LibSHARE: a library-wide communications environment

I wrote some time ago about a departmental wiki and the less than stellar result. I know, I know—wikis are so passé these days. Everybody’s got a wiki, why am I wasting your time? I totally agree. New Year, time to move on.

Anyway, we’re now in a soft launch phase of a library-wide collaborative web space. (We’ve blotted out the term intranet because that’s so 1990’s.) Our Systems Department (and a wide assortment of non-systems staff) pulled together an instance of Clearspace software which we have dubbed Lib-Share. It offers a suite of tools including blogs, wikis, photo/file sharing, polls, announcements, and message boards. It also authenticates using our campus accounts—so there is no need to keep track of additional user names/passwords.

The main page looks like this:

Each department / unit has its own section and can set a variety of access privileges to the content. Some material might be limited to the department only, but the spirit of the space is openness.

We can also form groups to create a virtual working space, share documents/files, and take advantage of the various conversation/collaboration tools. Oh and it integrates nicely with Spark, our library-wide IM service:

So hopefully the original idea will be preserved—a unified space for all public service desks to share and manage their content. We’ll see how it goes.

Comments

[Michael]

I haven't previously seen a working example of Clearspace--amazing! This seems much more natural than a typical "intranet" that is static and typically outdated and dull. Thanks for posting!