Wikis have the potential to profoundly change the way libraries manage their Web sites and foster student and faculty collaboration.

Let's review the salient characteristics of wikis:

• They are collaboratively maintained Web sites
• They are run on a content management system
• They offer version control by saving all page revisions for review and/or return to earlier versions
• They foster discussion about the content, including any page revisions

This sounds rather like the collaborative research process, doesn't it? A team located anywhere geographically, whose members have write access to the wiki, can join together to write, revise, annotate and discuss their project. Everyone has a say, anything can be discussed, publication is controlled by the team, and all steps in the process are preserved.

So where do academic libraries come in? Here are some ideas. As always, add your own.

• Topical resource building among practitioners: Subject specialists and reference librarians can collaborate on resource lists, shared expertise, issues discussions, etc. Such a project can be maintained primarily for a single campus community (see the Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki) or it can span an entire country (see the UBC Health Wiki - A Knowledge Base for Health Librarians).
• Topical resource building among librarians and students: Bibliographers have long compiled Web-based lists of recommended resources in their fields. Resource discovery is part of student knowledge building. Why not maintain collaborative lists?
• Research collaborations among librarians and students: Use a wiki to manage the content.
• Student-only project collaboration: Give students the opportunity to maintain a wiki as an integral part of their group projects.
• Hybrid library Web site that includes a wiki (and also blogs, for that matter): This is a biggie so I'm saving it for a separate posting.

A lot has been made of the fact that Google purchased the online word processing service Writely. This offers collaborative document sharing, but as far as I can tell, no version control of document revisions.

Wikis offer this and more, and make so much sense for an academic community whose processes are moving online. They are ideal for online document-based collaborations. It remains to be seen whether academic libraries take advantage of this potential in greater numbers.