by Alexander Feng, Cincinnati Chapter, Competitive Intelligence and Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Divisions
An interesting article came up this morning on USA Today, highlighting the rise of Q&A websites such as Quora and Stack Exchange and how they are “going to be the reference section of the library, where you can reach experts and get definitive answers.”
Yikes!
Is this a direct frontal assault on reference services? The final death knell of the librarian, laid to rest by question and answer websites?
Maybe not. Here’s why.
A while back, we wrote about the question and answer services kgb and chacha, which pay their consultants to do a Google/Bing search and relay answers to questions posed via cell phone – paid at the rate of roughly 3 cents per answer, or roughly minimum wage. As one might expect, these answers are often incorrect – but as a question asker, if it’s free to ask, that might be ok.
(One could make a convincing argument that Google voice search has usurped a large part of this market in any case.)
The difference between sites like kgb / chacha, which are “horizontal sites,” (wide in focus, anyone can ask / answer questions) and Stack / Quora, termed “vertical sites,” is that Quora / Stack are narrower in focus, with experts providing the answers. Purportedly, this leads to better answers, but still crowdsourced and free.
Coincidentally, today Vivek Wadwha, an entrepreneur turned academic at UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Duke, posted a blog entry on TechCrunch entitled “Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype.” His point? Quora will be an excellent resource if “the same people who have been hyping it, and who have been invested in it, keep posting their thoughtful answers.” But – the excess hype “is also destined to make Quora a victim of its own press. The quality of answers will decline. The people whose opinion I value, such as Quora’s #1 respondent, Robert Scoble, will simply stop posting on the site when they get drowned out by the noise from the masses.”
He continues: ”What is more likely to happen and make far more sense is that a new generation of private, gated communities will grow and evolve. This is where people with common interests will gather and exchange ideas. For example, for people seeking legal advice, there is LawPivot, and for business looking for experts, there is Focus. For techies, there are sites like StackOverflow, Slashdot, Hacker News; for children, there is Togetherville; for business students, there is PoetsandQuants; for entreprenurs in India, there is StartupQnA; for Indian accountants, there is CAClubIndia; and China has its own groups, and so do many other countries.”
If this is to be the case, sounds to me that there still will need to be information experts who keep abreast of all these information sources and know which is the best source to help point people in the right direction and get answers.
Gee, that sounds a lot like… a… librarian?
(information professional?)
Alex Feng is the Chair-Elect of SLA’s Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Division and writes for the division blog at http://phtd.wordpress.com/.
FYI all, our Reference Desk traffic at our largest library, Doheny, AND our Science & Engineering Library, has been INCREASING the past few years! We think our students are wanted the human/personal touch as a counter to all the online and on-phone/text time they spend.
Sara Tompson
SLA Board and Associate Dean, Library Public Svcs., Univ. So. Calif.
Absolutely! Our mission in life is to organize, develop, and retrieve relevant information. More importantly, and what I believe differentiates us, from for-profit information providers is our professional ethic:
Librarians provide information that is thorough and objective.
We use and cite reputable sources.
We do not suppress information. We tell both sides of the story.
We support everyone’s right to information. We do not judge.
We are not obliged to sponsors. We are non-partisan.
We provide a high-level of individualized customer service.
These values have motivated our profession for over a century. I believe these values are Future Ready as well.
A website question answering service can, at its best, provide a quick answer to an easy question. That’s not what the reference desk is there for. The reference desk and reference librarians are there to provide guidance to someone in order for them to be able to answer a more complex question on their own. No need to start job searching reference librarians! Although, being paid to google answers does sound like a pretty easy gig.
Has anyone used virtual reference from a patron’s perspective? Some of these people are paid Google searchers. Libraries also may staff these positions with junior librarians or library assistants just because of the amount of time required. But without proper instruction as to how one performs virtual reference, the added value of these virtual reference services, whether through a library or through chacha and kgb is not entirely clear.
Maybe Quora and Stack Exchange will be better. But who wants to pay when you can ask the Internet Public Library or other well vetted virtual reference services for free?