documentation solutions?

[Allan Berry]

Hi ChiC4L,

Thinking about Library technical documentation, best practices and products.  What do people use?

Like in an ideal world, my imagined system would work as intranet, but maybe also for limited public access.  Something more structured and sustainable than, say, Google Docs or Dropbox -- or better yet, something that works with them.  A place for text and screenshots mostly, PDFs, maybe some video.  Distributed authorship.

Our library has docs scattered among various systems, besides also a public knowledgebase.  These systems have similar use cases and often overlap.

Has anyone found anything they like?

Thanks,

-Allan

[Tod Olson]

Hi Allan,

Can’t say I’ve found something, but we certainly face the same problem. 

On campus we have Box, Google Suite, and Office 365 (which means Teams, SharePoint, One Note). Teams probably fits best for managing permissions. None of them are great for limited public access, Google Suite might be easiest, but unintentionally making something public is a concern. All are challenging for structure over time.

We are using Wagtail for both our public website and internal web, but we’ve not pushed it into technical documentation.

-Tod

Sent from the æther

On Mar 19, 2022, at 10:40 AM, Allan Berry <abe...@uic.edu> wrote:

Hi ChiC4L,

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "chicode4lib" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chicode4lib...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chicode4lib/337b2acb-618e-4d2f-80a3-df283bd36c8en%40googlegroups.com.

[Eric Lease Morgan]

My experience is very much like your's; the implementations are all over the place. And "No, I have not found anything I (personally) like". --Eric Morgan

[Sasha Neri]

I'm struggling with moving documentation from SharePoint to Teams. Teams Lists are slowly improving, but I wouldn't use them for a public view.

I've seen MIT - PLIX (Public Library Innovation Exchange) use Notion: https://www.notion.so/. Here's the MIT PLIX site:  https://plix.media.mit.edu/ 

I've dabbled with Airtable, but not so much for public viewing. I'm interested in WordPress's P2, but haven't had time to get into it at all.

So, no instructive examples, just tools that caught my eye. :)

[Margaret Heller]

We use mkdocs for our technical documentation that can be public. However because it requires knowledge of Git to use it's definitely limited in who contributes to it. Otherwise everyone now is in to Sharepoint, but I'm fixing our intranet (which will run on Drupal 9) to facilitate use of Sharepoint, but also encourage posting important documentation directly on the intranet as well rather than constantly making new Sharepoint sites.

Margaret

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "chicode4lib" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chicode4lib...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chicode4lib/4c4a9bd2-e851-4a96-ab61-017b0878ce74n%40googlegroups.com.

[Anne Slaughter]

Margaret when you're done with the D9-Sharepoint work I'd love to learn more about it.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chicode4lib/CAPVQYsRPQNvnee1UqYjAJejKx3fwdFRoS%3D3xktwMeNg_LOCoug%40mail.gmail.com.

[Allan Berry]

Thanks for your input everybody.

@Tod, yep your situation looks a lot like hours, except mix in a creaky old wiki too.  I've always liked Wagtail.  Sadly our own main web platform cannot handle this use case.

We do have access to Teams, we use it often for collaboration.  I'd never considered it for documentation.  Hmm.

@Sasha, PLIX looks super neat, I just signed up for their mailing list.  I'm now kind of trying to fit Notion into my head, it doesn't quite fit. :)  Anyways I'll definitely put this one into the mix, thanks.  Airtable didn't occur to me; do you use at a department level or something?

@Margaret, +1 Markdown.  Yeah, I would super love something like MkDocs, but then I would have to do ALL the work.  :)

@Anne, maybe we can convince Margaret to talk about it at our next Chicago Code4Lib meetup, whenever that turns out to be.

Cheers,
-Allan

[Anne Slaughter]

Great minds, Allan! I’m in 😁

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chicode4lib/6b00dace-e493-45ab-a3fe-94c7fa104b79n%40googlegroups.com.

[Margaret Heller]

Realistically it would be harder to get me to not talk about it, so I think we're on.

Margaret

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/chicode4lib/CAGw_xdmmvwF%3DNxrw1OzeKV2bRrwOWtogGP0G7wg-UgQ11v89%3DQ%40mail.gmail.com.