Case Study: Libraries Without Borders

Collaborate with far flung staff

Connie Crosby is the co-chair of the NE2007 Libraries Without Borders conference, an international event for law librarians that brings together 10 different associations from around the world. Because these annual conferences are organized by volunteers in different cities, Connie needed to share information and collaborate with a team of over 20 different international committee members.

A better way to stay up to date

At first, the team relied on email and conference calls to share information and communicate progress. But after several months of repetitive emails, lost documents, and duplicated work efforts, Connie knew she needed a more effective way to store documents and data and provide up-to-date information to her team.

"With a team of four members individually contacting vendors, it became confusing," said Crosby. "We had significant overlap in terms of which team members were contacting particular vendors, and found that members were collectively performing twice the work necessary - reaching out to the same client, and sometimes even doing so with a different pricing structure."

Initially, Connie turned to Yahoo! Groups for its mailing list and storage space for documents, but soon found this solution inadequate. Her team was alienated by the confusing login process and frustrated by a large number of unwanted spam messages. Fortunately, Connie found herself attending a national conference in Washington, D.C., where attendees were asked to contribute feedback through the conference wiki. A light bulb went off--perhaps a wiki was the right solution.

Connie originally turned to PBworks for a secure accessible site (librarieswithoutborders.pbworks.com) to store key conference planning documents and to permit easy communication between members. To organize the wiki, Connie began by setting up separate pages for each committee activity, populating the site with current documents and an archive of meeting minutes. She instructed her team to update the wiki as a replacement for cc:ing the entire team on each vendor email.

Productive conference planning

As the team gained experience in using the wiki, their usage began to evolve. In her day-to-day activities, Connie utilized the conference wiki to collaborate on vendor booth assignments, and to actively track vendor and sponsor information. To make committee conference calls run more smoothly, Connie placed the agenda on the wiki and had a team member edit the wiki during the call. This was an easy way to track decisions, and inform all members of future steps and action items.

Overall, Connie and her team were incredibly pleased the process and results of using PBworks to plan the conference.

"E-mail is difficult to keep track of and quickly gets out of control," said Crosby. "PBworks enabled a geographically diverse team to begin and remain on the same page. We no longer 'reinvent the wheel' in our efforts. PBworks helped us create a productive conference planning process."