose a wiki that meets the library's requirements.
Using WikiMatrix, the choices were narrowed down to 12. Several were discarded for being in beta since an established program is preferred. Others were not designed for non-technical users or just lacked special features that the final choice had. The final choice was MediaWiki.
MediaWiki was designed for users of all levels, and has the added advantage of multiple language packs so the Spanish speaking patrons can participate also. It has full text search, unlimited updates, and allows all revisions of a page to be compared, not just the most recent.
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