Who Moved My Intranet? The Human Side of Introducing Collaborative Technologies to Library Staff

In the Fall of 2007, the San Diego State University (SDSU) Library changed from an HTML intranet to a Wiki intranet (Dworak & Jeffery, 2009) using the MediaWiki software. This change was carried out by a group of three people (two librarians and an IT staff person who was the intranet webmaster). In doing so, the group shifted the responsibility for content development and maintenance from a single webmaster (with several backups) to all library employees. This change was made in the hopes that this would lead to a more dynamic, relevant, and current intranet. In order for such a major reallocation of accountability to be successful, library employees had to be persuaded to participate in this process. Without voluntarily participation, the move to this new, more dynamic format would be a wasted effort. This paper explores the measures that were taken to try to garner involvement in this technology change, analyzes the results of these efforts, and offers suggestions and next steps.