Liberal Education Today

Notes from a presentation on the National Geographic Society's Web 2.0 engagement. Presenter is Krista Mantsch, NGS' library webmaster, speaking to the 2008 NFAIS conference.

Internally, National Geographic has rolled out a series of tools: wikis, blogs, podcasts. They are aimed at mobile devices as well as PCs. Challenges of supporting these include: technological familiarity divides; divisional silos; habits of content control; security and confidentiality, ramified by international differences; staff support limitations.

An intranet includes a series of levels. RSS feeds hit a central communications hub via Newsgator, which branch out into decentralized division sites.

• The library division site hosts experiments and projects.
• The education network site includes RSS feeds from NGS and external projects, along with selected Google Gadgets.
• The Kids' site features a wiki for information accumulation, but no participation occurred. Reasons for the failure: a champion left, some staff decided not to use it, and a technological problem intervened.
• A Women Explorer's wiki did better, including hundreds of biographical pages. Reasons for success: a great deal of staff interest, plus sustained staff training. Generally speaking, wikis did best in NGS when paired with other sites.
• Blogs for the International Children's Editions did well, partly because of close connections to intranet content.

Mantsch went on to describe new projects:

• Ning is being considered to complement Lotus Notes, for greater flexibility, including multimedia content. Centralizing information through Ning was seen as a benefit.
• A gazeteer is in development, building up a large dataset and common vocabulary, and tying data to Google Earth. User customization should be available as well.
• MetaLens is a developing tool, aimed at giving users the ability to build collections and stories out of NGS data.