Title of project: Develop and Populate a Library Wiki
Project Team: The project was commissioned by the following 9 NHS Trust Library Services: Wrightington, Wigan, Leigh NHS Trust ; Salford PCT; Ashton, Wigan, Leigh PCT; Bolton PCT; Oldham and Tameside & Glossop PCTs; Bolton, Salford & Trafford Mental Health Trust; Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Trust Bury PCT Manchester PCT
The chosen Project suppliers were Christies managed by Steve Glover. Steve contracted – in other expertise from elsewhere in the region.
Local involvement , all members of the library team were involved in discussions around content and customisation
Diane Geldard Library Manager was a member of the PEAR project board
Julie Wickham Assistant Librarian developed content. reviewed and revised content from the library intranet pages for transference to the wiki
Ruth Massey , Laura Drummond Library Assistants customised the individual pages, added content from the intranet site and new content
Resources Required: The project was funded by the North West Health Care Libraries Unit (HCLU) after a joint bid from the libraries involved Wrightington, Wigan, Leigh NHS Trust was the lead bidder and the funding was available for a 12 month period only.
Using a local supplier (Christies) money was saved and 18 months of development and support were able to be negotiated with the funding available
Time was required to attend Project board meetings these involved reports on progress, demonstrations and some training
Information and updates were also conveyed by email and PEAR wiki
Locally members of the project suppliers came on several site visits to benchmark, provide training and discuss local development areas, this involved both library manager and assistant librarians time
Once the structure of the wiki was set a lot of staff time was needed to customise the wiki i.e. colour, look etc
Populating the pages was time consuming as was the transfer of documents from our intranet to wiki. However once this was all done keeping it up to date and revising is quite quick.
Initial requirements were access to Internet Explorer 6 but have needed upgrading to Explorer 7 as PB works where the wiki is hosted
no longer supports E6
Timeframe: Initial setting up phase 2007-2009
Local customisation phase 2009- 2010
Revision and development of new content ongoing
“The Story”: The development of a library wiki was undertaken as part of the PEAR project (Project for Electronic Awareness and Resources)
The Project was established to provide aid to a number of smaller Greater Manchester NHS Libraries which were unable to employ an Electronic Services Librarian. As part of this project one of our particular requirements was for a library wiki to be developed for use by staff in NHS Oldham and NHS Tameside & Glossop as many of our users are remote from the main library and unable to access either organisations intranet where the library information pages were and we were unable to get library information on either organisations internet pages
As part of PEAR project the main structure of the site was developed by the suppliers expert team they then delivered to us the bones of the wiki leaving the library team to populated the pages and change the design to suit us locally
Initially library/manager assistant librarian identified content for the wiki pages the library assistants then populated the wiki customising the design , adding local links , keeping the site up to date
All our Intranet pages have now been replace by the wiki
Minimum amount of time is now taken to update the site on a regular basis
The wiki can be viewed at http://otgpear.pbworks.com
Alignment to local, regional and national drivers:
Local: Library Accreditation Report 2008 Recommendations
Increase access to remote users
Access to help 24/7
Encourage use of evidence based resources
Embrace new technologies
CPD opportunities t for library team
Regional: HCLU Strategy
Modernising NHS Library/information services
Creating effective partnerships
National :
Darzi: Easy access for NHS staff to evidence based information
Hill: Support research and lifelong learning providing access 24/7 from any location
Support research and lifelong learning providing access 24/7 from any location
Impact of this project/service for the:
• customer • organisation • library
No longer reliant on 2 different organisations web editors to update library intranet pages.
Editorial freedom for library team
Easier and quicker to revise and update information
Enhanced skills of library team
Intranet pages were very difficult to locate
Accessible 24/7 from any PC with internet access
staff working in the community based in non NHS buildings could not access the trusts intranet pages but can access wiki
Library Help sheets, Research pack information etc available from wiki which has reduced the amount of printed material which is sent out to users
Short easily located wiki address
Information on the wiki is more up to date
Links to wide range of evidence based sites
Collaborative working partnership and joint bid with other health libraries attracted outside regional funding for the project from HCLU
Lessons Learned: As a small library team with no e -librarian we would not have been able to progress with setting up this ourselves due to lack of expertise time and funding. The collaborative nature of the project worked very well with plenty of opportunities to contribute to the project from start to finish and to be able to tailor deliverables to our own library needs. Much was down to the tight brief that was developed at the start of
the project.
It was very helpful to have site visits from members of the supplier team during the course of the project who were always very supportive
and to have a manual to remind us how to do
editing etc. We are still able to contact a member of the supplier team if we have any problems
Once we had the structure of the wiki developed we still found as a small team that time and lack of confidence with regard to editing was our main problem and we underestimated the amount of time taken to customise the site. There is a need to allocate protected time/staffing to populate wiki. A library team member who has quick keyboard skills is a real bonus
On reflection it would have been useful to have undertaken a user survey before we launched to gauge what our customers would have liked to see on the site, then a quick survey shortly after launch to see if users had been looking at the site and what were their initial thoughts.
We need to do a survey 6- 12 months
after launch to evaluate usefulness, ask for ideas get an idea of usage figures
Sustainability / next steps? We will continue to update the wiki on a regular basis and assess new ideas for information to be added.
We will aim to carry out a User survey via survey monkey on usage and possible areas for development. Ideally our library assistant would regularly update the site and add content but funding has been withdrawn for our Library Assistant Post
Further work, development and collaborative opportunities this year (2011/12) will be dependent of the future direction of our Library Service as it becomes part of Stockport FT
Contact details: dgeldard@nhs.net
Date case study completed: 27/05/11
Tagged: North West, Website, Wiki