What did we learn from this? Don’t do it again!
January 29, 2009
The title is a movie quote from “Burn after Reading” that I love because it fits everything. In this case I’m referring to rewriting the Emergency Management plan using a wiki. It seemed like such a great idea, but:
- Until I broke it down to a bunch of same page, it took way too long to load and then save an update.
- All the different font sizes we got because we were all cutting and pasting from other files drove us all nuts. I didn’t want to take the time to make it pretty since we were just in the draft stage.
- I woke up in the middle of the night and thought –why didn’t I use Google Documents. If only I had thought of that a month ago!
The wiki was good for bringing a lot of pieces of information together so we could share them. But not for editing. So, what did we learn from this?
January 30, 2009 at 8:54 am
Yes, indeed. Putting together a document from other documents is horrendous! We did this for our Acquisitions & Serials unit, and the manual is formidably bulky, but in the end it was worthwhile. Things I learned afterward?
Cut & paste is great, but make sure you select “paste special” because this way, you can paste as text, and avoid the annoying font danglers, html coding, and rich text coding.
and second, be prepared for overlapping information and for the need for ONE person to edit the whole thing into a more coherent (and one hopes, less confusing) whole.
Third, Google documents weren’t around when we did this initially, but you’re right, this would have been a lifesaver.
Thanks for sharing the mummy posts! Really fun. I got a chuckle out of your comment about the two tallest librarians being asked to help with this project. That happens around here too.