A Wiki for Emory's Health Sciences Library

Emory University’s Health Sciences Library at one time operated independently of the other Emory libraries, and answered only to the School of Medicine. However, budget cuts have resulted in the medical library being folded into the University’s general library as a “subdivision”.

The library is a private medical library (though open to the public for browsing), and currently serves a student, staff, and alumni population numbered at approximately 2,000, and has a total of 5 locations. The library's budget is a sub-section of the greater Emory libraries' budget, and in the current budget atmosphere, all costs out of the ordinary must be approved by the head of the main campus general library. As a result, the medical library is looking for a free, open-source program to avoid going through the approval process for expenditures.

In order to maintain a unique identity for themselves and to help with recruiting for the medical school, the Health Sciences Library would like to create a wiki to provide information on their history and services.

On the wiki, the library would like to include:

• Their locations: Main campus, Emory Hospital Library, Grady Hospital Library and satellite library, and Crawford Long Library,

• The population they serve: medical school students, public health students, biology majors, nursing school students, medical residents, and clinical staff,

• Their collection: several hundred printed journals, access to approximately 40,000 journal titles online, and thousands of books, textbooks and other monographs,

• Their services: book checkout, laptop checkout, photocopy, reference, medical literature searches, interlibrary loan, wi-fi access, remote access.

The library’s wiki requirements include:

• An English-only wiki is acceptable, as students must know English to attend the university
• Wiki must support page history to allow restores to a previous point
• WYSIWYG editing is required so that all staff can edit
• Must be easy enough to operate that no commercial support is required
• No remote hosting is necessary, as the university is offering server space
• Wiki pages will be stored in a file system, as it will be small – a database would be overkill
• Finally, the primary staff supporting the wiki are most familiar with Perl and JavaScript, so a wiki using these programming languages would be ideal.

After a thorough search of available wikis, we have found that TWiki is the only platform supporting all of these needs.