Princeton Public Library

Princeton Public Library, New Jersey

Happy World, by Ik-Joong Kang of New York, NY (photo by eszter).
A mixed media wall installation for the lobby of the Princeton Public Library.
This is a nice visual metaphor of people coming together in a wiki to create a greater whole.

The BookLoversWiki was a project of the Princeton Public Library Home for the 2006 Adult Summer Reading Club, to introduce library patrons to the concept of a wiki and to encourage them to participate (Janie from PPL). It is therefore more of an archive as opposed to a live page.

This wiki was created using pbwiki. It allowed patrons of the Princeton Public Library to share book reviews with each other and the general public. Generally speaking, I found this wiki easy to use. It has an Index to the reviews, including the intriguing category of 5 Star Reviews. It also has a Featured Review which has five stars. This reminds me of the Featured Articles in Wikipedia, however, it does not seem as if there is a particular process for a review to be chosen as a Featured Review.

This wiki is designed to encourage patrons to read more and share their book reviews with each other and to become more comfortable with Web 2.0. It seems that quite a few of the library users did choose to participate and post their reviews. And according to Ross Dawson (his blog), building “meaningful communities” is a desirable outcome of the use of Web 2.0 tools. While this is a fairly simple version of a wiki, it is a good example to show beginners. And any tool that encourages patrons to read is a good thing.

This wiki seems to fit in well with other features of the Princeton Public library web page. For example, BookLetters e-mail newsletter, Book of The Day, Ask A Librarian on-line reference service.

If I were a patron of the Princeton Public Library in the summer of 2006, I would definitely have used this wiki because I am always looking for ideas for new books to read and I enjoy sharing my opinions about what I’ve read.