Earlier this year, we launched our first Clicklaw wikibook, Legal Help for British Columbians. A wikibook is a born-digital book, created collaboratively on a wiki platform. By turning this popular Guide into a wikibook, we hoped to make it more accessible, easier to update, and more versatile than its previous print-first format would allow.
In the first six months, we’ve seen that use of the wiki version of the Guide is 20 times greater than use of the previous online version of the Guide (a PDF generated from the print-ready file). We’re impressed with the way multiple contributors and reviewers can effectively collaborate on the wiki platform. And through our Courthouse Libraries BC LawMatters program, we provided public libraries across BC with printed copies of the Guide that were assembled directly from the wiki pages. So far, so good.
This slide presentation “Clicklaw Wikibooks” summarizes our experiment in born-digital publishing.
