What's in a Wiki?

What is the difference between a blog and a wiki? What sort of things might be better suited for a blog and better suited for a wiki?

Blogs are basically used as public diaries. Using them in this way seems to make sense in libraries as well. Letting patrons know what has happened or is happening int he library. Keeping a blog on the library homepage would allow Librarians to update daily with classes, events, and future plans. This would aid communication within the organization as well as with the library community.

A Wiki seems to be a more complex tool. Or it can be used as a more complex tool. Keeping a chronological listing of events seems well-suited to a blog, but for more information that would be better served with a different organizational system a wiki seems to be the ticket. A wiki detailing current library policy and procedure may be just the thing to create a wiki for. At larger libraries a wiki may be used to keep track of librarians and classes, but smaller institutions would find this unnecessarily complex.

The wiki created by my colleague at the Greenblatt Library will be used to host our Reference Desk policies and procedures. These will take a bit of time to place and organize in the wiki, but they will then be bookmarked on the reference computers. New staff and faculty with fewer hours at the desk can easily answer complex questions by referring to wiki, instead of taking the time to find a source who knows or flipping through the print copy. The wiki I created will address Evidence-based nursing. As our hospital works to attain Magnet status I hope that this will provide information to nurses on searching for evidence, what to do with it, how to conduct research, and magnet information. Basically, everything they will need collected in one easy to access spot.