This presentation was given at the American Library Association's Library and Information Technology (LITA) forum in 2009. It shows what the Family History Library did to exponentially quicken our reference information publishing cycle, multiply content output, boost teamwork, morale, and community relations, and improve content design, quality and relevance by crowdsourcing our reference information publication process through a public wiki.

1. Wikis, CMSs, & Community Enhancing Publishing in Libraries by Michael Ritchey (Twitter: mtritchey)

3. Challenges & strengths in 2006

4. Solution Concept & Requirements

5. Quicken publishing cycle

6. Multiply content output

7. Boost teamwork, morale, community relations

9. Challenges

10. Challenge: Advise Genealogists Worldwide

11. Research advice on FamilySearch Internet, 2006 Challenge: cover more places

12. Challenge: cover more languages Research advice on FamilySearch.org about countries in their native language, 2006

13. Challenge: Update content faster Research advice on FamilySearch.org revised 2001-2006.

14. Challenge: connect customers with experts How do I find birth records from Brazil? Sounds tough! I dunno (Yawn!) I wish I had someone to help!

15. Implement old idea Achievedenial Fail Our time-tested model

16. 2006 Revelation: Headquarters can’t do it alone. Is there a better way?

17. Our Strengths as an Organization Expert staff

18. Our Strengths as an Organization Expert staff World-renowned record collection

19. Our Strengths as an Organization Expert staff World-renowned record collection 60,000 volunteers

20. Challenges + Strengths = Community Solution: Community! Strengths Challenges Cover more places Cover more languages Update content faster Connect customers with experts Expert staff World-renowned record collection 60,000 volunteers

21. Selling the concept: Wikipedia

22. Selling the concept: Wikipedia 8thmost popular Website Content written by community 3,000 new entries per day Most errors corrected in 5 mins. 11 edits per article

23. Requirements

24. Requirements Open source WYSIWYG authoring tool (yo mamma) Article history/version control Limit visibility of some articles Volunteer authoring Easy interlinking Admin can lock down a page (Home page) Notifications System deployable by non-engineers!

25. Solutions

26. First solution: Plone CMS

27. FamilySearch Wiki: Plone site Questions of concurrent authoring scalability

28. 2007 MediaWiki iteration

29. Quicken the Publication Cycle

30. Challenge: Update content faster Every revision required input from Director (approval) Publication strategist Usability specialist Technical writers Editors Correlation Software engineers

32. Add it to the wiki

33. Get input

34. IterateShortens the publishing cycle… …from months to minutes.

35. Multiply Content Output

36. Multiply Content Output 800  19,000 docs since 2007 82,000 edits in 2009 (as of 10/04/09) Top contributors have 10k-16k edits ea. 2009 edits = 719,000,000 characters 6,900 characters/edit avg. Top pages have 300-500 edits Reference librarians writing 22,000 hours/year

37. Boost Teamwork, Morale, Community Relations

38. Teamwork, Morale, Community Collaborative projects Unfettered Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) SMEs reach out for project help Collaboration between community vols. & staff Weekly user group/community meeting on Adobe Connect

39. Improve Quality & Design

41. Bylines

42. Change history

43. Discussion pages

44. Patrollers

45. Moderators

46. Watch lists & change notifications

47. Members are Pit Bulls

49. Today’s Challenges (Got advice?) Not getting 25% of librarians’ time Wiki mgrs. spread too thin to manage content dev Empower & train community as project mgrs. Experimenting w/ right mix of project mgmt. vs. production Democracy  design paralysis. Limit re-work! Projects: Small team makes initial design; later design changes require 70% consensus.

50. Conclusion: We are smarter than me! The job is too big for Headquarters Volunteer communities can do big jobs Success = community collaboration

51. wiki.FamilySearch.org Twitter: @mtritchey