More News From Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group

In the summer, federal government librarians in Canada created a Web 2.0 Interest Group (WIG) to explore ways of incorporating collaborative technologies into their work.

The most recent meeting was held yesterday at Library and Archives Canada.

It was a great opportunity to see what work has been done on the Web 2.0 front. Here are a few of the projects mentioned at the roundtable that opened the meeting:

• The Industry Canada library has launched an internal wiki and implemented RSS feeds for content
• The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information has launched a CISTI Facebook group, a wiki for posting known problems about its online services, and has created dozens of subject guides using delicious.com social bookmarks
• The Bank of Canada is looking into creating wikis for its economists and for developing guidelines for the use of social networks by its employees
• NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, has utilized social networking tools to perform searches to find people who could potentially be contacted to be part of grant selection committees
• The Communications Security Establishment, Canada's electronic intelligence agency, uses wikis, mashups and social bookmarking
• The Privy Council Office is examining the possibility of using wikis and blogs to replace newsletters
• Statistics Canada has started using screencasting software for e-training
• Health Canada has been using screencasting software and will initiate chat reference when it relaunches its website redesign
• Natural Resources Canada uses screencasting, wikis, blogs, and delicious.com and is about to move to an open source library management/cataloguing system that offers social tagging of content by users
• the Public Service Commission will launch a blog pilot and wiki this fall and its library has started a delicious.com account
• the Canadian Agriculture Library has set up a Web 2.0 team. Their pathfinder/research guide project is heavily based on delicious.com bookmarks

Earlier Library Boy posts about Web 2.0 in the Canadian government include:

• Federal Library Community Forms Web 2.0 Interest Group (May 3, 2008): "We are proposing (...) to identify & publish a list of key resources on Web 2.0 specifically for federal libraries; to identify topics of interest in Web 2.0 for discussion, for example, wikis, RSS, collaborative technologies, open source, etc.; to identify departments engaged in Web 2.0 projects and to show the results to the community this fall."
• Government of Canada: The Web 2.0 Genie Is Finally Out of the Bottle (June 6, 2008): "A contribution today on the FLC/CBF listserv (Federal libraries community/Collectivité des bibliothèques) pointed to examples of implementation of social networking on government Web sites: ... 'A comprehensive system for online collaboration and social networking projects by government departments is in the works. The project involves systems that can provide social networking capabilities for around 250,000 people and will cover 58 government departments. Key technology for this initiative is being provided by Waterloo, Ont.-based OpenText...' ".
• Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group News (June 23, 2008): "Federal government librarians in Canada recently created a Web 2.0 Interest Group (WIG) to explore ways of incorporating wikis, RSS, collaborative technologies, open source, etc. into their work. he WIG's first meeting took place June 9 here in Ottawa. Here is a summary."