This poster focuses on using a wiki technology both as a tool for community outreach as well as digital preservation. With a wiki's unique collaborative interface, libraries are better able to reach out to various constituencies (students, alumni, faculty, community...the world?) in the spirit of collaboration. This not only acts as a promotional tool, but also, invites the community to participate in its own local history, generate genealogical interest and much more. Included also are the web 2.0 social technologies which come part and parcel with a project of this nature. Specifically, we address the notion of a hybrid approach by combining good old fashioned research, oral history and archives with Web 2.0 social technologies (e.g. podcasts, mashups, wikis, blogs) and other folksonomy-friendly web based applications such as Flickr and LibraryThing.

This poster is not intended to address the technical issues of the Wiki-world; rather, we hope to address our peers in layman's terms to describe our experiences, best practices and lessons learned.

Judith Brink-Drescher, Faculty Librarian, Dowling College
Diane Holliday, LISS History Curator, Dowling College