“Do you see tools like Ask Metafilter and Yahoo! Answers as a threat to our role? Why or why not?”
No, I do not see these tools as a threat to the role of librarians. I think in realizing the reasoning behind this, it’s important to understand the context of information seeking behavior. Rubin (2004, p.38-41) discusses the differences between information wants versus needs, and seeking versus gathering behavior. There are basically different types of questions, and numerous ways in which individuals can decide to go about satisfying their informational quest. Online open community forums I feel offer a space in which more opinion or user experience based questions can best be answered. If people can go directly to these forums to have these types of questions answered, it almost acts as a filter for libraries and librarians to be able to focus their energies on the other types of questions that may be more suitable for them to assist with.
Reference:
Rubin, R. E. (2004). Foundations of Library and Information Science, 2nd edition. New York: NealSchuman Publishers, Inc.
I also think we should be reminding people that a lot of times Yahoo! Answers and other services give incorrect answers to user questions. Often time trollers will go on there and just answer wrong trying to be funny. It would almost be worthwhile to put a bunch of bad question/answers on the library reference page. People could then see a real difference between the answers they receive online vs the reference librarian answers.
ReplyDeleteThis post makes some good points about the differences in roles between an "ask" search engine and a librarian. I like how it shows that people can often gather information by interacting with each other, and these sites allow users to do that. It is important thought that users understand how to evaluate information and that they know the information on these sites may not be completely accurate. When I talk with people about using these kind of sites, I try to advise them to double check the information they find before considering it fact. It is often a place to start searching and to get ideas, but once some information is discovered, try to find the same ideas in a more reliable source.
ReplyDeleteI agree that these services serve a slightly different purpose. I think it is a very good interpretation that these services allow libraries to focus their energy on more research related topics. Another way to look at it is that the library provides access to these services for many in the community and helps verify answers given by these services.
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